On Thursday 25 November 2004 01:09, Kurt Seifried wrote:
Becuse if the building burns down, or you have a fire and both units take water damage, or someone breaks in and steals them, etc, etc you will cry. It doesn't take a major catastrophic event to wipe out the computer equipment in a building or render the data unretrievable. There's a reason people invest in offsite backups. Personally I have two file servers at home (I work from home) on seperate UPS's. I also have the critical data on a remote server and I burn DVD's/CD's which I place in my safety deposit box. If my house burns down, or the server colo burns down I'm not utterly f**ked.
One word.... "verify" Okay, you're possibly fine with your thousand backups, but if someone relies on a single backup, or even two, there's always a chance that the backup files lose the plot. It would be a little embarrassing to find that the CD (for example) you have all your data on is useless just as you're attempting to restore from it! If using removable media as a backup, you may have a utility in whatever backup software you use to verify against a database of what is supposed to be there. If you're just copying from a hard drive to a CD/DVD/tape then at least create a list of md5s which you store in a number of safe places, with possibly a hard copy in a filing cabinet or two ;-) If you're copying to another hard disk somewhere then you can use AIDE/Tripwire or whatever to monitor the system for any changes. While you're at it, do the same for your primary disk storage systems. Remember to update the database when you make an intentional change. If you don't and you get used to cron emailing you a list of changes you'll ignore them and not notice _something's_happened_. Trust me on this! Anyway, there's no point in backing anything up unless you can be sure the backup works. Tom. Tom.