DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Joel Spolsky writes about cascading system failures. Here’s his conclusion, after spending four days recovering data and rebuilding systems:

Backups aren’t good enough. I want RAID mirroring from now on. When a drive dies I want to spend 15 minutes putting in a new drive and resume working exactly where I left off.

I had the same revelation a few years back: disk drives are cheap, but downtime is expensive, and data is priceless. If you’ve ever lost data, you know viscerally what I mean.

Using RAID under Linux is easy — RedHat’s graphical installer provides a RAID option. The disk utility will format RAID volumes prior to the OS installation. But of course, if you use Linux, you already knew that.

Using RAID under Mac OS 9 (and soon, OS X) is easy, with SoftRAID. SoftRAID is a 3rd-party disk-driver that is faster than Apple’s. It provides mirroring (RAID 1) and striping (RAID 0).

My main workstation uses a striped RAID volume to store replaceable data (that is, applications) for fast access. My data volume is mirrored across two drives for safety; if one drive fails, I’ll lose no data. In fact I might not even know a drive died, because the OS would keep running.

I do wish my TiBook had room for a second disk drive, though — RAID requires a minimum of two disk drives.

Hmm, at the moment, I am embarrassed to say, I have no backup solution for my laptop. I will rectify that with my next phone call. In the meantime, somebody, please kick me… I know better than to use a computer that’s not getting backed up, really I do.