In this week's On Call, Lionel shares his experience as a senior developer and help desk support within a mainframe software development team. He inherited backup responsibilities after Richard, the previous maintainer, admitted to never having tested the backups, which had only logged successful completions without verification. Lionel soon discovered that the backup tapes were blank, emphasizing the critical need for proper backup protocols and testing to prevent potential data loss.
"Source code was stored on an SMB share on a large Intel server on which a backup was taken daily onto an 8 mm tape drive."
"When Lionel asked Richard when he last conducted a test restore, the answer was 'never' because Richard had been asked to make backups, not test them."
"Lionel’s attempts to restore from the tape drive revealed that the tapes were blank, highlighting significant backups that had never been verified."
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