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Yesterday morning, I pulled open my laptop to send a quick email. It had a frozen black screen, so I rebooted it, and… oh crap.
My 2-year-old SSD had unceremoniously died.
This was a gut punch, but I had an ace in the hole. I'm typing this from my restored system on a brand new drive.
In total, I lost about 10 minutes of data. Here's how. (Spoilers: #zfs #zrepl)
This story gives me mixed feelings. I wouldn’t exactly call it inspirational. 😁 While it’s good that he was taking automated backups, he wasn’t testing them and had no idea if he could restore them until he actually needed to.
On a side note, it’s not ZFS directly that prevented the loss of the HDD, it was zrepl (a tool he was using to take incremental automated snapshots of his ZSF filesystem). You can of course achieve this with many other incremental snapshot tools, and it works for non-ZFS filesystems too — although some of them make it more efficient than others.
This story gives me mixed feelings. I wouldn’t exactly call it inspirational. 😁 While it’s good that he was taking automated backups, he wasn’t testing them and had no idea if he could restore them until he actually needed to.
On a side note, it’s not ZFS directly that prevented the loss of the HDD, it was zrepl (a tool he was using to take incremental automated snapshots of his ZSF filesystem). You can of course achieve this with many other incremental snapshot tools, and it works for non-ZFS filesystems too — although some of them make it more efficient than others.