[Gllug] Backup Software for Linux?

[Alain Williams]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2004 at 10:51:24AM +0100, Andy Young wrote:
> >The most important thing is to TEST RECOVERY.  Nobody cares if you can
> >back up, they only care that you can recover :)
> 
> Absolutely! I should have the luxury of a little bit of time before the
> system goes live to make sure I'm fully happy.
> One of my big concerns is not just /data/ recovery, but the fast
> restoration of the whole system from "bare metal" up. 
> 
> Digressing slightly...
> Many, many years ago (on the first Unix system I was involved with
> talking 1990 HP-UX here), we though the backup was running incredibly
> quickly.
> Further investigation showed our script was just backing up THE FILNAMES
> and not the data. The log, of course, showed all the filenames that were
> backed up! Thankfully we spotted this teeny error pretty sharpish before
> we had to explain to anyone we couldn't get their data back but we sure
> could provide them with a list of all the files they had. :)

More to the point what version of files are you seeing when you test the backup.

Many (18 ish) years ago a customer (also an HP box IFRC) had a disk failure.
They have religiously tested their backup, so no problem: restored fine;
but they noticed that all the data was 6 months old -- the write head
on the tape had failed, so when they checked the backup they saw the names
of old files fly past ...

-- 
Alain Williams

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