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Major data loss in backup sets without warning


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Due to a drive name change (done by someone who was not a backup administrator). Retrospect gave no warnings or showed anything in logs that this drive was 'missing' or not backed up. It dissappeared from the backup scripts altogether.

 

Moral of the story? trust NOTHING. Triple check your backups daily, make sure that each and every backup happens. This makes 4 major data losses my company has had in the last 1.5 years in retrospect, and I felt the need to share this with the community so that it doesn't happen to you as well.

 

Dantz doesn't publicly post any bugs/eratta/known issues with their software that I've been able to find yet, so we are left to fend for ourselves on these matters. In the interest of sharing with the community I would urge others who are experiencing anomolies to share them with us here so that we have enough tools to fend for ourselves and avoid this sort of critical data loss.

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The "trust nothing" moral is a good one for backups. However, I haven't learnt anything from your posting about what to avoid.

 

How were your backups affected by a drive name change? Only backup files matching some selector? Specific volume listed as source? Backing up only selected volumes in Client setup? (I don't like this one because it is fragile and invisible.) Mounting a volume over file sharing? (I much prefer using a client!) Backup script? Backup Server script?

 

In my experience drives don't just disappear from backup scripts, although it is certainly possible to have backups fail in quiet ways. Part of "trust nothing" is finding out how to monitor whether things are working. The log tells you about some problems, but not all.

 

The Report window is a good place to browse for volumes or clients that have been lost due to configuration issues.

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Hi John

 

It was a selected volume done through a client backup. It disappeared (in that when the volume was renamed retrospect seemed to behave the same way it would have if I had have told it to "forget" the volume). Because of this it no longer shows up in the originating script or in the report window at all. Also it was done through backup server.

 

HTH

 

Mark

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