Today is World Backup Day. Don't forget your backups!

[Geoff]

Home | World Backup Day — March 31st

[PotNoodleTech]

I just created a new backup copy job in veeam. This was my celebration. It's running now! It's so lucky.

 

Happy backup day everyone!!

[Geoff]

It's not a backup until you test a restore.

[unixman_again]

To be pedantic, it's not a backup until to actually have to do a restore.

 

Which brings me to a cautionary tale and the very worse disaster recovery I had to perform. I worked for a company that sold solutions for housing associations. Part of this was their own clever backup software, which would scribble the files to tape and then read back the tape and compare what was on the tape with what was on disk. One of the clients was meticulous in their working and of the 50 or so clients, they never asked for anything to be restored. Clients always had the odd file go missing but not this one. They had a hard disk crash, which was reported to one of the juniors in the team. I quizzed him on what he was going to do, and he said the hardware support company would replace the hard disk, install the o/s and then he would do the restore. No problem!

 

A while later he came back and said the only thing he could find on the backup was the backup software, and could I make sure that he was doing things right. Sure enough, that's all that was on the backup tapes. When the backup software was installed, the standard test was to back itself up, to make sure the config for the tape drive was correct, and then change the config for the backup to backup the client's data. Who ever had installed it all those years before had neglected to do this important step. So even though the client had been religiously backup up every night, and replacing the tapes every year, they actually had no backups. Even though I knew there was no point, we checked every tape the client had, including those that were in the bank.

 

Result - me spending three weeks in Glasgow (which is a very nice place) in January (no so nice) doing a disaster recovery without any form of backup apart from paper records, such as rent books, maintenance scedules, etc. We managed to get back about 95% of the data without using a backup, so perhaps backups are overrated after all.

[6Foot2]

I had to restore a file from backup today. A member of staff had 'misplaced' an important spreadsheet. I initially helped her look for the file in her Documents folder on the network. When that was unsuccessful she was close to tears. It was then that I said, "Shall I make you cry?.."

 

She was very concerned at this point so I decided to adopt a more reassuring mode and restore the file from backup.