“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”
Once, I licked the bottom of my foot.
I won’t claim that my youth wasn’t full of foibles, but I like to think I have avoided many silly mistakes and that, on the whole, I have fairly good judgment. I bet you like to think that, too, since I fix your servers when they’re down.
Despite whatever more rational faculties I may have, there are times when judgment is overcome by other things, (I hasten to assure you that this never happens with servers or networks, unless you count the time in college when I decided to see if I could get better network performance by setting my NIC to 100MbpsFD instead of 10Mb. It crashed the hub, and my dorm was without net access for a day. Who knew?) and it’s during those times that I can be found buying soda cans from vending machines to drop them down stairwells.
Anyway, the point is that once I licked the bottom of my foot. But I can understand if you read it wrong. If I was reading some random blog and came across that sentence, I’d think it said “Once, I licked the bottom of my foot.” In fact, what it really says is “Once, I licked the bottom of my foot.” Once was enough. For a lot of the silly things I’ve ever done, once was enough.
Why am I writing about this on a blog that is about a data center? Well, once, I lost all my data. I was repartitioning a drive, or resizing a partition, or doing something in Partition Magic, which is a useful program that will do a lot of low-ish level data organization on your hard drives, when the power went out. My disks were left in an unstable state and I lost everything. This was years and years ago now, but it is also the last time I have ever lost data. I’ve deleted files, had hard drives crash, installed OSs over old ones, but I’ve never lost another bit of data. Once was enough.
In a future post I’ll get some backup basics together; it’s actually more complicated than you might think. Like good security, it requires a number of trade-offs. But for now, I just want to request that the reader think very carefully about whether she has any data to lose and, if so, what kind of precautions should be taken to prevent such a loss.
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