Re: Testing backups ...

Brice Avila wrote: > I think it's a great idea. Too many find that their backups are bad > when they need it most. It's also helpful just to keep your > backup/restore skills fresh. > > The best way to verify your backups is to perform a restore. Find a > spare server and practice restoring to it. Then run onchecks on it > (i.e. "oncheck -cc", "oncheck -cr", "oncheck -ce", "oncheck -cD" and > "oncheck -cI") to check the consistancy, and then have your DBA and/or > developer check to see if all the data is there. > > Another option is to run archecker on the ontape backup. Archecker is > not discussed in the Backup and Restore Guide because it is not > supported, but there are some documents floating on the web on how to > use archecker. While this produces a report on the consistency of the > backup, it is not as good as an actual restore. And also, and this is from very bitter experience, blow away the contents of your chunks or swap the symlinks around on the restore machine whenever you upgrade Informix Versions. A long long time ago in a place far away, I went for 4 months not knowing that my archives were bad, even though I was doing a a restore every night, and that restore seemed fine and was usable. Lost a disk on the 'restore machine' replaced it and discovered that the archives were so much cr*p. It was engine down and dd'ing the chunks every night for about a week until Informix came up with a fix.