[H-GEN] DVD Backup & burning software under Linux

Adrian Sutton adrian at intencha.com
Fri Jun 11 02:27:57 EDT 2004


>  It should be
> trivial to grab an MD5sum of the tar file (or whatever's on the disc)
> before and after the burn to verify the contents of the disc.

While doing an MD5sum to check each and every backup is definitely a 
good idea - do NOT depend on that as the only test of your backups.  
Even if the files are copied 100% accurately from hard drive to backup 
you still must test that you can put them back successfully, including 
testing that you can restore *all* the necessary files not just the 
ones you thought were necessary.

The only way to be confident in your backups is to perform regular 
emergency recovery drills.  Assume that your office has just burnt down 
and everything was destroyed - now see how much you can set up again.  
The other catch is that if only part of your infrastructure is 
destroyed you need to be able to preserve things like user ids and a 
bunch of other things that client computers and other servers have a 
copy of and expect to be the same.  This is particularly troublesome on 
Windows domains but there are a number of things in the UNIX world that 
would suffer similar issues (NFS springs to mind).

Plan for the worst - probability dictates it will happen eventually.

Regards,

Adrian Sutton.

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