[ashray]

I don't understand, you had a backup HD - that means you had a RAID setup. Why didn't your host replace the damaged hard disk ? In my experience hosts usually monitor RAID health on their servers and if there is a problem they replace the bad hard drives at the quickest opportunity.. and I'm talking about budget hosts.

EDIT: Too many to respond to below so just editing in here. The author mentioned that the primary hard disk had failed over a year ago - but he didn't know about that (the host informed him of this... now?). That points to a RAID setup where the mirror was basically working all this while. That's what I'm talking about in this post.

[Sanddancer]

Repeat after me: RAID is not a backup. It will mitigate certain drive failures, but is not a backup. Period, end of statement. Controllers will forget their info, OSes will eat their partition tables, and will otherwise ruin your data. If you're not backing up your stuff, to a completely separate system, preferably to a completely separate service, you will lose data. Period.

[Udo]

I don't think that's what ashray meant. A backup (as in failover) HD, not an HD that stores backups... Because apparently to add insult to injury, in this case they ignored a failed RAID drive and didn't have backups.

[dangrossman]

When you buy unmanaged servers, the host isn't monitoring RAID health -- they don't have any remote access to your machine except maybe IPMI for reboots. I've rented servers from various providers for a decade and none has ever monitored my hard drives... plenty have failed, including disks in a RAID and RAID adapters themselves; they get replaced when I call up and tell someone the server won't boot and I need someone to go take a look.

[ashray]

You're right, I seem to have gotten lucky with my unmanaged hosting (3 times over with different hosts). They seem to have some sort of hardware interface to monitor RAID health, of course, this is hardware RAID so maybe that's where the setup differs. I was surprised when I received an email from them one morning about a year ago saying "Hey, one of your RAID drives failed so we replaced it, just FYI".

It's true that a RAID failure may go unnoticed by a sysadmin for a year or more if they don't have proper checks setup for themselves.

I guess the only thing that could've been done in this case was to have a backup cronjob or use a provider that takes care of this stuff..

[gregd]

Thank you. This was exactly what I was getting at. 1&1 is on the short list of budget hosts that are notorious for doing the bare minimum to get your money.

[gregd]

"The backup HD" doesn't necessarily equate to "that means you had a RAID setup". How did you arrive at that conclusion? Budget hosts are notorious for having little to no backup solutions in place simply because, well I don't really know why? Costs? Complexity?

[ashray]

The author said that the primary hard disk failed and the host had told him there was a backup hard disk that hummed along for a year.

I cannot imagine any other practical situation in which a 'backup hard disk' would automatically kick in - apart from a RAID setup.

I know that budget hosts do not backup data off site, but they do tend to maintain their hardware, RAID arrays, etc.

However, I admit that I am all too unfamiliar with shared hosting environments in today's day and age, it's either a cloud or dedicated server for me - and for my budget dedicated servers, hosts have been pretty proactive about replacing bad hard drives.

[garysweaver]

http://www.overclock.net/t/1254683/why-raid-is-not-a-backup-...

[GalacticDomin8r]

Repeat after me: RAID is not a backup.