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Subject:Re: Data Storage and File Management From:Eric Ray <ejray -at- RAYCOMM -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 6 Apr 1999 08:56:27 -0600
>Now, the thing to make sure of is that "Fred," or whatever your IS guy's
>name is; knows how to do proper backups, and that the procedure for using
>and backing up on the network, and the network itself is useable. If you
>do all the "Fred" jobs, make sure you've got it right 8-)
And verify both the official policy on doing restores and that
restores actually work well enough to be useful. You'd assume
that "whoops, I deleted it all" or "disk crashed" would automatically
get the IS people to work on restoring, but that's not correct
in many companies. Even if they will try to restore, if they
haven't had a catastrophic crash recently, they might not know
how without researching it, or the backups might not actually
work. Test. Test. Test. Belt and suspenders, and trust nothing.
If you haven't actually restored data from your backup to a
clean system and used the data, you don't know that the
backup system works.
Eric
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Eric J. Ray RayComm, Inc. http://www.raycomm.com/ ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com
*Award-winning author of several popular computer books
*Syndicated columnist: Rays on Computing
*Technology Department Editor, _Technical Communication_