[LINK] Navitaire was a Virgin, and now Blue as well

[Richard Chirgwin]

  True story.

1. Moving offices from Level Y to Level X in about 1997.

2. Nightly backups were on a tape but nobody had tested the tape in ???

3. Server dropped down the stair well.

4. Backup would not restore from tape in new office.

It turned out that someone had been a wee bit too aggressive with the 
spanner when they put the tape drive in the first rack. That bent the 
drive's chassis slightly out of shape. The tapes would not align in the 
new location, because the installer had been more kind. It took days for 
a technician to work out what had gone wrong...

RC

On 12/10/10 5:59 PM, Stilgherrian wrote:
> On 12/10/2010, at 10:33 AM, Steven Clark wrote:
>>> [So, finally, we have the answer.
>>> [The backup and recovery plan had never been tested.]
>> which is fail! in both senses>.<  it's not a backup and recovery system
>> if you're not even sure it works. *headdesk*
>>
>> though this is not as surprising as it ought to be. so very often,
>> technologies are assumed to 'just work'.
> Indeed, Steven. I had wondered, when I saw in Teh Meedjuh and other places, so many commentators saying that not testing your backup and disaster recovery was "stupid" and worse, how certain they themselves were that their own organisations weren't in exactly the same boat.
>
> Gentle Linkers, when was the last time you tested the process for restoring your own computer from backup, including data, applications and their configuration? And how long did it take?
>
> [My own answers, for the record, are about 18 months, and most of a day, though I am happy that I could access my data more quickly by other means if necessary.]
>
> Stil
>
>