Verify or not to Verify....

[Boydie1122]

that is the question!

These seem like the reason for not doing it:

1) Verifies when jobs fail, when run manually, always indicate that the backup was fine.

2) Jobs that verify successfully don’t necessarily mean that the data will be good when you go to restore.

3) Increases tape drive time utilization by at least 10-25%

4) More wear and tear on media

5) More wear and tear on library

What do other people do and what do you think of the verify process?

 

[Zelandakh]

Verify is like a backup / check of the backup.
Better safe than sorry.

Think of it as insurance for your backup.

 

[vm146971]

Imagine you are doing a restore of a mission critical database. The restore takes 10 hours to complete. At hour 9.5 the restore fails and you discover that there is a bad block on the tape. Now you have just lost 9.5 hours on the restore, and you have to go back to an older instance of the database.

Verifying may or may not have encountered the bad block, so maybe it would have saved you some time or maybe it would not.

When all is said and done there is a days worth of transactions missing from the the DB, it was a production down an extra 10 or 12 hours due to the bad backup image.

Then someone like the customer, or your boss asks:

"Is there no way to check the integrity of the backups after they run?"

At that point it becomes an interesting conversation when you try to explain the rationalization for not running verifies after the backups.

 

[deepdba]

Hi
Thats an interesting question and am sure you will also help me find out as to how to verify the data on tape.

Here we use Veritas Netbackup on SAN and am unable whihc takes backup on disk and then onto tapes.

Kindly can you help me to describe in details how to restore a file that has been backed up by Veritas Net Backup and is on tape to another location.

The details please and we use Linux

Am grateful in advance for your help

Regards and sincere gratitude
Deep

 

[blankboy]

boydie1122, i understand what you are saying. And here is why i do verify. if your boss asks you to restore a backup tape and it happens to fail. At least then, you can show him the job log saying it was backup and verified successfully, and whatever reason it didn't restore it wasn't your fault.

-cover your own ass, especially when it is really not your fault.