I had a disk failure a couple of weeks ago, which I mentioned at the time. The data was non-critical and I had, I thought, a reasonable backup. <\/p>\n
Just to be on the safe side, not only did I get out my copy of the backup tapes, I got the duplicate copies that I keep in a safe location a few hundred miles away. <\/p>\n
For all my preparation, it seems that there are some problems with the tapes, including a couple which had a bad label, some duplications I hadn’t appreciated at the time, and some tapes which simply didn’t contain what I’d written on the outside. <\/p>\n
The upshot is that out of the 20 tapes that made up the backup set, and over 60 that cover all the various things I backup and archive, about 10 were unreadable or badly labelled. Fortunately the combination of duplicate tapes mean that I haven’t lost anything. Better still, I was able to recover the bulk of the files off the disk when it miraculously reappeared this afternoon, which made parts of the process even quicker.<\/p>\n