On Oct 18, 2009, at 12:25 AM, Max Battcher wrote:
On 10/18/2009 0:38, John Williams wrote:
On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 8:36 PM, Julia Thompson<[email protected]>
wrote:
Er. In that sort of a situation, I myself would set up a RAID for
storing
the data, *much* less chance for losing it.
RAID does not protect from rm -rf / , which (some variant of) is my
guess at what happened. Although now they are saying most of the data
is recovered, so maybe it got munged in a reversible way.
Any "cloud" service at this point is going to be tens, if not
hundreds, of servers. (Major services easily run in the thousands of
servers, and if you count "virtual" servers the biggest services are
using millions of servers already.) At this point any outage that is
going to affect a service as whole is generally going to be a lot
subtler (and possibly a lot "nastier", such an accidental viral
infection due to an underlying bug/exploit in the service) than a rm
-rf /.
At least, assuming the system admins are doing their jobs correctly
rm -rf / to a single server is extremely unlikely to cause massive
outage or damage... (As a service gets large enough hard drives are
expected to fail randomly, and surprisingly frequently, and services
should be designed around that problem...)
And, as with a RAID except on a much larger scale, there's built in
redundancy and error correction, so the system tends to self-heal.
About the only threat is viral mechanisms that propagate through the
system.
I'm just territorial about my data, is all. I tend to like knowing
where it's stored and who has access to it, and have some control over
its persistence in some cases. There are some applications for which
I think cloud storage might serve my needs, and others for which I
consider it unsuitable.
"Oh yeah? Well, I speak LOOOOOOOUD, and I carry a BEEEEEEEger stick --
and I use it too!" **whop!** -- Yosemite Sam
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