Breakfix

Have you tested your backups recently? I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase before. And then thought “Hmm, yeah, I should do that”. If you remember, you’ll stick a tape in the drive and fire up your software, and restore a dozen files to a temporary location. Success! You’ve proven your backups can be recovered. Or have you? What would you do if your server was destroyed? Do you require specialist software to recover that backup?

I was reminded of a backblaze article about SMART numbers. This nudged me to look up the stats on my drives to see if any numbers had budged. Let’s collect the data for processing: for a in /dev/sd? do smartctl -a $a > $a done Spot the error. I ran the code. Did an “ls”… and didn’t see any output. I started to panic a little… I didn’t just do what I think I just did… did I?