Tao Of Backup Wailing Wall Story

Something the Master Never Told Us

We were following the Tao of Backup, but discovered one rule the Backup Master forgot to teach us. "Never trust your backups to a single method." When we had to recover data from an old tape, we discovered that the tape was written with an older version of a program that is no longer supported by the supplier of the operating system. We had to find someone with one of the older systems floating around to have the data translated so we could use it. Fifteen days were spent looking for a system to do the translation. The rest of the days were spent trying to determine how to read the recovered data and confirm its veracity. Since that event occurred, we routinely backup on differing schedules, using more than one method; hoping that one of the methods will survive into the near future.

     Mike Mohr
    Auckland, NZ, Mon 04-Oct-1999 2:31am

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