If the database is not extremely huge, makes you wonder what does a RAID actually give us. A robust near-realtime replication setup (say PITR + cloud) may be good enough against once in a few years of disk failure.
atleast you don't add another point of failure that you (your database/OS) can't do anything about.
> Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:30:45 -0500
> From: Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov
> To: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org; qcor@vp.pl
> Subject: Re: [ADMIN] db recovery after raid5 failure
>
> <qcor@vp.pl> wrote:
>
> > I have serious problems recovering our db after recent raid5
> > failure. Long story short - no recent dumps, some missing files
> > (like pg_control).
>
> Been there -- at least on the end of helping with recovery for
> people in that position with a different database product. It can
> be very painful. :-( (I'm assuming from your post that a second
> drive failed before recovery from failure of the first was
> complete.)
>
> First a word of advice -- don't discard anything. Keep any backups,
> keep the bad drives, keep any logs, exports, reports, or anything
> else which might contain fragments of the data. Make a backup of
> what you have now, if you haven't already. Keep these things for a
> long time.
>
> Second, a word of encouragement -- given all these scattered
> fragments and enough time and money, you'd might be surprised at how
> much data can be recovered. But time and money is required --
> someone has to make the hard call of how much money it is worth to
> recover how much of the data.
>
> Based on your description, it sounds like you will probably need the
> assistance of an outside company to recover very much. Possibly one
> company specializing in recovery of data off of damaged disks, and
> another for PostgreSQL internals expertise.
>
> I don't suppose there's another source for the data to avoid
> attempting this recovery?
>
> -Kevin
>
> --
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