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What verytrivial said!!!!

I’ve been in similar situations, but never without an immediately obvious solution.

That system WILL FAIL. Even as we speak the time-to-failure is shrinking.

Even if one of the solutions described below actually works, you won’t get 100% recovery.

I recall a story years ago - from MIT, if memory serves - where they rebooted a system because they had many generations of Sybase backups. When they tried, it didn’t work. Nobody had actually tested recovering from a backup.

Grit your teeth; cover your ass; and get on with it. The clock IS ticking.




> That system WILL FAIL.

I think that the key point. We have a system that can't easily be restarted and won't automatically start after a server is rebooted. The developers of the software don't care, because "what are the chances of a virtual machine spontaneously restarting". Turns out, those chances are rather good.

Servers, virtual machines, containers, doesn't matter, unless that thing is running on a mainframe, it will crash.


What's special about mainframes in this context?


Mainframes tend to be designed with extreme uptime in mind - to the point of often having hot-swappable processors.


The software doesn't care. It will crash anyway.


Oh, of course. But the MTBF for 'sleep 500y' on a mainframe is higher than on commodity x86 hardware.


Aah, my favorite write-only backups.




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