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Re: [Networker] Check backup copy
2006-08-15 07:50:22
On Aug 15, 2006, at 5:23 AM, Felix Pablo Grande wrote:
Hi Preston,
at this moment i use auto-media-verification. But i want to explore
other options.
How important is this to your employer? By far, the best way to
ensure a backup works is to recover the data. There simply is no
other way to guarantee it works, although the ideas that have already
been posted get you a good idea of a backup's reliability, especially
cloning.
A few months ago, a Windows 2003 server here lost power. The RAID
array to which it was connected died. As a result, approximately 1TB
of research data was lost. That data was backed up to my NetWorker
server. The system admin for that server recovered the most recent
data from tape only to find out it was corrupt for some files. They
ended up having to piece meal the data back from three full backups.
So, although we proved that we could recover data for this client
from the previous three full backups, those backups did not include
entirely correct data.
At about the same time, I had someone else try to recover a different
server. That server was fairly small, but it contained SQL data and
they never installed the SQL module. The data off the backup was
inconsistent and unusable. They still have not installed the SQL
module, which is odd to me because they did purchase a license
enabler to use that module.
My point is, just because your backups succeed, does not guarantee
that what you are backing up is valid data. For any mission critical
system, you need to test bare metal restores and make sure the data
you are backing up is valid. Anything less is just not enough,
especially with Windows servers.
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