Recovery

Besides testing your backup, hopefully you never have to go and grab that backup to do a restore. It can be really nerve-wracking. Now, there have been times when I've just restored a few files or folders or whatever the case may be. But when things are actually catastrophic and you're going for those backups and you're just praying that you have good backups and you can do a full restore, there's a couple of things to think about when you're going through that process and doing the restore. So let's cover some of those.

Where do you restore to?

First of all, we are actually restoring a file that probably already exists. There's a good possibility it exists. There are times when somebody will come to me and say, "Hey, can you restore this file?" They made some changes, or something happened to it and now it's gone, or maybe something is missing off of it. Or they come to me thinking — a lot of times they blame it on some sort of technology when it's really most likely something that they did. But that's besides the point.

The thing is, when we're restoring it, we kind of have to know where are we going to restore it. We've got to put these files somewhere. If we've got a file that we're restoring that goes by some name — maybe it's file name — and we're restoring it to the same location, what's going to happen? It could overwrite that. Is that what we want? Do we want to overwrite the file that's already there if it's got the same name? Or do we want to rename it something else so it's right next to it? Or do we want to have an entirely new path, create a new folder somewhere else, which is often what I'll do? But then what you end up doing is you end up having a lot of duplicates that generate some confusion on your file share.

So what I'm just saying here is you've got to think about: are you going to overwrite that document that's already there, are you going to put it side by side, or are you going to put it in a new location?

Tape backup and media inventory

This is a tape backup right here. What it is is this would have a cassette around it, and then you'd put it in this cassette player that would actually unwind this. As you can see, it's just one long strip here. It's not like an audio cassette that has two windings to it, so that way you can just fast forward and move through it at any speed. This actually has to unwind to read all of this. And then once it's done, before it gets ejected, you have to rewind it back up. It rewinds it back up on just this single little spindle right here. So it's quite a lengthy process.

So something you can consider doing ahead of time, or something you may have to do to do a restore of a file, is do a media inventory. What will happen is you'd put this into your cassette player and then you'd say do a media inventory. It would unwind this and record all of the data that it finds on here, so that way you can view the file and restore the single file that you want to restore. So that's what a media inventory is.