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I first used MySQL about 12 years ago, it seemed pretty reliable and relatively performant, although I do remember the odd crashed server and having to run myisamchk etc.. first with one set of arguments and another more aggressive.

I think in the whole time we lost very little data, I was winging it as a sysadmin.

However this strikes me as very odd for Q4 of 2011, from a community of shall we say 'expert' linux users:

http://www.archlinux.org/news/wiki-and-bbs-downtime/

On October 23th the data center where our server is located had a power failure. The server was rebooted and at the first look everything was fine.

In the morning we noticed that the performance was bad and started to investigate and found out that one of the hard disks was failing. The drive has been replaced and is now synchronizing.

Update: A few hours after the server was back online, mysql found out that the bbs db has been corrupted. We have restored a backup from Mon Oct 24 09:47:59 CEST 2011. Unfortunately all forum posts made after this date have been lost.

We are sorry for the long downtime.

Is this normal nowadays? Has MySQL regressed to the point that a corrupt DB now means a rollback to snapshot backup losing several hours? Or are we dealing with just bad sysadmin here? Presumably given the fame of project and expertise it pull together they made exhaustive efforts to restore the data?

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on reflection this probably belongs on serverfault – mattcodes Nov 6 '11 at 15:48
I don't think this belongs anywhere on the Stack Exchange network. This is something you would probably rather discuss on Server Fault chat. I don't see how this question can be "answered". It's very localized and involves a lot of guessing. – slhck Nov 6 '11 at 16:34
Do note "...found out that one of the hard disks was failing" earlier in the same post. Even on good disks, silent data corruption is far more common than you would imagine; some file systems such as ZFS even store two copies of every byte to counter that. – grawity Nov 6 '11 at 17:58
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closed as not constructive by slhck, grawity, Simon Sheehan, Sathya♦ Nov 6 '11 at 18:36

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