Good questions and I should have provided the info. If I were to put
my official business signature on these emails, then you'd see my job
title and begin to understand why I don't know much. That's the price
of being management...
When backing up MS-SQL and MS-Exchange, they use TDP. When backing up
Windows and AIX servers, they use Backup/Archive Client. So far, we
haven't had to deal with Solaris or Oracle but I fear those days may
soon end. I do very much appreciate the excellent feedback that I have
received so far. This seems to be a very active list. That's code for
"a heck of a lot of emails going around", but that's a good thing.
Thanks again for all the help pointing me in the right direction.
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Sims [mailto:rbs AT bu DOT edu]
Sent: Wednesday, November 08, 2006 10:05 AM
To: Wesley Smith
Subject: Re: How do you verify the Completion and Accuracy of Backups
and Restores?
Welcome aboard, Wesley -
I suggest that you re-post this question with full details on what you
are backing up (Unix, Windows, Solaris, Linux, file systems,
Oracle, MSSQL, etc.), and how (Backup/Archive Client, TDP, other).
Right now we have no idea, and can't advise without details.
Richard Sims
On Nov 8, 2006, at 10:40 AM, Wesley Smith wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I've just joined this group and I am pleased to see a lot of
healthy
> discussion going on. The main reason I joined the group has to do
> with trying to find some way to help out the people who are
> responsible for dealing with Tivoli Storage Manager at a neighboring
> agency. I represent a State agency in Louisiana. We do a lot of
> large
> applications for Statewide users as well as departmental support.
> We do
> not have to deal with the H/W and OS issues. That's someone else's
> job. That also means that they are responsible for the backup and
> recovery procedures for our application servers. That's where Tivoli
> and you guys come in.
>
> My problem is that they (that sister agency) do not seem to have
a
> reliable way of verifying that all backups have been properly
> completed. They don't even seem to have a way to know that all files
> (that need to be backed up) are being backed up. I've seen the
> reports that get generated during the backup process and I am
> definitely unimpressed. Backups start and backups complete. There
> doesn't seem to be anything that says how many rows are copied or how
> large the files are or anything else that could be used for verifying
> the accuracy of the backups. They tell my folks that we should trust
> Tivoli is doing the job correctly. Trust is the problem....
>
> We have needed to have restores done on just a few databases in
the
> past and the restores were not complete and up to date. In each case
> we were able to rebuild the data using logs maintained within the
> applications but that should not have been necessary. Each recovery
> was done at a point after a backup and before additional processing
> had been done within the apps so they should have been complete. In
> each case, the folks who run Tivoli for us were able to track down and
> show that problems had occurred during the processing of the backups.
> They did this through circumstantial evidence and in each case once
> again said that they have no way of verifying that the backups are
> actually good.
> I hear a lot about the difficulty of trying to write a program to
> process the Tivoli log files.
>
> I think I'm at wit's end with these folks and the product. I
know
> that the people are competent and I suspect that the product (like
> other things available from IBM) really is weak on the reporting and
> verification issue. I'm hoping that someone out there in the Big Wide
> World has already solved this problem with an in-house or third-party
> solution. Sorry for being so long winded. Any ideas...?
>
> Wesley Smith
|