Re: Got my new Home Server up and running..

[James Fidell <james@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

brougham Baker wrote:

> Yeah may be time for another penguin bash here- although I don't trust
ext3
> since it munched a whole partition- the drive still reports as
perfect.

FWIW, ext3 is generally considered absolutely rock solid these days.
I've not lost data in years on a huge number of machines other than in
exceptional circumstances (a Telehouse monkey pulling the wrong disk out
of a degraded RAID array whilst attempting to replace a failed drive,
for instance).  Obviously if you just yank the power out or switch the
box off there are going to be problems, but that's hardly something you
can blame the OS for.

The price of disk these days though means it's not expensive to mirror
smaller capacity disks in software in Linux using MD, and to use RAID5
with hot spares on larger arrays.  I've had to recover a server for
someone before now where both halves of a mirrored setup had failed in
different places and done so quite successfully.

Given a chance, it usually will "just work".

James