In-reply-to » QOTD: Have you ever suffered significant data loss? If so, what went wrong?

@mckinley@twtxt.net When typesetting our graduation newspaper (“Abizeitung” as we call it), I destroyed the work of a whole day. :-D

I plugged in the USB stick of my mate (exact same model as mine) to do a backup of that day’s work. Since mine was already plugged in, the mount path /media/USB_DISK or whatever it was already existed. Throughout the day I saved everything on my drive (I don’t know the reason for that anymore). The newly plugged in thumb drive then got automatically mounted by Konqueror as /media/USB_DISK2 or something like that. I wanted to show off my other mate how cool Linux was and how quickly the command line was able to get things done. By force of habit I cded into the wrong path to first rm -rf *, so that there was room for the new stuff. Indeed, the data was ruined super quickly.

When I noticed my fuckup I aborted immediately, but it was already too late. I went to the family computer to research recovery tools. All the files I was able to restore were corrupted. The Scribus XML files ended somewhere in the middle. So then we decided to redo all the work instead of wasting more time trying to fill in the missing XML. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that not only the last closing tags were missing, much more of the contents disappeared. I remember that I gladly noticed the second typesetting round went much faster. :-)

I could be totally wrong here, but I think one problem was that write operations to external devices were not immediately synced, one had to expicitly flush the write cache, e.g. by umounting it properly. Early on in the typesetting process we decided to have each page or spread as separate *.sla, because a) our computers were not powerful enough to handle a large project and b) once the layout template was cast in stone, we could easily work in parallel and join everything in the end. That helped to limit the damage to just my work. My mate’s was still there I believe.

Oh yeah, that’s certainly the best strategy, @bender@twtxt.net! ;-)

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In-reply-to » @prologic ZFS is fine but it's out-of-tree and extremely inflexible. If Btrfs RAID5/6 was reliable it would be fantastic. Add and remove drives at will, mix different sizes. I hear it's mostly okay as long as you mirror the metadata (RAID1), scrub frequently, and don't hammer it with too many random reads and writes. However, there are serious performance penalties when running scrubs on the full array and random reads and writes are the entire purpose of a filesystem.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Fair 👌

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In-reply-to » @prologic ZFS is fine but it's out-of-tree and extremely inflexible. If Btrfs RAID5/6 was reliable it would be fantastic. Add and remove drives at will, mix different sizes. I hear it's mostly okay as long as you mirror the metadata (RAID1), scrub frequently, and don't hammer it with too many random reads and writes. However, there are serious performance penalties when running scrubs on the full array and random reads and writes are the entire purpose of a filesystem.

@prologic@twtxt.net Planning it ahead of time is all well and good if you have the money to buy 6 or 8 hard drives at once. I really don’t, and I want to mirror the whole thing offsite anyway. Mergerfs will let me do it now, and I’ll buy a drive each for SnapRAID in short order.

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In-reply-to » @prologic ZFS is fine but it's out-of-tree and extremely inflexible. If Btrfs RAID5/6 was reliable it would be fantastic. Add and remove drives at will, mix different sizes. I hear it's mostly okay as long as you mirror the metadata (RAID1), scrub frequently, and don't hammer it with too many random reads and writes. However, there are serious performance penalties when running scrubs on the full array and random reads and writes are the entire purpose of a filesystem.

To be honest I don’t find it all that inflexible.

When you consider that you’re limited by hardware anyway, you plan your ZFS array ahead of time like I did.

As the years go on and drives fail you eventually replaces all disks with slightly larger ones.

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I guess I’m not missing my GUI Web Browser yet. In fact, I think I’m enjoying this. 😆

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I might even drop to TTY to try stuff I read about earlier today.

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I guess I’m not missing my GUI Web Browser yet. In fact, I think I’m enjoying this. 😆

Image

I might even drop to TTY to try stuff I read about earlier today.

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In-reply-to » @mckinley I am curious now, though. Doesn't Synology use RAID Btrfs? How in the world do they do it? Researching...

Ha! Found it:

Due to the Btrfs RAID issues, Synology chose Linux RAID. Based on the diagram below, Synology has implemented the layers in between the file systems and disks to ensure that Synology has full control to achieve the highest stability.

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In-reply-to » Come on guys, can't we just do Btrfs RAID5/6 already?

@prologic@twtxt.net ZFS is fine but it’s out-of-tree and extremely inflexible. If Btrfs RAID5/6 was reliable it would be fantastic. Add and remove drives at will, mix different sizes. I hear it’s mostly okay as long as you mirror the metadata (RAID1), scrub frequently, and don’t hammer it with too many random reads and writes. However, there are serious performance penalties when running scrubs on the full array and random reads and writes are the entire purpose of a filesystem.

Bcachefs has similar features (but not all of them, like sending/receiving) and it doesn’t have the giant scary warnings in the documentation. I hear it’s kind of slow and it was only merged into the kernel in version 6.7. I wouldn’t really trust it with my data.

I bought a couple more hard drives recently and I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to allocate them before badblocks completes. I have a few days to decide. :)

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In-reply-to » Do you believe one can survive surfing the web using a text-based web browser? (i.e: Lynx or W3m) no CSS no Bling for at least 24 hours 😲

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Why not, give it a shot! 😅

I think I even integrated my password manager into tmux at some point. There’s a lot that you can do.

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In-reply-to » Do you believe one can survive surfing the web using a text-based web browser? (i.e: Lynx or W3m) no CSS no Bling for at least 24 hours 😲

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com At work? Not a chance. 😂

Private life? Sure. There was a regular community event called “A week in the TTY” over at nixers.net, where we spent a week only in text mode. It was easily doable.

There are some things where a graphical browser is pretty much mandatory these days. Online banking comes to mind. I could in theory physically go to the bank, but I’m way too lazy for that. 😂

Netflix is more popular nowadays and I wouldn’t want to miss that, either.

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Do you believe one can survive surfing the web using a text-based web browser? (i.e: Lynx or W3m) no CSS no Bling for at least 24 hours 😲

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