Do you do backups? Do you test them?
I recently read a story about a hosting company that was
trying to restore a server and was having problems. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/hostv_outage/ To
me this highlights one of the most common problems in disaster recovery, not
that people aren't doing backups (that is the other common problem), but that
they aren't testing the backup.
For any backup it is vital that you are testing the backup. What might go
wrong you may ask. Well in my experience because backups are generally
processing large amounts of data that means they are using memory and a lot of
disk and using a lot of throughput, these are situations that your normal every
day use may not be experiencing. You can therefore be experiencing issues with
corrupt data being put in your backups without you knowing.
Whats more and this is my biggest experience, when using 3rd party vendors to
manage backups the liklihood of problems with restoring is much much higher.
IMHO it is therefore essential that you keep ALL versions of a 3rd party
products software that you have used to do backups with. Too many times have I
tried to restore a backup and found it not work because I've been on a new
version, although having said that I've also found that I can't restore even
with the currrent version.
The minimum you should be doing is to regularly restore from your backup and
run a checkdb to ensure that your backups work.You should also be using checksum
detection to check page checksums as the backup is processing and also to
calculate a checksum for the backup.
If you don't test your backups your backup process could be pointless, and
the last thing you want to do is find out when your database has just crashed
and your website is down and loosing money.