Joel Fisher wrote:

>I started full scale cloning just about 2 months ago and it has already
>saved my butt.  It turned out we had a firmware issue with our drives,
>but I never got any errors until we attempted to read the data.  Now,
>because of the cloning we are attempting to read every single saveset we
>back up so I started seeing a bunch of media errors.  After a couple of
>weeks of trouble shooting we wound up putting the latest firmware on the
>drives, now all is well.  Moral of the story is... if I hadn't been
>cloning I wouldn't have known I wasn't getting good backups until someone
>needed a restore.  Not a good time to find that out.

The moral is that if you do not clone, "thou shall do restores at regular
intervals". It used to be company policy to insist on a recover test once a
month for hosts which had not recovered any files the previous month.

Whether it is best to do two backups or a backup and clone depends on the
situation. Not everybody needs to have the systems available all the time.
Most businesses have quite a lot of available backup time during weekends
and nights.

greetings,

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