[aklug] Automating backup tests

From: Christopher Howard <choward@indicium.us>
Date: Sun Aug 01 2010 - 19:35:16 AKDT

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Just wondering if anybody else had thought along these lines before: We
all know it's not enough to simply run backups of important data: we are
also supposed to periodically pull the backup archives and restore them
to see if the backups themselves are good. But instead of doing all that
manually, what about writing backup testing scripts also?

The reason I was thinking about it is because I am a recent convert to
the practice of writing unit tests for my program code. So I was
thinking maybe we should have 'unit tests' for our file backups also.
Say, you write a bunch of scripts that pull some of the backup data from
your remote stores and MD5s them against the real data; then you batch
run these scripts once a month (or whenever) and see if you get any bad
output.

(Please tell the sys-admin in the back row to stop laughing at my
ignorance.)

- --
Christopher Howard
frigidcode.com
theologia.indicium.us
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Received on Sun Aug 1 19:36:58 2010

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