[Zope] Backing up the Data.fs

[Alastair Burt]

I have just sent a message to the list asking how to fix my corrupt
Data.fs. Now I am wondering how I got into this mess. Until now I had
always reassured myself that I can regnerate the Data.fs for any day in the
past month. But it does not seem that is going to help me very much.

My log file tells me that an instance of Zope came up on October 22 with
one ConflictError and several CorruptedDataErrors. This Zope (or maybe
another instance [1]) kept serving requests on the Data.fs for two weeks
until the server crashed again. I now think that I will not be able to
recover the data from these requests unless I plough through the source
code to decipher the ZODB format and then cut and paste the transactions
into a usable Data.fs by hand.

So I have two questions for the list:

  1) Is it, indeed, possible for Zope to keep serving requests from a
     Data.fs that will not be usable when Zope restarts?

  2) How do people sleep at night knowing this to be the case?

--- Alastair

Footnotes: 
[1]  I think my scripts to automatically start up Zope in event of a crash
may have led to two instances of Zope trying to serve the same Data.fs.