[Beowulf] GPFS and failed metadata NSD

[Joe Landman]

On 05/19/2017 10:33 AM, John Hanks wrote:
> There is a potentially lost PhD project there which was to be defended
> this month for which the person may simply give up and another project

Egads ...

I went in the complete opposite (almost paranoid) direction.  I made 
copies of my thesis/run data everywhere.  20+ years ago, but still the 
lessons hold true.

Most important of them is "Software has bugs and will actively work to 
nuke your data and confound your recovery".

Second is "hardware fails".

Third is "RAID is not a backup".  To this day ... I know many people 
whom mistakenly think it is, and do not backup their important data. 
I've seen file system crashes take out parallel file systems atop them, 
so ... its even more true today than ever.

Fourth should be "cloud storage can go away/fail/go out of business."

There are others, but ... wow ... losing Ph.D. project data.

-- 
Joe Landman
e: joe.landman at gmail.com
t: @hpcjoe
w: https://scalability.org