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Fragile

Entry 641, on 2007-11-14 at 19:47:26 (Rating 1, Computers)

A recent incident reminded me of how fragile some of my data really is. I have been running MySQL databases on Mac OS X computers for years now, and I haven't been too careful about maintaining the databases - they just work. Or they did until I had a problem - ironically with my backup software - which forced a restart of one server. After the restart many of the tables in the databases on the server were corrupted so I had to repair them as quickly as possible (the servers are running 24/7).

I had some strange results from normally reliable recovery tools but in the end everything was working again OK with no data loss. Some functions of the databases were down for a few hours but I'm confident, now that I know the tricks, I could recover from a similar issue in the future much more quickly.

So my data is a bit more delicate that I thought. This is the only time I've ever had a problem with MySQL and I still think its the best database there is. But in future I will protect my data and spend a bit more time shutting down services gracefully and avoid the quick fix of a restart!

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