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Should I verify Backup to Disk jobs?

Chrisb2012
Level 3

I have a server that performs 2 backups jobs every night. Once is a file backup the other is an Exchange backup.

The backups are doing to Backup2Disk folders and then a seperate job writes these to tape.

Currently I have verify ticked on the Backup to disk jobs and on the tape jobs.

Do I really need it on both jobs?

Many thanks

5 REPLIES 5

teiva-boy
Level 6

The recommendation to verify all of your backups, is legacy code, and old thinking of the Conner/Segate/Veritas days, that Symantec, hasn't weeded out yet.

As a legacy product, BackupExec and many other backup products were primarily tape based products with disk features bolted on over the years/revisions.  If you were around the era of DDS tapes, you'll know how bad and unreliable those were.  As such, you had to do verifies to make sure your tape copy wasn't corrupt.

As hard drives have gotten larger, faster, and very reliable especially around RAID types and RAID controllers; you shouldn't need to verify anything on disk.

LTO technologies since LTO3 onward, are super reliable, and it's arguable that you don't even need to do it to that format of media.  Many enterprise applications like NetBackup, Commvault, Networker do NOT do a verify unless you specifically setup a task for it.  

That said, it's not a bad idea at bare minimum the tape copy has it performed, and not the disk copy.  However, many other products don't do it, and they are protecting 10x the amount of data, which would mean 10X more the potential for failures, yet don't have that level of issue...

It's your business, your data, only you can put a value on your data, and the risk the business will allow.

 

Walker_Yang1
Level 5
Employee

hi,

Is it really necessary to do such thing? In my opinion, the answer is YES.

Let's understand the purpose of Backup first.

Backup system build on our environment is mainly to protect our business data, in order to restore our data in case of unexpected circumstances, e.g. human mistake, data loss, hardware failures etc.

To backup data is just starting point, not ending point, to get our wanted data is just ending point after data loss. In other words, make sure the backup images can be verified and restored correctly is just most important thing.

We can't absolutely make sure all backup images stored on disks and tapes are ok due to disk bad sector, tape issue.

Hence, in this case, we could consider to make a plan to simulate data recovery periodically to make sure backed up data is available.

Hope helps.

Thanks

 

 

 

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified
What is the harm of doing verifications? They do not access the source servers. Only the media server is impacted

lmosla
Level 6

Hi,

It is recommended to run a verify on both disk and tape jobs though tape media is much more prone to damage than disk media.  review:  http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH18698  

If you decide to keep verify turned off of the disk jobs. I strongly suggest that you schedule periodic.

Chrisb2012
Level 3

Thanks for the information.

The reason I ask is we currently backup our servers every night with backup exec. This allows us to take our backups off site.

We also have a HA server that takes an image of the servers at intervals - both the HA server and backup exec cannot run at the same time as I understand they both use the VSS.

My aim was to reduce the backup time on the backup exec jobs as they currently take a long time as both jobs to disk and then tape perform a verify.