[clug] Spreading the joy!

[Steve Walsh]

I've done the same on an old Tandem K1000 a few years ago, when I ran all
the commands to switch to the other Fridge...I mean drive array, then
dismounted the drive and went into the machine room to pull it out and do
the nightly swap. The moment of clarity as I heard the contacts on the alarm
relay slam home pointed out I'd just done everything right, but in the
emulator window, and not the actual machine console window.

It look about 14 seconds before the first operator appeared at the fishbowl
to find out what had happened to their terminal, which game me just enough
time to reseat the drive and get back to my desk to start disaster recovery.

-----Original Message-----
From: Burn Alting
Sent: Wednesday, 27 October 2004 11:01 AM
To: linux at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: [clug] Spreading the joy!


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

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