Data recovery emergency on a downed server... Help please!!

Madison Kelly linux-5ZoueyuiTZhBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org
Wed Dec 31 17:48:42 UTC 2003


I have been hearing over and over again how tape drives are far less 
reliable than I once believed... I am now giving serious thought to 
alternative backup schemes but I -have- to find something that will be 
easy to maintain lest user apathy kick in and the backups stop occuring.

So far, I have helped negate the nee for a future recovery a certain 
amount by implementing a RAID1 mirror however that will do nothing to 
prevent more than a single disk failure. I have thought about DVD-/+RW 
drives but that would require more effort on the part of the users; see 
above fear. Finally, I have been thinking about getting a collection of 
laptop-size HDD and placing them into external USB2.0-powered chassis 
and writting a script to do the copy. This would allow for a simple swap 
of a chassis each day and would be a lot faster, to boot. The only fear 
there is the initial setup cost.

As for the superblock; if I was more confident in my own abilities I 
would have tried exactly that. The problem is that the last PC actually 
lost the drive indicating a hardware failure. Given the value of the 
data, I was not willing to risk any further proding by me. If the data 
is recovered and the original drive is still intact than for practice I 
will try just that.

Again, I can't express enough how much I appreciate all the help 
everyone has given me in this!!

Madison (who has finally gotten herself a good night's sleep!!)

Kevin Cozens wrote:
> At 12:23 AM 12/29/2003 -0500, Madison wrote:
> 
>> I have had a drive failure on a server and I can no longer mount the
>> data partition on the hard drive (/dev/hda5 [ext3 under RH7.3]) because
>> the replacement server (Fedora Core 1) claims that the drive's
>> superblock is toast.
> 
> 
> Sorry to hear about your hard drive and tape drive problems. Hopefully 
> the recovery service will be able to help you. As was suggested earlier 
> I was wondering if using one of the other superblocks would have helped 
> you recover the files if the primary superblock was bad.
> 
>>   Now, before anyone rips me a new one, I -DO- have a tape drive but 
>> that,
>> too, has rather depressingly failed. When I try to recover the files
>> from the IDE Travan 8GB drive it successdully recovers about 50 files
>> and then fails with this...
> 
> 
> I don't have anything against using tape for backups but I do have 
> something against tape drives. I have had four tape drives die on me. 
> Actually, it was three drives. The fourth drive was made up of the two 
> main pieces of two other identical drives that had previously failed in 
> different ways. None of the drives had seen heavy usage. In fact, they 
> had each been used for barely a dozen or so backups (IIRC).
> 
> This is why I am now looking at the use of DVDs for backup. I already 
> have software that allows me to backup everything in my Windows side of 
> the machine to DVD. It backed up a bit over 6G on to two DVDs and the 
> bonus is that they are bootable so I can recover from bare metal 
> directly from the DVDs. I'm hoping to eventually be able to do something 
> similar under Linux.
> 
> One other difference between the use of tape and CD/DVD for backup is 
> that the CD/DVD drives (AFAIK) are a lot cheaper to buy/replace should 
> something happen to the drive. There is a place I know of which can 
> repair the tape drives I have at a flat fee of $350 per drive. Only 
> problem is, I don't have confidence that a repaired drive would last any 
> longer then the new ones did.
> 
> 
> Cheers!
> 
> Kevin.  (http://www.interlog.com/~kcozens/)


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