AKA Schrödinger’s Backup. Until you have successfully restored from a backup, it is just an amorphous blob of data that may or may not be valid.
I say this as someone who has had backups silently fail. For instance, just yesterday, I had a managed network switch generate an invalid config file for itself. I was making a change on the switch, and saved a backup of the existing settings before changing anything. That way I could easily reset the switch to default and push the old settings to it, if the changes I made broke things. And like an idiot, I didn’t think to validate the file (which is as simple as pushing the file back to the switch to see if it works) before I made any changes.
Sure enough, the change I made broke something, so I performed a factory reset and went to upload that backup I had saved like 20 minutes prior… When I tried to restore settings after the factory reset, the switch couldn’t read the file that it had generated like 20 minutes earlier.
So I was stuck manually restoring the switch’s settings, and what should have been a quick 2 minute “hold the reset button and push the settings file once it has rebooted” job turned into a 45 minute long game of “find the difference between these two photos” for every single page in the settings.
Not sure if what you’re working on has it (been in systems for a hot minute so I’m not doing network tasks here) and saving my console log and doing a ‘show run’ saved my ass more than once
That’s always just one of the worst feelings in the world. This thing is supposed to work and be easy and… nope. Not there. It’s gone. Now you have work to do. heh
Circa 1997 I was making some innovative new games, employed by a dude who’d put millions of his own money into the company. He was completely nonplussed when I brought him 20 CDs in a sealed box to remove from the building and store off site. He thought I’d lost my damned mind and blew it off as ravings of a stressed dev. I pointed out real threats to our IP including the hardware failures and even so far as the building burning down. 2 years of custom art and code gone. “Unlikely. Relax.”
After I moved on… an ex co-worker who’s still a longtime friend, tells me a different division lost a huge amount of FMV over some whoops-I-destroyed-the-wrong-drive blunder. 20 days to render on an 8 or 10 machine farm. Poof - No backups. In 1997 even with top-of-the-line gear it took an insane investment to render quality 3D.
The friggin’ carelessness irks the shit out of me as I type ahah
I remember back when I first started seeing a DR plan with three tiers of restore, 1 hour, 12 hours or 72 hours. I knew that to 1 hour meant a simple redirect to a DB partition that was a real time copy of the active DB, and twelve hours meant that failed, so the twelve hours was a restore point exercise that would mean some data loss, but less than one hour, or something like that.
I had never heard of 72 hours and so raised a question in the meeting. 72 hours meant having physical tapes shipped to the data center, and I believe meant up to 12 (though it could have been 24) hours of data lost. I was impressed by this, because the idea of having a job that ran either daily or twice daily that created tape backups was completely new to me.
This was in the early aughts. Not sure if tapes are still used…
We used to say Raid is not a backup. Its a redundancy
Snapshots are not a backup. Its a system restore point.
Only something offsite, off system and only accessible with seperate authentication details, is a backup.
AND something tested to restore successfully, otherwise it’s just unknown data that might or might not work.
(i.e. reinforcing your point, no disagreements)
AKA Schrödinger’s Backup. Until you have successfully restored from a backup, it is just an amorphous blob of data that may or may not be valid.
I say this as someone who has had backups silently fail. For instance, just yesterday, I had a managed network switch generate an invalid config file for itself. I was making a change on the switch, and saved a backup of the existing settings before changing anything. That way I could easily reset the switch to default and push the old settings to it, if the changes I made broke things. And like an idiot, I didn’t think to validate the file (which is as simple as pushing the file back to the switch to see if it works) before I made any changes.
Sure enough, the change I made broke something, so I performed a factory reset and went to upload that backup I had saved like 20 minutes prior… When I tried to restore settings after the factory reset, the switch couldn’t read the file that it had generated like 20 minutes earlier.
So I was stuck manually restoring the switch’s settings, and what should have been a quick 2 minute “hold the reset button and push the settings file once it has rebooted” job turned into a 45 minute long game of “find the difference between these two photos” for every single page in the settings.
Not sure if what you’re working on has it (been in systems for a hot minute so I’m not doing network tasks here) and saving my console log and doing a ‘show run’ saved my ass more than once
Always a fun time when technology decides to just fuck you over for no reason
But the backup software verified the backup!
That’s always just one of the worst feelings in the world. This thing is supposed to work and be easy and… nope. Not there. It’s gone. Now you have work to do. heh
Schrödinger’s backup
3-2-1 Backup Rule: Three copies of data at two different types of storage media, with 1 copy offsite
Circa 1997 I was making some innovative new games, employed by a dude who’d put millions of his own money into the company. He was completely nonplussed when I brought him 20 CDs in a sealed box to remove from the building and store off site. He thought I’d lost my damned mind and blew it off as ravings of a stressed dev. I pointed out real threats to our IP including the hardware failures and even so far as the building burning down. 2 years of custom art and code gone. “Unlikely. Relax.”
After I moved on… an ex co-worker who’s still a longtime friend, tells me a different division lost a huge amount of FMV over some whoops-I-destroyed-the-wrong-drive blunder. 20 days to render on an 8 or 10 machine farm. Poof - No backups. In 1997 even with top-of-the-line gear it took an insane investment to render quality 3D.
The friggin’ carelessness irks the shit out of me as I type ahah
I remember back when I first started seeing a DR plan with three tiers of restore, 1 hour, 12 hours or 72 hours. I knew that to 1 hour meant a simple redirect to a DB partition that was a real time copy of the active DB, and twelve hours meant that failed, so the twelve hours was a restore point exercise that would mean some data loss, but less than one hour, or something like that.
I had never heard of 72 hours and so raised a question in the meeting. 72 hours meant having physical tapes shipped to the data center, and I believe meant up to 12 (though it could have been 24) hours of data lost. I was impressed by this, because the idea of having a job that ran either daily or twice daily that created tape backups was completely new to me.
This was in the early aughts. Not sure if tapes are still used…
Alive and well depending on the use case. My org has an older backup software that’s entirely tape based and it’s amazing for the Linux systems I hear
Fukan yes
A LTO drive with a non-consumer interface?
We still say that.