Sunday 9 April 2017

Server Admin : How Good is your Backup?

How robust is your back up solution?  Go on, be honest with yourself, how good is it?... Because I've seen a whole host of them and, at this very moment, this is the screen up on one of my servers....


Yes, my raid 5, just a test raid 5 with three really bad recycled SAS drives in it has failed; this doesn't surprise me, but it does delay me because I now have to rebuild the data... However, I know my data is good.... Lets see how good my back up is.

This back up is coming from a DD created raw image of the virtual disk, stored to and soon lifted from my NFS accessible ZFS mirrored back up server.

Therefore you would be right to ask, why are you rebuilding the virtual RAID disk in the above screen shot?  Well, I'm going to test my back up strategy!

I popped the known bad disk and the good disks out, replaced all three and I'm able to test a restore to a new virtual disk set, I have a USB boot drive ready, this is a test.

This kind of test, a real live restore, is sorely missing from so many enterprise set ups, so ask yourself is your back up going to work?

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