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Tell HN: take a moment and check your backups today
do yourself a favor and take some time out today to check your backups. make sure they've been running properly, try doing a test restore of some crucial piece of data to a test machine. time it, see how long it takes and whether you have all of the proper recovery steps documented.
i fat-fingered a database change and had to restore a full table of data from a recent backup. if i didn't have working daily, redundant backups (that is, doing a full table dump of each table in each database on each server, not just backing up the raw mysql binary files) i would have really been screwed.
- chuhnk 16y agoAgreed. Nothing worse than pulling a tape only to find out the backup was incomplete. It happened, it was painful, someone got fired for it. We check for errors while dumping databases, do md5sums after on the local machine and then again on remote server where the backups are synced. Most of our backups are restored on a daily basis on development systems so we are assured they work.