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Comment by ghubbard | Hacker News Reader

Current HN Title: 1.7 petabytes and 850M files lost, and how we survived it.

Article title: The largest unplanned outage in years and how we survived it

Article overview: A month ago CSC's high-performance computing services suffered the largest unplanned outage in years. In total approximately 1.7 petabytes and 850 million files were recovered.

Although technically correct, the HN title is misleading.

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To be fair, giving some numbers in the title makes the link much more interesting. With the original title this piece wouldn't probably have made it to the front page, as it doesn't even hint that this is about a scientific computing center.

It was an interesting read, so thumbs up for the dramatization.

1.7 petabytes and 850M files lost --- 1.7 petabytes and 850 million files were recovered

Given that the latter statement is from the article, how is the former "technically correct"?

Imagine an article "One web server lost and how we survived it" simply said "Our load balancer automatically removed that server from the pool and we let the other 15 web servers pick up the load. We didn't have to do anything." This is different from "Oh crap, we only had one web server and we absolutely had to do a lengthy recovery process to get it back online."

Yeah; I read the headline and presumed that they had been using a resilient data duplication scheme that allowed them to recover from the catastrophic loss of e.g. an entire datacenter's worth of data.

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