Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Data corruption

Today I had an interesting experience on how bad things are on platforms that lacks ZFS. For an upgrade I was dumb enough to store a ISO image on a non-ZFS filesystem for a while. Later when performing upgrade tests I begun to get all sorts of strange errors from live upgrade.

The image had been corrupted on the disks or somewhere between the plates and the memory, before I verified it with md5 it was not found by any layer of the storage system.

I would normally never store anything important on a filesystem which is unable to protect data, and this time I was lucky since I found the corruption after a day instead of after a few months.

If feels good to know that even my data at home is protected by ZFS.

2 comments:

Jakob said...

Lovely. Now when will we get ZFS on an OS that people actually use?

Henkis said...

Well, the best implementation is available on Solaris which is widely used in the enterprise. If you want something free try OpenIndiana or FreeBSD.

That should cover the server side, but maybe your want it on your desktop? Sadly Apple dropped the OS X port and I don't think you will see it for Windows any day soon so build your own storage server and you will be fine :)