September 2008

This weekend, I was following my friends on Twitter and noticed that our friend Leo Leporte experienced something that all true geeks fear most, DATA LOSS!

Here’s how I saw it go down on Twitter:

First off, let me say that my thoughts and prayers go out to Leo during this time of loss! Weirdly enough, I almost mean that as much seriously as much as I do in a lighthearted way as I would express the same sentiments to someone who has lost someone near and dear to them.

I thought that the reason why people used a Raid 5 backup (RAID 5 : Combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk; the storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk.) was because hardware such as an individual hard drive is susceptible to failure and so that if all the data is mirrored on all three or more drives, if one drive fails, you have two or more good copies of the data. However, it would appear that a simple failure of the hardware known as the “Raid 5 Card” can completely wipe out the benefit of having more than one external drive backup. This is exactly why I’m not at all fascinated by Raid 5 or Drobos!

To many of us geeks, we put so much of who we are into ones and zeroes. Luckily, Leo didn’t loose any of his own content, just all the blood sweat and tears poured into the systems that were in place to deliver the content. However, the contributions from hundreds, if not thousands, of people who left comments on his blog or posts in his forums have been forever lost. At least all those done since the last “good backups” of each of the sites he maintains.
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