When it comes to backups (or anything else you have to do during an emergency) KISS is the way to go. Not only do you increase the chance of doing something wrong, when it comes to restores after a disaster, you have to try to remember which method was used for which dataset and how to actually do the restores. Trying to run different backup methods on different datasets in an attempt to save time, money, or storage space may seem like a good idea on paper, but it’s being penny-wise and pound-foolish. How do you do backups? Do you do full of everything every day? Do you do fulls on Sunday nights, and incrementals during the week? Or maybe differentials instead? It doesn’t really matter to me, or for purposes of this article, which you do, as long as you do them consistently. The last thing you want to do comes to a point where you have to rely upon a restore job, and only then find out the media is bad.

You should make this a regular part of systems maintenance, and every piece of media you use to backup should be confirmed on a regular basis. The only way to be sure you have a good backup is to confirm it by restoring data from the backup. VERIFY your backups by, you know, actually restoring from them.

It only seems obvious after it’s been missed and is now needed, but because it takes time and log files tell you all is good this one is so easy to skip. And as with all the best lists, this one goes to eleven! Let’s start with the first one, which is also the one more overlooked than any other… Verification Given your job might rely upon the ability to restore data when the worst happens, you want to make sure you protect your backups at least as well and as thoroughly as you do anything else in the environment, so here is our list of the top ways to help protect your backups. A disaster? In my datacenter? It’s more likely than you think, and whether it comes from a site disaster, a user falling victim to ransomware, or an administrative oops (not that those ever happen) the one thing you hope you can rely upon are your backups.

Fbackup keep old backups