A few weeks after I took over as the IT manager a rather large problem came up. A file server at a remote office had failed and the backup process at the same time. The file server was a Snap Server setup in RAID 5 with only four drives and had two drives fail. At the same time the backup process that was in place had failed so about a 1/2 a months worth of work was lost and I’m in the process of reviewing the backup prooces and correcting at each office.

The one problem that I’m having is how is the best way to go about and verify a backup to tape, not only during the scheduled backup but also at a later time for a sanity check. Curerently, there are daily (Mon-Thur) incrementals and a full backup on Fridays to disk on a seperate backup server. Then the weekly disk backups get put to tape. The idea was to be able to restore from disk first and then tape if we have too. What I’m moving to is replacing all of the Snap servers with PowerVault 220s / PowerEdge 2850 with the PowerVault in RAID 10. I would be interested to hear what solution other people are using to verify and audit the backups and the process itself.