Howard White <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, this is work for customers. Who knows, you might have the same > problem for your customers and we might all do better for the exchange > ;) > > My company has sold many servers with DAT5 tape drives (36GB native, > 72GB in the best of all compression circumstances - so of course they > tout them as 72GB...). These drives are not as reliable and durable > as > say DLT or LTO. Some of my customers also have NAS to which I may > connect (remember my mount presentation last Tuesday in which I did > not > discuss CIFS). So what I'd like to script is a backup and verify to > NAS > and then dump the NAS backup to tape and verify again given the > reliability issue. > > Please know that in the years that Tilghman and I worked together, he > tried to show me some of these things. Did I write them down? > Nooooooo. My bad. > > So I solicit thoughts on such an exercise. One obvious test that > needs > to occur is to check the size of the NAS archive to make sure it'll > fit > on the tape. The process also needs to be archive utility neutral as > we > use cpio, star, afio and occasionally tar. An archive is an archive > is > an archive so the process of moving an archive to tape "should not" > care > what the archive is -- famous last words. > > Howard
Also, if your customers are not periodically storing a copy of the backups off-site, whether in the cloud or by physically taking backup media off-site, strongly encourage them to do so. Otherwise, a disaster such as a fire or tornado can destroy both the original data and the backups. Early in my career, I was working as a system administrator and programmer for a small company here in Nashville. A hardware failure caused data to be written to the wrong place on a hard drive, and we didn't discover the problem until two weeks later, because initially it was overwriting data that wasn't retrieved often. The backup program had not reported any errors, because it was making an accurate copy of the data it was given; unfortunately, that data had already been corrupted by the hard drive. I had to replace the bad hardware and then load backup tapes, one by one, until I found one with good data, that had been created two weeks back. Then, we had to get all of our business partners to resend every order from the last two weeks, while making sure that the orders didn't mistakenly get filled a second time. Simultaneously, new orders were coming in, and DID have to be filled. It took a month, and hundreds of hours of overtime by many different people, to put Humpty-Dumpty back together. Had we not still had some good backups, we would probably never have rebuilt all of our business records. A lot of companies that lose all their business records end up going bankrupt, both because of the direct effects and because their customers become impatient and take their trade to competitors. -- John F. Eldredge -- [email protected] "Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
