From: John P . Looney (valen at domain tuatha.org)
Date: Mon 27 Sep 1999 - 15:05:14 IST
On Mon, Sep 27, 1999 at 01:42:56PM +0000, Niall O Broin mentioned:
> I'm puzzled - if you're trying to retrieve tables, why are you
> reformatting the disks ? If the tables are on some kind of backup medium,
> why not just bring them back to another machine ? Or is it a case of -
> well, I know the couple of little tables I actually want are somewhere in
> that 100GB of data, so just restore the whole thing and then I'll see
> what I want.
Right. Picture it. E5000 with a ~100GB database is marked for
decommissioning. 10GB that's marked as "useful" is added to another Sun
box. 5GB that's kinda useful is stuck on an NT box. The machine is shipped
to limerick & reinstalled as a backup server - which only needs a pair of
internal disks. The old hard disks are kept in Dublin, to be used "for
something else".
7 months later some goon says
"Oh, we need some data from the old blah machine".
"You mean the one that was decommissioned, broken up, and scattered to
the four corners of the earth, it's disks sown with salt, and then
formatted, it's CPU's powered down, it's PROM reset to defaults, it's
DRAM recycled for the benefit of Sales users and it's name stricken
from the DNS tables so it would be forgotten for all time ?"
"Do you always talk like this to financial users ?"
"What poxy tables do you want ?"
"I don't know, but I'd know them if I saw what was in them".
Riiiight.
So, our Kate gets one of the spare E5000's, hooks up a few 20 disk
fibrechannel arrays that happened to be lying about, to make sure that
there would be a free machine & database to get all the old data back from
some backup tapes.
I've no idea how they were laid out, but I know that they aren't all one
happy disk partition. So I partitioned it. I didn't think it'd be still
formatting (checks watch) near three hours later.
Kate
-- Microsoft. The best reason in the world to drink beer.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Thu 06 Feb 2003 - 13:04:36 GMT