[OpenAFS] Is OpenAFS appropriate?

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Wednesday, January 21, 2004 23:52:34 +0100 Hendrik Hoeth 
<hendrik.hoeth@cern.ch> wrote:

>> Here's the concern, probably typical of a noob -- "what if something
>> goes wrong, and we lose our AFS infrastructure, but still have our
>> partitions?" Is the data gone? How hard would it be for us to get it
>> back?
>
> If you still have the vicepx partitions, the data is not gone. Though
> it's not very easy to extract it ...

Well, partially true.  It's not easy to take what's on a vice partition and 
just turn it into files.  But there's no real metadata stored elsewhere 
that can't be regenerated, so pretty much all you need to do is attach 
those disks to a machine of the right platform, drop an AFS fileserver and 
volserver on it, run in noauth mode, and dump the volumes.  You don't need 
the central infrastructure to support that sort of recovery, if you don't 
plan on resurrecting your cell.