A friend of mine used to work at Veritas[0] making enterprise data retention solutions. When I spoke about their product as being "making backups", he corrected me by saying:
We are not in the backup business. We are in the restoration
business.
"You know how to take the backup, you just don't know how to restore the backup. And that's really the most important part of the backup, the restoring. Anybody can just copy a file!"
Restores can be Very exciting. I worked tech support and got trained on an email server backup program. I was alone for my first call on the program.
Before I could finish the greeting I knew it was going to be a wild call as I could hear in the background someone shouting and someone sobbing, the guy actually on the phone sounded like he wasn't planning on making it home that night.
Turned out they were testing out some sync software and after a test they deleted the sync without turning off the app which then did its thing and now nobody could log in except admin who was the only user left.
I was able to find and confirm that the backups were in place and accessible. Which was good, I could hear them breathing again. But I had no way to get the restore going because the source server was so hosed.
Just then the dev walking by and I got him on the call and he did some outright hacker magic to get things to the point that a restore could function.
I thought about writing my notes into a troubleshooting guide but then realized it would be better to skip the hacking and make a setup guide that showed them how to set it up properly in the first place.
AdieuToLogic · · focus · HN ↗
voiceofunreason · · focus · HN ↗
BLKNSLVR · · focus · HN ↗
wallst07 · · focus · HN ↗
"You know how to take the backup, you just don't know how to restore the backup. And that's really the most important part of the backup, the restoring. Anybody can just copy a file!"
GarnetFloride · · focus · HN ↗
Before I could finish the greeting I knew it was going to be a wild call as I could hear in the background someone shouting and someone sobbing, the guy actually on the phone sounded like he wasn't planning on making it home that night.
Turned out they were testing out some sync software and after a test they deleted the sync without turning off the app which then did its thing and now nobody could log in except admin who was the only user left.
I was able to find and confirm that the backups were in place and accessible. Which was good, I could hear them breathing again. But I had no way to get the restore going because the source server was so hosed.
Just then the dev walking by and I got him on the call and he did some outright hacker magic to get things to the point that a restore could function.
I thought about writing my notes into a troubleshooting guide but then realized it would be better to skip the hacking and make a setup guide that showed them how to set it up properly in the first place.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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