The best thing I can say is: "Make Multiple Copies". This is why I always make sure I have at least 2 copies of my next longest retention before expiring the shorter retention(S).
For example: If you do weekly full backups, keep you're daily incremental backups for at least 2 weeks. In turn, if you're monthly backups have a longer retention, keep your weekly full backups for at least 2 months. Even if you verify the tape using a restore to be absolutely certain, that tape will eventually deteriorate, and could potentially get damaged. Any kind of electronic media is far from indestructible. If you truly paranoid, don't rely on your backup system as your only point of recovery. Backup systems should be first and foremost designed for disaster recovery (although if you have the funds replication works even better), and secondarily for long term legal and archival purposes, and lastly as an operational recovery mechanism. There are much better ways to insure operational recovery (i.e. versioning filesystems) if you are truly that paranoid. I'm not saying your backup system can't do all three, and do them very well, but there are other methods that work better for giving your management the warm fuzzy they are looking for. Of course if all they really want is a warm fuzzy, just find some marketing documents that say the likely hood of a problem is extremely low (there are plenty of them out there). +---------------------------------------------------------------------- |This was sent by [EMAIL PROTECTED] via Backup Central. |Forward SPAM to [EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu