Rise of the Machines™ 1 - Sussex University 0

[torkell]

The laws of backups stipulate that you will only find out the tape drive has been systematically scribbling random gibberish over the backup tapes when your file server eats the filesystem.

So guess what's happened to the Informatics file server here?

Yep, someone at the Lizard Alliance apparently hit the "scramble" button for Sussex, and got the Informatics file server to eat the disks. It seems that they've been planning this for a while, as the backups for last weekend are mysteriously corrupt.

Comments

[katayamma.livejournal.com]

It amazes me that a lot of people do a backup to tape, but then aren't willing to wait while the machine verifies the readbility of the backup. Sure, it dbls the time the machine is crunching the tape, but you've got to cover your ass.

Of course, I only have 1 customer who uses a tape backup system. All of my other customers use a tar-to-drive-over-net system where the backups are kept on secondary file servers. Much quicker backup/restore system. Even my tape drive customer uses that system. I create a master .tar.bz2 backup file on the server with the tape drive. Dump it to tape while at the same time sending it via 10G eather over to the master fileserver. So far, never had an issiue with either archive being corrupted when we needed to restore data.

Cheers