IT team is in charge of backups. They swore up and down that everything was fine and backups are working correctly.

For my department because I believe in Happiness, asked them to send me a backup. It was garbage data.

Then I learned how they verified the backups were working if the file size was bigger than 0kb.

If only my happiness supported non-blocking I/O

RAID with parity is technically a backup, just a mostly ineffective one. It’s a backup that allows you to recover from exactly one scenario, single (or double) device hardware failure.

But I definitely understand the mantra “RAID is not a backup”. It’s not what most people think of when they say “backup”.

Pro tip: Copying a Postgres database while live transactions are interacting with it frequently results in a corrupt backup.

Thankfully I test my Luanti backups.

Edit: I should clarify - My dangerous backup method was a naive file copy. I’m sure there’s a different correct way to do a live backup. I just haven’t checked into it yet, since stopping my Luanti server for a backup is no big deal.

Don’t forget being forced into the office

RAID 0 is the best way to ensure data redundancy. It’s what we use at every Fortune500 company and there’s not an issue.

11. Social media

I recently changed my hosting provider and wanted to install the new server from the backups I’ve been creating daily for the last four years. Well, it turned out the backup process got stuck on a lock file in July, 2021. And the email process that should have notified me was broken too. I was so happy I didn’t find this out in an emergency and spent more time testing the email notification this time.