Why Mirroring Is Not a Backup Solution

Craig writes "Journalspace.com has fallen and can't get up. The post on their site describes how their entire database was overwritten through either some inconceivable OS or application bug, or more likely a malicious act. Regardless of how the data was lost, their undoing appears to have been that they treated drive mirroring as a backup and have now paid the ultimate price for not having point-in-time backups of the data that was their business." The site had been in business since 2002 and had an Alexa page rank of 106,881. Quantcast said they had 14,000 monthly visitors recently. No word on how many thousands of bloggers' entire output has evaporated.

Again a frost post to a red story

[Anonymous Coward]

While this mirrors previous comments, it's not really a backup solution.

Excellent!

[GravityStar]

Excellent! We can use their demise as yet another cautionary tale.

Thank you

[ari_j]

This is fascinating and altogether newsworthy. I had never before thought of this. I am very pleased, indeed, that kdawson engaged his most finely-honed editorial faculties to post this article to the front page, as it is not only stunning and fascinating in substance but also rather eloquently written.

Inconceivable?

[LSD-OBS]

I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:stunned silence

[conureman]

I am experiencing a strange phenomenon. The jaw-drop reflex has been popping my mouth open for several minutes and won't stop. If I focus I can close it, but then it pops open again. wow.

To the HR department

[squeegee_boy]

Important note: don't hire the IT dude with Journalspace.com on his resume.

Re:Excellent!

[El Torico]

Excellent! We can use their demise as yet another cautionary tale.

Ironically, it's more useful than the entire collection of blogs that they stored.

Re:The rules of backups

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Do not talk about backups
2. DO NOT TALK ABOUT BACKUPS

Someone needs to be FIRED

[spitek]

You pay your infrastructure people to maintain business, continuity I mean the tittle of this post made me go, "Really, no shit" That's like systems admin 101! If the admin was aware then the manager that didn't listen needs to be fired. If the manager listened and they are just run by retards then they got what they deserve. You'd think 17,000 visitors a month would be worth enough to do it right, in add revenue alone. The cost of a consumer machine running linux with a few TB's of SATA space - $1200 How much the company paid to have a system's admin play video games all day - $50,000 The cost of a 17,000 vistor a month site going down because they had no data base backups - Priceless.

Re:Dear Every Corporate Tool in the Universe:

[slugtastic]

I'm more surprised that the site lived for 6 years without back-up. That's pretty hardcore.

Re:Dear Every Corporate Tool in the Universe:

[modmans2ndcoming]

Screw that!! IT Departments are cost centers and have absolutely no benefit to the bottom line of a company... none at all... nope.

Re:Someone needs to be FIRED

[macbuzz01]

I think they are all fired now.

Re:El Oh El

[spuke4000]

Indeed. Everyone knows that when you drive your company into the ground through incompetence you don't give up! You go to Washington to get your bail out. That's the American way.

Re:rm -rf /

[Piranhaa]

C:\>rm -rf /
'rm' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

Everything's still running here...

If you can't be a good example...

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning."

Catherine Aird
Quoted in the Book Practical UNIX & Internet Security

Re:DUH!

[djupedal]

As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

Re:rm -rf /

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! I store all my data in directory names!

Re:Dear Every Corporate Tool in the Universe:

[bb5ch39t]

Absolutely correct! Why management here is drooling over how much they money could save if they just didn't need the damn IT department. And all those damn desktop computers! Why, life was much better back in the days of paper ledgers and pencils! Sigh - if only we could have the perfect company. One which only has high level managers and none of the "riff raff" that infects them. Oh! Wait! That's Congress. And they have a monopoly.

Re:Dear Every Corporate Tool in the Universe:

[digitalgiblet]

Pay the salary of someone smart enough to handle your data correctly if you have no interest in becoming smart yourself.

The first step is admitting you are stupid. That is hard for most people. Of course today they are having NO trouble making that cognitive leap...

Re:DUH!

[larry bagina]

I pity the fool who hahas?

Re:To the HR department

[squeegee_boy]

OK, you hire him first. I think he's available.

Re:To many shops think HA==DR

[cbiltcliffe]

I tried Googling, but the only results I got were a medical office in Chinatown.....

Re:rm -rf /

[Poltras]

$ del C:\*.* /s /q /y
-bash: del: command not found

Guys...

Re:Dear Every Corporate Tool in the Universe:

[slushdork]

Maybe they should have used this [bash.org] backup strategy, although this one looks more like this [bash.org]...

Re:rm -rf /

[dfdashh]

Judging by your OS, not for long

How to backup, the Slashdot way

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The file system must be ZFS. If your FS' acronym is more than 4 characters long, your data is fucked from the beginning.

2. Backup often: if it's not done every five minutes, your data is stale and totally not fresh.

3. Off-site backups: you need to Fedex your shit to five different corners of the world at a minimum. If a fire breaks out, you can call your offices in Uganda for the restore disks/tapes.

4. Secure your backups: keep guard dogs, armed mercenaries and Jason Statham nearby. In the likely event that your hard drives get jacked, you can always rely on Statham to kick down a door or two to save the day.

5. ???

6. Profit.

Re:DUH!

[severoon]

Journalspace CTO: We don't need an expensive off-site backup solution b/c we mirror all of our data real-time. It's genius!

-entire database gets overwritten-

Journalspace CTO: Ohhhhhh...now I get it.

Re:Mirroring

[gEvil (beta)]

See mirroring is like...well a mirror. If you stand before one and stick a fork in your eye your mirror-image does the same. In real time. Analogies are there for a reason.

There's a major flaw in your analogy. See, if I stick a fork in my right eye, the mirror image will stick a fork in his left eye. Between the two of us, however, we still have one good left AND right eye. So ipso fatso, I have a complete backup.

Re:DUH!

[NickFitz]

What about archive.org?

Ah, apparently not... [archive.org] :-D

Re:rm -rf /

[mabhatter654]

operators make mistakes... the higher up they are paid the more likely they are to do it. Take the manager covering for somebody on vacation... they jump in and mistype something... boom! data gone. Happens to the best of us... the really good ones have ways in place to make sure mistakes have a way of being undone.

how many AS400 operators typed PWRDWNSYS *IMMED and got a surprise!

Re:DUH!

[jcuervo]

What we've got here is failure to administrate.

Darwin awards

[ZiggyM]

Are there Darwin awards for websites?

Re:Double Duh!

[Murpster]

Their admin is criminally incompetent.

Isn't that the same as saying "they had a Mac admin"?

tape backs up perfectly....

[SethJohnson]

Back in the nineties, a friend of mine was backing his mac system up weekly with a tape drive. The thing is, he was using the same tape to repeatedly back up onto. One day he calls to tell me he needed some help recovering files on his hard drive after a crash. I asked, "What about the tape backups?" He said, "That thing backs up perfectly. The problem is, it doesn't restore at all."

Seth