It's actually much more complex than that. Here's a little-known
story from a place I used to used to work some decades back. This did
not happen on an MVS system, but some other vendor's system with those
letters in a different order. One day that system crashed, I think
for no apparent reason. Rebooting it failed. Apparently the system
disk volume was corrupted. They restored from a backup. That backup
was corrupted. They tried backup after backup, going all the way back
to the oldest backup they had, 5 months old. It was corrupted. They
had to rebuild the system from scratch. Apparently a hacker with a
lot of patience had gotten them. They were very tight-lipped about
what happened, even to data center staff, but the above leaked out to me.
The takeaway should be just because your backups appear to be
successful, unless you regularly test restoring from backups, you
really don't know that they're any good. So even on MVS or z/OS or
whatever it might happen to be called tomorrow, TEST THOSE BACKUPS.
Even if they're "read-only".
One of my current employer's customers needed to restore a catalog
from backup due to the catalog being broken. Well, it was broken for
much longer than they realized, and all of the backups (4 months
worth) were incomplete due to that. Nobody was looking at the backup
job to ensure that it was successful.
At another place I worked in the dim past, the HSM SDSPs were backed
up daily via REPRO to tape. Do I really need to say it? The backups
were all truncated due to a key sequence error in the SDSPs, but
nobody was looking at the REPRO output.
/Leonard
Colin Paice wrote on 3/10/2023 12:27 AM:
Does it protect you from ransomware? It gets you back to a good backup.
It depends on how often you backup - and having ransomware means you might
lose all changes since the last backup so unless the database is read only
- you are likely to lose some data.
On Thu, 9 Mar 2023 at 23:44, Attila Fogarasi <fogar...@gmail.com> wrote:
Also there are various solutions for immutable backups of z/OS data, which
would protect you against ransomware.
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