Proof that lack of backups causes disk failure

[Ben Pfaff]

As many of you know, I do nightly tape backups, and had for the
last 4 years or so.  Or, at least, I did until I moved out here,
because my tape drive hasn't been shipped to me yet.  I figured
that the chances of anything going wrong in the meantime were
small.

Ha ha--this afternoon I got a console message that there was an
unrecoverable error accessing /dev/hda1.  Goddamn.  I reboot
(can't even shut down cleanly because /dev/hda1 has been forcibly
remounted read-only), fsck -c, fsck -c again to make sure, fsck
-f a final time.  So now I have a sh*tload of bad blocks.

Normal reaction: Back the disk the hell up, call up Compaq and
order a warranty replacement.  But I'm going to wait until I
actually have a tape drive to do most of it.  I'm still going to
do the "back the hell up" part by copying across the network to a
machine I admin at MSU, all the way across the country.  Let's
see how this works out.

While I'm waiting, I'm monitoring the situation by adding a
nightly cron job that runs `badblocks' and compares to a known
list to make sure that new bad blocks aren't creeping in
slowly...

-- 
"Whoever you are -- SGI, SCO, HP, or even Microsoft -- most of the
 smart people on the planet work somewhere else."
--Eric S. Raymond