Harddisk Failure?

[jeffery]

There is just something come up with my mind..

If one day the darddisk installed with DA is out of service,
or is damaged.

What can we do?

Sorry for asking a stupid question~ :p

[ProWebUK]

Depends...

If the /boot partition is corrupt but the drive is actually spinning, you can set the drive up as slave and then copy your data across or possibly try repairing a partition and get the os disks to help you... reinstalls may also work but be careful with data!

If your drive is dead, and everything is corrupt... theres little you can do but start fresh and find backups on your secondary drive or external backup location... not a good position to be in if you don't have backups ;)

There are always specialists about if you seriously need data recovery... but they dont come cheap and there is no guarantee you get any/all data recovered..

Chris

[nobaloney]

Originally posted by jeffery
If one day the darddisk installed with DA is out of service, or is damaged.

What can we do?
That depends on whether or not you've got a good backup.

There's a good backup thread here (http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1489&highlight=Full+DirectAdmin+backup), should you want to set up backups yourself.

We'll be happy to set it up for you on your server, but of course there's a charge for that; contact me by email (address in my sig) if you're interested.

With either of the above options you need a place to which to backup your data. So you'll either need another system, either in your colo center or somewhere else. Some colo and dedicated server companies offer backup space, some don't.

We offer both backup space and automated backups with our dedicated servers, but then again we're not the cheapest guys on the block; you usually get what you pay for and pay for what you get.

Presuming you do nothing else, I'd say start with a weekly backup using the script I mentioned above, and leave it on the server. Then if you have a high-speed connection, download it to your local desktop system using some kind of automated ftp; automated ftp programs are available for Windows, Linux, and OS X desktops, and probably for others as well.

Jeff

[jeffery]

Thanks Chris and Jeff.


If the /boot partition is corrupt but the drive is actually spinning, you can set the drive up as slave and then copy your data across or possibly try repairing a partition and get the os disks to help you... reinstalls may also work but be careful with data!

Any situation that the /boot partition will be corrupted? I am thinking of something like bad sector.

OK, the harddisk used for colo, will possibly come to what failure?
a sudden crash?


Bared in mind the importance of backup.
I will try mounting another harddisk for the backup script that Jeff provided.


:)

[ProWebUK]

modifying an active partition is not advised for the reason it may corrupt data etc... thats likely in co-los if your playing remotely.

Otherwise its more just waiting on the HD to fail... bad hardware that may be new or it will just die over time... theres nothing to say a drive will die next week, but theres no guarantee it will last until next week either ;)

Chris

[nobaloney]

Not to mention a recent power spike at HE in the SF Bay area a few weeks ago; plenty of systems were totally fried.

So only an offsite backup would have helped.

Jeff

[jeffery]

Originally posted by jlasman
So only an offsite backup would have helped.


It makes sense.

:p