[Gllug] Tape backups

[Nix]

On 17 Feb 2009, John Hearns verbalised:

> 2009/2/17 Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk>:
>> > And as for hard drives 'corrupting on you', well, unless the OS goes
>> insane it simply doesn't happen often enough to worry about.
>
> Depends how many petabytes a year you write to disk :-)

Individual users?!

Overshoot, silent writes, and so on are theoretical problems, but the one
instance I've seen which looked like being this (the drive simply forgot
about a seek command, it looked like, leading to a bunch of journal being
written into an inode table) later turned out to be an OS bug.

I'm willing to believe these problems happen, but they are *not* common.

> http://storagemojo.com/2007/09/19/cerns-data-corruption-research/
>
> Silent writes.... shiver.

Yeah, but are you doing ATLAS volumes of writes on your home machines?
I know I'm not.

... actually, thinking about it, I had a strange bug eight years ago
which may have been a single-bit-flip extracting a source tree. (But
that could equally well have been the OS, not the disk. Net cost:
zero, I just re-extracted it.)
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