test
Power outages suck ass. And there are times when colocation sites will get hammered and suffer downtime no matter what they promise their customers.
BTW, a tip for those here assembled that was driven home to me yet once again this week. It may be good for some extra mileage for some of you ...
When a hard drive apparently fails because of a power outage or line surge or some other electrical root cause, always suspect the attached PCB (printed circuit board) as well as, or in place of, the physical disk.
Here is a photo of a Western Digital Caviar hard drive with the PCB exposed.
The reason this can help is because the PCB can be changed out easily if you have, or can obtain, a replacement unit. These are usually specific to the precise hard drive model and are unlikely to be interchangeable between model numbers. But I have found them on eBay.
If the PCB got fried instead of the physical drive, your data may still be OK. I had occasion to revisit this yesterday, when I changed out the PCB of an outboard USB drive which apparently died during a residential power failure on 12/29.
The disk now checks out, and the data is readable.
A replacement PCB will likely cost you as much as a whole replacement drive. But if the data is worth it and will otherwise be lost, this is something to consider.
back when I was in data recovery that is exactly what I would tell clients.look the hw is repalceable, the applications are replacible. the data is gold. your data is irriplacable and the object of true value on teh system...for the love of god have redundent back ups...and (as my current employer just learned) ruteinly check the backups for validity (we lost 10,000 DB records, 1 weeks data, and the backup tape for that week had gotten croupted...woops).
Power outage? WTF? My podunk ISP has a huge UPS and a backup natural gas generator. Never loses power.
BOHICA : single points of failure..worked for abott labs a while backe...sure we had a massive backup infrustructure, btu the relay that was supposed to tell our UPS adn genoerators that the mains had died, died....THAT was a fun weekend. espicaly considering I had jsut tourd the center the week before adn asked as to why that realy wasnt redundent...multimillion dollar data center and they hosed it to save a few thousand bucks.
Jesse,
HS is still up n down. Eating posts, apparently eating posts, eating posts and then putting em back up, etc.
This is why I got Gilly off of HS...
:D
ratemymusic wasn't much of an improvement, Jen.
(1) There was no way to preview comments before you published them.
(2) Eventually, the comment spammers found it.
My podunk ISP has a huge UPS and a backup natural gas generator. Never loses power.
BOHICA, no backup system of any sort is a panacea.
There is a story that was famous in information security circles about 10 years ago, about tape backups at, I think, HP.
The lady who was responsible for these had been very carefully taught the backup procedures by her former supervisor. She was a suspenders and belt type, so she made careful notes of all of this.
One fine day, the company had a serious disk failure, went to restore from the backup tapes, and ... WOOOPS! They were all corrupted. Thus useless. So the data loss was not something they could mitigate - The data was simply *gone*, and they had to eat the loss.
The lady came within a hairsbreadth of being sacked. Those notes she took saved her job, because they proved that her mentor (and former boss) had been following the same flawed procedure that he had taught to her.
(1) There is no such thing as a foolproof backup.
(2) You have to test the procedure from time to time.
(3) You have to run end-to-end tests from time to time to test the integrity of the entire system.
(4) Even so, they can fail you.
As I learned myself, again, less than two weeks ago. I had a server and an outboard USB drive taken out by a power outage even though they were both protected by a 1250 volt-amp backup supply.
I'm still restoring both.
My earlier comment to this thread was not completely OT. 
Commenting by HaloScan
