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Comment by Dylan16807

3 days ago

Power outages across big areas are common enough.

It's downright stupid if you build a system that loses all existing data when all nodes go down uncleanly, not even simultaneously but just overlapping. What if you just happen to input a shutdown command the wrong way?

I really hope they meant to just say the write buffer gets lost.

That's why you need to go to other regions, not remain in the same area. Putting all your eggs in one basket (single area) _is_ stupid. Having a single shutdown command for the whole cluster _is_ stupid. Still accepting writes when the system is in a degraded state _is_ stupid. Don't make it sound worse than it actually is just to prove your point.

  • > Still accepting writes when the system is in a degraded state _is_ stupid.

    Again, I'm not concerned for new writes, I'm concerned for all existing data from the previous months and years.

    And getting in this situation only takes one out of a wide outage or a bad push that takes down the cluster. Even if that's stupid, it's a common enough stupid that you should never risk your data on the certainty you won't make that mistake.

    You can't protect against everything, but you should definitely protect against unclean shutdown.

    • If it's a common enough occurrence to have _all_ your nodes down at the same time maybe you should reevaluate your deployment choices. The whole point of multi-nodes clustering is that _some_ of the nodes will always be up and running otherwise what you're doing is useless.

      Also, garage gives you the possibility to automatically snapshot the metadata, advices on how to do the snapshotting at the filesystem level and to restore that.

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