[Grizzly]

<p>Last year at this time we held one for our HR/Pay application.  The team found that the tape they were mounting was corrupt so they went back a day.  I told the DR coordinator to mark the exercise as "failed" and we'd pick up and continue from there.  He refused and said that it had passed.  Not a good move, the Veep essentially had his hide.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This year, same exercise one day later... and the manure has hit the ventilator.  Not only is the tape corrupt, it has exposed the fact that we essentially have no recovery capability from Friday to Tuesday.  Tuesday is supposed to be full backup with incrementals the rest of the week, but the infrastructure boys confirm that the Tape Storage Management treats every backup as full with regards to storage - and wipes away the version that is 3 iterations old.  In this case that means 3 days old.  Tuesday backup is wiped on Friday - so nothing for the incrementals to point to.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>As far as we know this has been happening for over a year.  A "failure" last year would have ensured that we found out sooner than now...</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Double Plus Ungood. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Our infrastructure outsource team were treating this as a low priority.  No. It. Isn't.  They have had an attitude adjustment from a grumpy bear.</p>

 

[duckgeek]

<p>We do test restores regularly.  We have to do this in part because our shadow copy works so well for recovering accidental deletions that we only go to tape for subpoena or open records law requests.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>We also do a semi-annual snapshot on to hard drive media (yay for cheap hard drives!) which we keep locked in a fireproof box within an industrial safe.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>It took us a quite a bit of effort and waiting for patches/updates to get BackupExec to work as well on Window Server as it had been running on our Netware rig.</p>

 

[Grizzly]

<p>We are going to a Lan-free solution for our financials.  A backup to tape takes 23 hours.  Ooops.</p>