Similar story but way shorter. Was working on the beginning of Typeform years ago and we had some issues in production, wanted to take a look at the logs. The logs were in a tar archive, so just needed to untar it. Mixed up the arguments in the tar command and instead overwrote the logs with a empty archive. Doh. In the end, lesson learned: be 100% sure arguments are correct if you're stupid enough to run terminal commands in production environments. Obviously, duplicate data (pull down logs locally) if you're planning to read something that can possibly write instead of just reading is another lesson.
I lost my data trying to back it up
11–20 of 126 posts
Re: I lost my data trying to back it up
#12There was a recent example with Asrock motherboards that are supposed to have compliant RAID support
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541493
Should open source software fill up with quirks for the mistakes of other software? This looks like a bug report to other RAID software that should clear up any obsolete flags and enforce a sane condition of the RAID.
Re: I lost my data trying to back it up
#13Did you log a bug against `dmraid`? You're right, it shouldn't make changes to the file system without user intervention.
Not yet. I suppose I should do so via Debian bug report? Cause the last update for the upstream source seems to be around 8 years ago.
Re: I lost my data trying to back it up
#14(many others including myself, have been there, different way though for me) The bright side is, you'll never make this mistake again. The downside is, for me at least, I end up with triple+ backups of everything..
I can defiantly see myself ending up with triple+ backups of everything...
Re: I lost my data trying to back it up
#15These commands look a bit dangerous:
# dmsetup remove_all
# dmraid --activate y --format isw
In my experience, working with anything beside simple mirrors in a RAID config will eventually result in loss of data, and that most data loss is because of human failure rather then disk failure.
Re: I lost my data trying to back it up
#16RAID, not even once. At least for me.
Re: I lost my data trying to back it up
#17These commands look a bit dangerous: # dmsetup remove_all # dmraid --activate y --format isw Is that y a "yes" flag !? eg answer Yes on any question. In my experience, working with anything beside simple mirrors in a RAID config will eventually result in loss of data, and that most data loss is because of human failure rather then disk failure.
No, IIRC the --activate flag accepts either 'y' or 'n' so you can active as well as inactive the array (LVM has similar flags).
Re: I lost my data trying to back it up
#18I think the moral of the story is; always use software RAID.
Hardware RAID (even fake ones like Intel) are time bombs, either you have fun configurations like this or the controller dies and no replacement exists.
Unless you'd absolutely need a HW RAID, I'd go for a Software RAID that mounts and works natively in Linux. I can put the harddrives into a fully foreign computer and it would work.
Re: I lost my data trying to back it up
#19I think the moral of the story is; always use software RAID. Hardware RAID (even fake ones like Intel) are time bombs, either you have fun configurations like this or the controller dies and no replacement exists. Unless you'd absolutely need a HW RAID, I'd go for a Software RAID that mounts and works natively in Linux. I can put the harddrives into a fully foreign computer and it would work.
The other moral is that RAID is not a backup.
I’d also argue that for most individuals who don’t really need to worry about an hour or two of downtime, it’s a lot more useful to have good (multiple) current backups than potentially complex RAID configurations.
Re: I lost my data trying to back it up
#20There's now way he could have possible known simply booting the Ubuntu live disk would do this. He could have done that without any consideration to doing a backup. However regular tried and true backups are the way to go, preferably automated. My worst horror story wasn't really mine. I did desktop support in my first job. The library had their own system and their own support arrangements but I had a good relations…
Did it end up going to data recovery? Most of the time it should be possible to retrieve most of the data, at least.