OT: Are your backups running?

[Kenneth Brody]

On 12/6/2012 4:17 PM, Jean-Pierre A. Radley wrote:
> Jay Ashworth propounded (on Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 03:16:23PM -0500):
> | I have a client who's running BackupEdge (thanks, Tom :-), and we love it
> | just as much as we've loved it for the last 20 or 30 years, but while it is
> | nice enough to send you an email every morning, telling you if the backup
> | ran correctly...
> |
> | that doesn't help you much if those emails are going somewhere where noone
> | reads them.
[...]
> All my customers send BackupEDGE mail to 'edgemaster', and their mail
> aliases define edgemaster to be one or more employees (and often me).
> A few sites also like a printed report.
>
> But whatever or whomever or whenever: I have no way of guaranteeing
> that the email or the printouts are actually read instead of scanned or
> skipped or discarded.
[...]

Ditto for a RAID controller that sends notices letting you know that one of 
the drives has failed.  I know someone who had that happen, and no one saw 
(or cared enough to act on) the notifications.  The RAID hardware did just 
what it was designed to do -- continued running without the safety net of 
that last drive, waiting for it to be replaced.  Until, that is, a second 
drive failed many months later.

> Christmas or not, you can lead a horse to water...

-- 
Kenneth Brody