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When I worked as a VMS sysadmin full restore checks were one of the things I insisted on doing, sure, it used up a morning every couple of weeks, and tied up on
by NikkiA 3y ago
When I worked as a VMS sysadmin full restore checks were one of the things I insisted on doing, sure, it used up a morning every couple of weeks, and tied up one of our microvaxes, but it was worth it.
Especially three months after I finished being sysadmin and moved to development, and they had a disk failure.
me: 'so you have backups?'
the replacement: 'sure, but they didn't restore'
me: 'what's the last good backup you have?'
tr: 'august, the last one you did'
me: 'welp'
tr's boss: 'guess £390,000 for third party disk recovery is our only option...'
- NikkiA 3y agoTo add some context... Yes, it was documented in our ISO 9000 docs. But only 'strongly recommended' to perform a regular/routine test restore. I attempted to get it converted to a mandatory step, but since I was only a temporary sysadmin and an intern, it wasn't going to happen. I was told by my predecessor (who was a direct contractor to my employer) to perform it as routinely as I could. I would guess that he had attempted to get it put as a mandatory step, but his time was billed, mine wasn't, so shrug. My/the replacement was an external contractor as part of a 'company Y now provides system administration services' deal, who presumably ended up eating the liability of not having working backups that they were contracted to produce. As horrified as I was, 'it's not really my problem, I wasn't responsible' was the only attitude I could bear to take. Besides, I was busy with fortran.