Backups

The story of how a harddisk crash destroyed an entire site:

[Story]


"...What happened was that the read heads slipped slightly out of alignment and began what is known as 'head skip,' which means that the heads skipped along the platters like a stone across water. Each time they hit the platters, they destroyed a little bit of data (somewhere around 256 bytes). Because they were skipping, they were reading bad data, so the drive attempted to compensate by moving the heads away and back again, which caused the heads to skip into more areas, which the drive then attempted to read from, which moved the head and caused more damage. Given that the drive spins at 7200 RPM, a few hours worth of this type of treatment just completely hosed the drive...."