In case anyone is confused, what happens when the server catches fire or is stolen?
Or even more likely, the RAID configuration is lost.
I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
11–20 of 53 posts
Re: I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
#12The community has discussed the idea of adding a feature to specify a minimum streaming replication delay
This is a feature of Oracle, the redo logs are replicated to the standbys as normal, so you have an up to date copy of them on the standby, but only applied after an x hour delay. You can roll the standby forward to any intervening point in time and open it read-only to copy data out.
Less need of it these days with Flashback, of course, but it saved a lot of bacon.
Re: I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
#13A backup has not much value when stored in the same physical location with the original data. Any fire/flood/robbery will destroy all the data.
Re: I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
#14A backup has not much value when stored in the same physical location with the original data. Any fire/flood/robbery will destroy all the data.
Of course it has value; fast recovery of data after hardware failure.
You still want off-site backups as well of course, in case of something more extreme, but they're usually going to be slower to recover from than nearby backups.
Re: I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
#15Most companies I've worked for have had some kind of annual fire drill / alarm testing. They announce it the prior week, and then, say, Tuesday at 10am the alarm goes off, everyone files out of the building into the parking lot for 5 minutes, then back inside. In 15+ years (at several different companies), only once has there been an actual fire department call where the evacuation was "real" (even then, there was no actual fire).
In those same 15+ years, mostly working for startups, there have been numerous drive failures. Unfortunately, failure (a) to verify backups before there's a failure, and (b) to practice restoring from backups has often meant that a drive failure means loss of several days' worth of work. In one instance, the VCS admin corrupted the entire repo, there were no backups, that admin was shown the door, and we had to restart from "commit 0" with code pieced together from engineers' individual workstations. That was when I got religious about making & testing backups for my work and the systems I was responsible for...
Re: I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
#16In case anyone is confused, what happens when the server catches fire or is stolen?
Or more commonly according to the article: a user accidentally removes (and perhaps even shreds) the wrong file.
Re: I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
#17I was burnt once when both hard disks in my Raid1 fail at the same time, unlikely but it happened. And Raid is not a backup strategy.
Re: I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
#18Never underestimate your RAID controller's ability to fail (silently!) and start writing corrupted garbage to your disks.
Re: I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
#19This is one of the problems I have with SQL Azure. They have yet to implement a satisfactory backup option:
http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34685-sql-azur...
Re: I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1
#20redundancy != backup
Actually, backups are redundancy.
You just have to structure your redundancy to survive multiple threat models.
In which case, the redundancy offered by RAID alone is grossly insufficient.