I just needed to do a recovery of a vserver after a failed update. Because the scope of the affected files wasn't exactly known, I completely restored most directories, except /home which was not affected.
While recovering, the server was in a special recovery mode, thus with all services turned off.
After recovery, initially everything looked good. However, to my surprise, a svn repository and a git repository were corrupted. Mostly we have about 1-2 commits a day, so the probability for 2 commits taking place exactly at the moment of the backup is quite unlikely. In this case it was not a big deal to reconstruct the repositories, but how could that happen? Is it because of cached data not written to disk or something like this?
Would snapshot backups eliminate such a risk?