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Thoughts on the ext4 panic

Thoughts on the ext4 panic

Posted Nov 8, 2012 6:00 UTC (Thu) by kevinm (guest, #69913)
In reply to: Thoughts on the ext4 panic by cesarb
Parent article: Thoughts on the ext4 panic

Mirroring, whether to separate disks or separate machines, also does nothing to reduce the need for backups.

In the case of application- or user- level corruption, mirroring will simply replicate the error very efficiently.


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Thoughts on the ext4 panic

Posted Nov 8, 2012 7:49 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

to err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer

and to _really_ trash things requires automation :-)

automated replication (including mirroring) is a wonderful way to propagate corruption (as someone who has automated the trashing of several hundred systems with a single command, I can really attest to this one)

Thoughts on the ext4 panic

Posted Nov 8, 2012 15:34 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Quite. I did, after all, spot this problem on a hardware RAID-5 array. The RAIDness of the array didn't help: the corruption was faithfully written out. It had neither the evil nor corrupted bits set, after all.

Thoughts on the ext4 panic

Posted Nov 11, 2012 2:16 UTC (Sun) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]

Sorry, but that claim is just wrong. Mirroring and replication do REDUCE the need for backups. They do, however, not ELIMINATE it. They protect against many forms of hardware failure, including what I would assume is the most common cause of hw-caused data loss: disk failures. Hence they reduce the need for backups. Of course they do not get rid of user-/app-level failures. They're not supposed to (and by definition cannot), and hence they do not eliminate the need for backups... but they do definitely reduce it.

Thoughts on the ext4 panic

Posted Nov 12, 2012 3:58 UTC (Mon) by kevinm (guest, #69913) [Link]

The need for backups is binary - you either need backups, or you don't need backups.

Thoughts on the ext4 panic

Posted Nov 12, 2012 5:10 UTC (Mon) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

The backups you need can take any of a range of values from none to offsite copies that let you reconstruct the state of anything at any moment.

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