cfradenburg (5/10/2011)
Eric M Russell (5/10/2011)
I'm not sure how many users monitor their guest book or blog posts close enough on a daily basis to notice if one (out of a couple hundred) entries from months back suddenly disappeared. I'm sure somebody eventually would, and they'd be really verklempt about it.If it was an old one then chances are very slim that anyone would notice. I was coming from the perspective that it was the write failing meaning it is a new post instead of an old one. If it's a read that fails and it shows up after a refresh no one is going to care if it's Facebook or a blog. Well, no one should care. If it were a medical record, one bad read can have very, very bad consequences even if the data shows up on a refresh.
The issue is with some systems (not saying Facebook is one), that you might write an update on Node 1, and you see the update. However Node 1 is buried, and before it can update node 2 and node 3, it fails. when it's rebuilt/recovered. your update is gone. You might not notice, or if you do, do you stop using the service? You might, but depending on your investment in the service, you might not. You might be more careful, or chalk it up to a random glitch in the matrix.
However if one of my deposits failed at an ATM because it wasn't fully hardened in the entire system, that's bad.
Customers don't want to ever lose their data, but it happens and we accept some minor glitches.