On Jan 5, 2006, at 7:40 AM, Bob Sullivan wrote:
Have you checked your backups? Sorriest fellow I met at work had 1
1/2 years of tape back-ups that he couldn't read. Seems that he had
some problems writing the back-ups. Since then, I like to test what
I've backed up.
I know a guy who used to work in telecommunications.
One day a computerised telephone exchange had a big crash which lost
a whole lot of data (eg phone records that had been changed since the
last backup). No problem, they fetched the tapes and restored from
the backup. Or at least they attempted to.
It turned out that the most recent upgrade to the exchange software
contained a bug in the backup routine so that corrupt data was being
written to tape... and that upgrade was at least six months before
the crash.
It took a while but they eventually got all of the data restored by
hand from the paper records.
Cheers,
- Dave
