SSD Failure Temporarily Halts Linux 3.12 Kernel Work

[dee.]

out of interest who manages the BSD kernal ? will they use backups

Which BSD kernel?

[Daktyl198]

Although despite the name, an SSD isn't actually a disk. It's a bunch of chips, not a spinning platter...

As mentioned before, SSD stands for Solid State Drive, "Disk" isn't in the name anywhere.
HDD stands for Hard Disk Drives, just as a "The More You Know" type of thing.

Back on topic: he lost less than half of the day's merges. I'm sure he does have a backup on his system, ignoring his quotes, as I only see him complaining about a few Kernel merges and not all of his data (It was his main SSD after all).

[demonkoryu]

Still, it's amazing that a guy like Linus doesn't get the point of mirroring. Someone suggested to mirror his drives and he went "no, backups are inconvenient". Well, it's only the Linux kernel on his drive, nothing important.

[stevenc]

Only wimps use RAID. Real men wait until their only disk fails, and lose their unsaved work, and a few emails, and a few hours trying to fix it, and then order a replacement disk, and wait for it to arrive, and reinstall the OS, and restore data from those off-site FTP mirrors of your data, and say "look, you're just going to have to wait a bit longer".

RAID is more about availability than having a backup. Especially if it's a production system which is an important part of the release process of a major operating system kernel...

[skies]

You can do asynchronous mirroring using DRBD over tcp/ip, either localy within the same machine (ex: from SSD to SSD, or SSD to HDD) or to an other machine. Linus just would get out and get a new SSD and sync up.

www.drbd.org

[Veerappan]

From the lkml thread:

> And may I suggest that you get TWO of them next time and mirror them,
> for just this case? The SysAdmin in my shouting out here...

I long ago gave up on doing backups. I have actively moved to a model
where I use replacable machines instead. I've got the stuff I care
about generally on a couple of different machines, and then keys etc
backed up on a separate encrypted USB key.

So it sounds like instead of backing up primarily to external storage, he just backs his stuff up to another functional machine (like his laptop). As long as it happens often enough, there'd be even less downtime than if he had to restore from backup, as he can just pick up the other machine and get back to work... with whatever the most recent copy of the backup was.

And as has been mentioned before, the kernel git mirror functions as a large off-site backup.

[ворот93]

Single point of failure.... is personal PC. *rofl*

[ayandon]

I hate Backup!!

I hate doing Backup because I used to do backup using Floppy-disks
Then I have to check these Backup disks

[schmidtbag]

I hate doing Backup because I used to do backup using Floppy-disks
Then I have to check these Backup disks

Yeah but now you can do backups using online services or at the very least, DVDs.

Personally, I use clonezilla once every month or 2 and create highly compressed images of all my drives. With the exception of the drive containing all my games and media, I can fit 2 computers and my Windows User's folder on 1 single-layer DVD. I use a separate DVD for all my media (I don't have much), though I should probably use dropbox or something.

Some people have moved on from optical drives but I personally still find them useful!

[garegin]

one word for you people, NAS. Just transparently backup your computer to a network share. One doesn't even have to think about it.