4 ms·

In other words, he didn't have backups. A live copy of a running system available to that running system is not a backup.

• Houshalter 11y ago
  Well it still prevents against the hard drive failing. It doesn't protect against bad code, which he obviously didn't consider.
  • laumars 11y ago
    RAID parity drives also protect against a drive failing but they're not backups either.
    • Houshalter 11y ago
      If it's a duplicate copy of data intended in case of failure then yes it is a backup. Its not an offsite backup, but many people don't keep their personal backups offsite.
      • rlpb 11y ago
        It is so deficient as a backup that I don't think it qualifies to be called a backup. That was my point. Backups are expected to protect against data loss for a number of different failure cases (eg. disk failure, hardware fault leading to slow filesystem corruption, fire/theft, failed upgrade, "undo" for accidental change or deletion). There is a point where something addresses so few of these failure cases that you can't reasonably call it a backup.
      • laumars 11y ago
        There's another term for what it is: redundancy. Redundancy is there for fast recovery times (even zero downtime depending on how redundancy is implemented). It's not intended to run as a backup as redundancy devices are live and can fail from many of the same causes that will take your primary devices offline (fire, sysadmin fail, etc) Likewise, if your "backups" are always online then it works better for business continuity than it does as a backup. So realistically it's more of a redundancy share.