>>Just tell me that you make sure that the backup ran successfully the night before prior to starting your early morning madness (if not, lie to me and start doing it.) I don't feel very secure about doing global nastiness without a solid backup in hand, and I'll often copy the app directory over to another volume or server before doing things if I can, to ensure that i can recover quickly from my own mistakes.
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>Well, I check the Event log, so that'll catch most problems other than problem messages when you logon the server, or the tape sticking out of the server :) And I check the Win AT scheduler frequently to make sure the right backup is done.
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I actually check the ARCServe log, since it'll tell me if a file got skipped because someone held it open exclusively when the backup was supposed to run; the same kind of log is available to Seagate Backup. It's equally important to make sure it ran to completion; I had someone put in an old 60m DAT tape which wouldn't hold even close to enough data for the backup to complete.
>The one little problem aside from the maintenance backups is incrementals, where I (or my backup admin) forget to change the tape once in a blue moon. I'm getting an autoloader soon, so that should remedy that problem, I hope...
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Everything gets full backups now, and the most I'm willing to comprimise is to do differentials, not incrementals, so that the last full backup plus the differential gives a full backup; with incrementals, there could be lots of tapes, and each tape increases the likelihood that something got toasted. It's personal preference and company policy here, and once nice thing about Weatherhill, as far as backup goes, my personal preferences
are company policy...
We switched over to a DDS-3 DAT, so that we can fit two full backups of our database on a tape if push comes to shove and someone forgets to change tapes. I can't justify the cost of a new autoloader at this point, with a bit less than 10GB backed up off the servers nightly, and a second DAT drive backing up workstations on a rotating basis (and available as a spare drive if the primary server backup drive dies). And I've got the same DAT drive at home now (a recent upgrade; I had an HP1533 (DDS-2) DAT drive that had to be replaced, so I opted for the same raw drive that we got in the SureSotr kits from HP from Dirt Cheap Drives.
>Beyond that, I do a periodic test Restore attempt to make sure everything is in order. And we do keep periodic backups of files copied directly on an older archiving backup server...
ABSO-FREAKING-LUTELY! There is nopthing so disheartening as discovering that going to the trouble of making backups was completely a waste of time because the tapes can't be restored! We do a backup and restore test at least monthly.
