

Linux-Kernel Archive: RIP - dead harddisk - bsg75
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1309.1/01669.html

======
masnick
I have Arq
([http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/](http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/))
set to back up my ~/git folder every hour. At most I can lose an hour of work.

This came in handy once when I accidentally did the equivalent of rm -rf
~/git. Lost 54 minutes of work.

Arq is Mac-only, but you could accomplish the same thing with
[https://www.tarsnap.com/](https://www.tarsnap.com/) and a cron job. Both are
changes-only backups so there shouldn't be a huge performance hit.

I also use Time Machine when I'm at home but only sort of trust it.

~~~
stingraycharles
Has anyone got any experience with using Dropbox as a backup service? They
provide 30 days of file recovery for free, and for a few dollars a month you
can get packrat, which provides eternal point-in-time recovery. Seems like a
great use case of a git folder backup?

~~~
hannibalhorn
I've had weird issues with my whole Dropbox getting deleted - in the middle of
the night, with my machine off, have never figured out why - and while your
Dropbox can be restored through the web interface, it's just one file at a
time. In the case of a "mass delete" you actually need to e-mail support and
generally wait a couple of days before they restore everything, which is less
than ideal.

The last time it happened (the third time!) I wrote some scripts myself using
their API to do the restore rather than wait on support. It really doesn't
make for an ideal backup solution, though!

------
thex86
I have a Intel 520 SSD. Fantastic thing I must say and I don't think I can
ever use a HDD again, but somehow -- and I realize this may just be baseless
-- I don't trust it as much as I trusted my old Seagate HDD, which lasted 7
years.

SSDs are getting better now, but are they as reliable as HDD? Can anyone
shares his/her expertise on this?

~~~
chrisbolt
I've been using Intel SSDs in a datacenter for over 3 years now. X25-E, X25-M,
320, 520, DC S3500, DC S3700. Over 1,000 of them. Not one has failed. Just my
experience though.

A few are getting low on their media wear indicator (25% remaining) but they
are getting replaced due to capacity issues.

~~~
astrodust
Most drives, when they "wear out", simply flip to read-only mode. At least you
can get your data at that point.

Mechanical drives, on the other hand, are simply dead.

------
cjensen
On the Mac with Time Machine, I can lose at most an hour of work. Not saying
that to praise the Mac; I'm saying that because that's how all computers ought
to be.

This would be a swell time for Dropbox to offer Linus a free large business
account so he can store everything.

~~~
claudius
I ha(ve/d) a small external hard drive enclosure which holds/held two 2 TB
drives in RAID-1 mode (recently tested that it’s indeed RAID 1: The enclosure
left out smoke and one of the drives now works happily in a single-drive
enclosure), attache(s/d) via eSATA and is used every hour by an rsync backup
run using hard links. Every evening, I run another script that cleans up most
of the older backups of the last week, keeping one per day.

So, yes, while at home, I also lose at most one hour of stuff, provided that
nothing catastrophic happens that damages both the drive and the notebook –
unfortunately until very recently, the internet connection to backup offsite
was simply not there, and even with 50/10 MBit/s it will be annoying.

~~~
ansible
If you hadn't written your own script, I'd recommend you use rsnapshot [1]
instead. It is based on rsync. You can set up a schedule with multiple
generations.

[1] [http://www.rsnapshot.org](http://www.rsnapshot.org)

~~~
claudius
Yeah, I stumbled over it less than a week after I had set up some nice script
to delete the extraneous backups I didn’t need. At the time, my requirements
for keeping backups were a little stricter, too, due to space constraints,
which were not easily implementable using rsnapshot. I guess with my ‘new’
scheme of one backup/day to keep, it’d be much easier.

------
EvanAnderson
I find if vaguely disturbing that John Stoffel suggests to Linus that he
mirror two discs in the future (presumably meaning a RAID-1 arrangement) and
Linus responds with "I long ago gave up on doing backups."

 _Linus_ conflating RAID with backup?!? Surely not. My world feels turned
upside down... >smile<

~~~
Dylan16807
RAID is a lesser class of backup, and he's given up on the entire realm.

------
flexd
If you are doing something as important as this, why aren't you at least
running some sort of RAID setup that would have been fine with losing a disk?
Or at the very minimum had a decent backup setup so that you would not lose
data.

For someone who created Linux in the first place, this must/should be very
embarrassing.

~~~
primelens
OTOH, it must be nice to know that even if your house blows up (hopefully when
you're not in it), your life's work is mirrored and backed up on millions of
computers. All he lost were some pull requests which have to be re-sent. The
submitters know who they are and if the changes don't show up in a day they
just send another email - no harm, no foul.

------
lutusp
This is especially ironic, as Linus has lately been extolling the virtues of
SSDs:

[http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/linus-
torvalds-...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/10/linus-torvalds-
hard-disks/)

And when Linus speaks, a lot of people listen.

------
bsg75
Additional:
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1ODY](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ1ODY)

------
consider_this
Maybe buy two hard disks, and back up one to the other.

It is only the linux kernel afterall.

~~~
jamesaguilar
*Linus' copy of the Linux kernel.

------
hakcermani
Yes Linus. Why don't you use RAID ?

~~~
astrodust
In a laptop?

~~~
vacri
There are some laptops with two hard drives, but whether or not these models
are nice to use, I don't know. Or maybe they have other hardware with poor
linux support....

------
kunai
So... does this mean that Apple's flash storage is low-quality?

I use the same MacBook Air that Linus does (except it's a 13" model), never
turn it off, have reinstalled the OS multiple times, archive my data, do
around ~3GB worth of transfers every day, and run 3 different VMs more often
than not.

Maybe I should just upgrade to a newer SSD. Anyone had luck with OWC?

~~~
hnha
All devices can fail. No use to overstate an anecdote.

------
hannibal5
Relevant Linus quote:

"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on
ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"

source:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/linux.dev.kernel/2OEgU...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/linux.dev.kernel/2OEgUvDbNbo/bTk-
VE1zrnYJ)

~~~
LukeShu
That still mostly worked (s/ftp/git/)

    
    
        > I had pushed out _most_ of my pulls today, so
        > realistically I didn't lose a lot of work.
    

You're always going to lose the things newer than your last backup.

~~~
astrodust
That's why the hourly backups of a system like Time Machine is great.

I've had several drives fail, and I've only lost about half an hour of work,
excluding that which was pushed, picking up almost exactly where I left off.

