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I have been places that have been through this same routine with backup after backup being found to have failed even though they were all checked recently throu

by bugsy 16y ago

I have been places that have been through this same routine with backup after backup being found to have failed even though they were all checked recently through test restores. Another thing that likes to happen is that even if you have a good backup, it's likely due to psychological stress that the first two or three restoration attempts will accidentally erase the backups due to someone typing an incorrect command.

viraptor 16y ago
So true. I lost ~3h of work because I screwed up my hg repo with msc dissertation somehow... on the hand-in day. Then in a panic, tried to restore it - of course I made a mistake in rsync source and destination and overwrote my backups before I could stop the sync (also ignored modification times - yay). Fortunately I had another copy on bitbucket. Not the latest version, so I needed another day to finish all document formatting.... but I'm not sure how this would end otherwise.
- lnguyen 16y ago
  I've had 5 years of graduate research literally walk out the door when someone decided to steal the workstation out of my office at the beginning of 2000. Thankfully everything was being backed up remotely but it took over a month before a successful restore from tape. I'm guessing it was the first time the department's backup system was put to an actual "test" and during that month it was questionable whether or not I'd get anything back. Not the best thing to happen right before you're set to write your PhD dissertation.
- NginUS 16y ago
  I almost lost half my backups this year. That panic is what got me, right when things don't need to get any worse, they do. After all the frustration of suffering through slow as molasses copy operations because they had to be with checksumming, wondering to myself 'how can I justify spending so much time on this?'... Ultimately it paid off & a bad thing wasn't allowed to get worse because of it, and the third copy saved the day. My infrastructure is more resilient now after, and I'm less likely to make concessions with regard to redundancy later. I can still feel overwhelmed when I think about all the time & potential progress I lost recovering, but when I read this article I totally understand & it takes the edge off some. I'm glad for them that all wasn't lost. Some of the good that came from it all was that I found an app called SyncBackPro to pull backups onto an offline sequence with from Windows machines. Unlike others I saw, it can implement logic that says when this serial USB storage is mounted on drive foo, trigger job bar then run this script & eject- plus it does write checksumming for <$100.

by bugsy 16y ago

viraptor 16y ago

So true. I lost ~3h of work because I screwed up my hg repo with msc dissertation somehow... on the hand-in day. Then in a panic, tried to restore it - of course I made a mistake in rsync source and destination and overwrote my backups before I could stop the sync (also ignored modification times - yay). Fortunately I had another copy on bitbucket. Not the latest version, so I needed another day to finish all document formatting.... but I'm not sure how this would end otherwise.

lnguyen 16y ago
I've had 5 years of graduate research literally walk out the door when someone decided to steal the workstation out of my office at the beginning of 2000. Thankfully everything was being backed up remotely but it took over a month before a successful restore from tape. I'm guessing it was the first time the department's backup system was put to an actual "test" and during that month it was questionable whether or not I'd get anything back. Not the best thing to happen right before you're set to write your PhD dissertation.
NginUS 16y ago
I almost lost half my backups this year. That panic is what got me, right when things don't need to get any worse, they do. After all the frustration of suffering through slow as molasses copy operations because they had to be with checksumming, wondering to myself 'how can I justify spending so much time on this?'... Ultimately it paid off & a bad thing wasn't allowed to get worse because of it, and the third copy saved the day. My infrastructure is more resilient now after, and I'm less likely to make concessions with regard to redundancy later. I can still feel overwhelmed when I think about all the time & potential progress I lost recovering, but when I read this article I totally understand & it takes the edge off some. I'm glad for them that all wasn't lost. Some of the good that came from it all was that I found an app called SyncBackPro to pull backups onto an offline sequence with from Windows machines. Unlike others I saw, it can implement logic that says when this serial USB storage is mounted on drive foo, trigger job bar then run this script & eject- plus it does write checksumming for <$100.