Annals of bad luck: when primary, backup, and second backup power fail

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Data centers and servers can fail for all sorts of reasons. That's true for businesses running data centers for their own employees' needs. It's true even when you're Amazon, one of the largest data center operators in the world and the most popular provider of infrastructure-as-a-service cloud offerings.

http://arstechnica.com/information-...-primary-backup-and-second-backup-power-fail/

 

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Another source



http://arstechnica.com/information-...-primary-backup-and-second-backup-power-fail/

 

[Corrine]

From the 2nd source:

A cable fault took down the main service, a defective cooling fan messed up a backup generator, and finally an incorrectly configured circuit breaker caused secondary backup to fail.

The same kind of catastrophe can happen at home. That is why a friend has images stored several ways: two different external hard drives and disks. She rotates where she puts them. That way, if one hd dies or a disk in unreadable, she still has an image elsewhere. It might not be the latest but it is better than going back to factory condition.