Went to do a test restore of one of my databases and I noticed the dump files over the last few months were all 0kb. Glad I caught it this way and not because I needed to restore. Put it on your calendar, schedule a test restore of your critical stuff a couple times a year. I know y’all are busy but it is worth the time and effort. A backup you can’t actually restore isn’t a backup at all.
A few months after setting up the backups for my server to two remote locations and patting myself in the back for it, I woke up in the middle of the night realizing I had no idea how to restore.
I worked at a datacenter that wanted to change backup vendors, as we dug into the details we found out that the agent based backups needed an agent running on the machine to restore to and they didn’t have a linux agent. Despite this obvious problem mgmt chose this vendor. It didn’t take long before sysadmins were rebuilding linux boxes from scratch in the wee hours. I left shortly after.
I worked at a small shop and every week I took the backup and booted up the backup hardware we had with a dumb hub and would connect my laptop and make sure everything work. I would then exchange the backup drives in the bosses office who was to take them home on the weekend and bring back the older backups from the week before on monday. For the life of me I could not seem to get them to understand the important of this which got worse when my boss left (as he got it as was part of the leadership circle). The owner had this thing to with having external drives and expecting each employee to back up to it and did not get why it was important they backup to the network drive where backups were tested.