  Forecasting the imminent catastrophic failure has a high importance for a
large variety of systems from the collapse of engineering constructions,
through the emergence of landslides and earthquakes, to volcanic eruptions.
Failure forecast methods predict the lifetime of the system based on the
time-to-failure power law of observables describing the final acceleration
towards failure. We show that the statistics of records of the event series of
breaking bursts, accompanying the failure process, provides a powerful tool to
detect the onset of acceleration, as an early warning of the impending
catastrophe. We focus on the fracture of heterogeneous materials using a fiber
bundle model, which exhibits transitions between perfectly brittle,
quasi-brittle, and ductile behaviors as the amount of disorder is increased.
Analyzing the lifetime of record size bursts, we demonstrate that the
acceleration starts at a characteristic record rank, below which record
breaking slows down due to the dominance of disorder in fracturing, while above
it stress redistribution gives rise to an enhanced triggering of bursts and
acceleration of the dynamics. The emergence of this signal depends on the
degree of disorder making both highly brittle fracture of low disorder
materials, and ductile fracture of strongly disordered ones, unpredictable.
