[clug] Spreading the joy!

[Burn Alting]

To my (then and now) shame, back in the early 80's I used to backup my
Vax's HUGE 400MB Fujitsu Eagle drive to a bunch of CDC 80MB removable
disks. I'd been doing this for months until one Friday night I got a
whole series of bad blocks on the Eagle, so quite confidently I went to
my backups in preparation to load them onto another drive whilst I
reformatted the Eagle and to my horror the backups had nothing one them,
just lists of files they should have had!!!!!!

I then spent the next 48 hours modifying the VME disk driver and
filesystem driver handle 'blank regions' on a disk (back in those days
the Unix kernel (Level 7 AUSAM) was relatively small and simple, so it
was easy to hop into any part of the kernel, work out what it was doing
and then mod/fix/add to it).

By Monday morning around 1:00AM I was very tired (and hyper from all the
coffee and junk food) but I had recovered about 85% of the data.

Naturally, I then immediately fixed my backup scripts and from then on
have never, never, never trusted a backup procedure and always did a
partial restore and compare as part of the backup procedure (or a full
restore and compare if resources and time permitted).

Surprisingly, I don't think anyone noticed the loss of data until I hung
my head in shame and told them of the events of the weekend. Poetically
or perhaps fortunately, only I lost data.

Burn Alting