Soooo, how many times have you been bitten by Schrodingers Backup?

This is the backup where it all appears to go swimmingly and all is well in
the world. Right up until the moment you want to use it and its either
corrupt not the right data, or some other unforseen issue.

Wish I had forseen that one, but its tricky to forsee unforseen issues. :)

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: The future's uncertain, the end is always near. (21:3/101)

On 08 Apr 2022, Spectre said the following...

Soooo, how many times have you been bitten by Schrodingers Backup?

This is the backup where it all appears to go swimmingly and all is well in the world. Right up until the moment you want to use it and its either corrupt not the right data, or some other unforseen issue.

Years ago in a previous job the company I worked for was sold to a larger international conglomerate. Their team of IT folks got in touch with me asking for a whole bunch of information, one of them was my "backup audits".

This is when I realized I had never REALLY tested my backups even though I monitor them daily. "All green checkmarks, we're good to go!"

Sure, I've restored a file now and then when whats-her-face in QA accidentally deleted an excel file on a network drive, but hadn't actually tested a bare-metal restore.

After that I started periodically restoring a backup to a test server just to verify it actually works. That's when I discovered one of our database servers really didn't like the backup software we were using. Everything restored fine, the OS booted but the database service wouldn't start up.

I worked with our backup software vendor who helped fix the problem and got it working, just in time for our new overlords to replace our ERP system so we didn't need that server anymore. Good times... good times...

Moral of the story: Test your backups. You don't want to find out they don't work in the middle of a crisis.


Jay

... It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

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* Origin: Northern Realms (21:3/110)

Re: Backups
By: Spectre to Anyone on Fri Apr 08 2022 12:59 pm

Soooo, how many times have you been bitten by Schrodingers Backup?

This is the backup where it all appears to go swimmingly and all is well in the world. Right up until the moment you want to use it and its either corrupt not the right data, or some other unforseen issue.

Wish I had forseen that one, but its tricky to forsee unforseen issues. :)

Spec

*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]

I have not had backup corruption because I check the consistency of the backup data every now and then.

I have had the backup destroyed while moving it from cold storage to the place were the recovery was to be done, and that sucked hard. Good news is I usually have duplicates of the backups because paranoia is king.

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Spectre wrote to Anyone <=-

Soooo, how many times have you been bitten by Schrodingers Backup?

tar czvf / > /dev/null

Saves on tapes.






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Warpslide wrote to Spectre <=-

Moral of the story: Test your backups. You don't want to find out
they don't work in the middle of a crisis.

Backup failed? That's OK, I keep my resume on a thumb drive...


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I have not had backup corruption because I check the consistency of the backup data every now and then.

Back in them there long gone days, I had a 40Mb colorado tape drive. One of those floppy interface jobs, slow as two wet weeks and limited in capacity.
In these pre internet days I had a set of software I received with the system it was in when I acquired it and that was it.

One of the drawbacks was that even allowing for backup, there was no space in which to restore a complete backup so you could never really test it. Turns out I never had a problem so long as each drive I had fitted on one tape. But once I had larger and more drives, it required backups spanning more than one tape.

Said software supported this, but it turned out any spanning backup was actually useless. They were not restorable. I was somewhat surprised when I learned of this, but was lucky in that the monolithic data in those backups wasn't something I'd needed to restore as opposed to the BBS system drive. Which always fitted into 1 40Mb drive.

Spec


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
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* Origin: The future's uncertain, the end is always near. (21:3/101)

Soooo, how many times have you been bitten by Schrodingers Backup?

tar czvf / > /dev/null
Saves on tapes.

Probably much faster too. :)


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
--- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
* Origin: The future's uncertain, the end is always near. (21:3/101)