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Subject: Re: ICC's disk problems

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 20:48:16 06/22/01

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On June 22, 2001 at 20:11:30, Chuck wrote:

>If you log onto ICC presently you may find the following statement concerning
>disk problems they've had:
>
>***** DISK-PROBLEMS *****
>
>As you may be aware, on June 2 part of ICC's disk system crashed.
>We restored the player data and other operational files that same
>day, but had less luck with the old games, game libraries and
>some other data such as TriviaBot's database.  Our in-house
>efforts (working with consultants) to read the bad disk have
>failed, so now we are sending it to a data recovery lab.  We are
>hopeful that they will be able to recover all of the data, but
>we probably won't know for about a week.
>
>We are very sorry, of course; this was quite a disaster for us!
>It was very bad luck that not only our RAID array died but that
>while we were repairing it, the other disk that had a copy of
>that data crashed.  Now we are setting up a new disk system and
>better backup procedures.
>
>****
>
>Now I wish to make an issue of this statement. I don't have anything against
>ICC, but IMO, this statement is a bunch of hogwash. My problem with it is that
>ICC is not being honest. They should just admit they didn't have a good backup
>in place, take the heat and move on. Don't try to tell us that while you were
>trying to run your backup the backup crashed. This is like telling your teacher
>your dog ate your homework. Even if it were true, no one would believe it.
>
>And if it were true [that they had good regular backups], they could just roll a
>backup from the day before and hardly miss a beat. In such a case the above
>statement would not be necessary.
>
>I don't wish to start a big thread about whether they did or not, I just expect
>they are not being honest and everyone should consider they are probably doing
>things with the money you pay them other than what they say they're doing.
>Personally, I wouldn't pay that annual fee to watch them blow smoke.


I don't think that is what they are saying.  One disk crashed out of a RAID5
array.  Apparently a second disk died shortly thereafter.  When _that_ happens,
you are dead.  You can lose one but not two.  If you don't have a good backup
(and this has happened to me with 24gig scsi tapes myself) then you are royally
screwed.

I had a scsi tape that wrote tapes just fine, except that they were unreadable
if you tried to restore.  That is how I lost all the old source versions of
Crafty a couple of years ago.  I now dump 'em to CDRom every few months so I
won't be losing them again.  I am waiting on a DVD write to dump all the
endgame stuff to make sure none of it gets lost either...







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