A couple of weeks ago one of my colleagues and I worked on a data corruption case that reminded me that sometimes people make unsafe assumptions without knowing it. This one involved SAN snapshotting that was unsafe.
In a nutshell, the client used SAN block-level replication to maintain a standby/failover MySQL system, and there was a failover that didn't work; both the primary and fallback machine had identically corrupted data files. After running fsck on the replica, the InnoDB data files were entirely deleted.
When we arrived on the scene, there was a data directory with an 800+ GB data file, which we determined had been restored from a SAN snapshot. Accessing this file caused a number of errors, including warnings about accessing data outside of the partition boundaries. We were eventually able to coax the filesystem into truncating the data file back to a size that didn't contain invalid pointers and could be read without …
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