57 Days of Forward Recovery: A DBA's Worst Nightmare And How To Minimize The Risk

57 days of forward recovery. If you work in IT then you know what a nightmare that is for a Database Administrator. Just the mention of it makes my skin crawl. This is what we had to go through to recover the billing system's database when the server crashed. This was because the backup admin did NOT retire the tapes properly. This knowledge isn't widely known, even in the IT community. He didn't know that tapes are aged NOT by date/time/stamp but by the number of mounts that a tape goes through. Tape is a flexible medium and deteriorates every time you mount the tape in a drive. It gets stretched across the read/write head and that stretching eventually creates a weak point that the drive cannot read past no matter how hard you try. Chances are, your data is on the other side of that stretch point.This book is about Tape Backup Systems Management. System Administrators(SA;s) know how to install backup software and they can configure it to make copies of data on the tapes. I was thrown into the role of Backup Admin. I've made mistakes configuring backups and learned the hard way that I shouldn't have done some things. The saying goes, "Just because you CAN do something does NOT mean you should". This book is how I WOULD configure a backup system to ensure I can restore data with the fewest issues. These configuration practices I'm about to share will help you recover data as quickly and efficiently as possible. This knowledge will prove itself Priceless.