Unix Permission Problem After a CPU Crash

[Bill Campbell]

On Sun, Apr 20, 2008, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
>On Sun, Apr 20, 2008 at 07:45:00AM -0400, Del wrote:
>> Thanks for the replies to this problem.  As it turned out, two files, the 
>> open order file and the order archive, were completely trashed beyond 
>> repair.  We could not back them up and when we ran fsck, it just deleted 
>> them.  We restored the files from his most recent backup (three weeks old) 
>> and are manually rebuilding them to the point of the crash.  Fortunately, he 
>> has paper records of all incoming orders, and we have other files in the 
>> system that have records of activity since the last backup, so we are 
>> optimistic about being able to manually recover the missing data (most of 
>> it).
>> 
>> This is the first time in twenty-six years that any customer of mine has 
>> actually lost data.  The customer admits that it is his fault for not moving 
>> fast enough to get the failed tape drive replaced.  When it rains, it pours.
>
>Yeah; we haven't lost any to anything except customer stupidity since
>we started speccing BackupEdge.  Thanks, Tom.  :-)

The major reason we stopped selling the accounting system I
developed was that I am afraid of being held liable for customer
stupidity, and having to fight off the land sharks.

Almost 20 years ago, one of our customers had a failing tape
drive, and ignored my explicit instructions not to back up over
their previous good backup tapes from their normal rotation so
wiped out all their backups containing all their accounting data
for the previous five years, and there was some corruption within
the data that needed to be fixed.  Fortunately I was able to dump
the data to ASCII files, and recreate the data files, but I had a
life-size picture of the problems if I hadn't been able to.

>FWIW, one of my clients has a directory (on another filesystem, and now
>on another drive) that he backs all his key segments up to every night
>from cron; rolling 7 day cleanout.

We generally back up to external hard drives, and several of our
customer's systems are set to do nightlyh rsync backups to our
systems here or to a server we have co-located at one of our ISP
customer's sites.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186

People from East Germany have found the West so confusing. It's so much
easier when you have only one party. -- Linus Torvalde, Linux Expo Canada
when asked about confusion over many Linux distributions.