I’ve had this problem over the years, with managing to execute even a basic DR simulation. Once I bought some huge external drives to test restores from tape. By the time I got around to doing the test, the external drives weren’t big enough to do any but the smallest of our restores. I’ve been fortunate though, and the few real disasters we’ve had were easily recovered from, but I’ve been burned a few times by smaller instances of data loss because of issues that would have been discovered during a DR Simulation.
This week, for example. We have nearly non-existant IT support at our Brazil office, so I use DFS replication to keep a copy here in the US. We run VSS snapshots every hour and back it up to tape nightly, it’s quite a solid data protection plan. That is, of course, if you don’t do something stupid with your backup software like exclude DFSR data under Shadow Copy Components in Backup Exec 12.5. It will look like it’s backing up, and it won’t give you any indication that it’s not, but it won’t be backing that data up even if you have explicitly selected the folder where the data actually resides.
At this point, the image to the left represents what I assume is the correct configuration, to have both the windows folder, and the DfsrReplicatedFolders selected for backup in BE. I may come back and change this if I find that BE actually starts backing it up twice.
So there you have it. Don’t be stupid. Read the manual or something. And test. Test your DR plan even if you’re only backing up 10G of data.
Twitter
