On recoverability

Had a lovely situation this morning.

I can’t go into details, but essentially a database had no off-site backups, no tape backups and the only full backups were on disk. Then the SAN glitched and both the data files and backups were corrupted.

I’m probably preaching to the converted, but I don’t think there are many more important things on a production server than ensuring good backups.

However, having the backups is not enough. Can they be restored? If there’s a complete drive failure of all drives connected to a server, can the databases be recovered?

When the pawpaw hits the fan (as the local saying goes), that’s the only thing that matters.

2 Comments

  1. Glenn Berry

    Wow, I feel for you. People often try to talk me into doing less backups or relying on just on SAN snapshots…

    Good luck!

    Reply
  2. Gail

    You know the nice thing, it’s not my database. Just one I was helping out with.

    I’ve seen that before. Management doesn’t see the point of backups, downtime, expensive storage, tapes, etc, etc. Until something like this happens.

    DB’s totally fried. From what we can tell, the secondary files have corrupted headers.

    Reply

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