Regarding backups

[I am P]

Hi
I just want to say a few words regarding backups.
If you backup a faluty set of data, it doesnt matter how many times a day/hour you do backups.
If the tapedriver is faulty and writes errorus data on the tape you are fucked, regadless how many times you do your backups.

I think KK have done everything they can do to restore our chars.
Sad that things have gone this way, but theres nothing to do about it.
Keep up the good work, and try to do a routine regarding restore-tests :)
Get a set of cheap IDE-disks and do a two-way archive-log storage.
Archive-logs are the win.

Please dont destroy this thread with posts of anger against KK.

Regards P

[Sakletare]

They still needs to compensate their customers for their loss, not just taking the easy way out by restoring the last (very old) backup and leaving it at that. So far the only conpensation we have recieved is a "sorry" and that's not even close to good enough.

[I am P]

Why is there a need for that?
Shall they give you free items? give you a month or two for free?
Shit happens, thats just the way life is.
Live with it!

P


They still needs to compensate their customers for their loss, not just taking the easy way out by restoring the last (very old) backup and leaving it at that. So far the only conpensation we have recieved is a "sorry" and that's not even close to good enough.

[LOST]

to right.

i think after so many threads with so many people getting angry its time to move on. i too lost exp and rares that i took so much time to do (last minute shopping after 20th). but hey, i took a time with people i know to prepare my chars as best i could. so be it.

with regards to backups...i always thought that there was a server cluster for nc, to balance the load of heavy jupiter/saturn against pluto/uranus/venus. maybe with seperate login servers too. backups are important..

a lesson learned, we can only hope...

[switchback]

this will just get closed with a message saying keep it in MJS's thread

[Nidhogg]

(moved from the sticky which is now closed)

Backups of the servers are taken every day without fail. An offline copy of each server's state is produced and that state is then archived. This procedure has been in place since day one and has been tested and proven on a number of occasions.

In this case the problem was associated with the hardware used to produce the offline backup prior to archival. The files produced for archiving were not valid reflections of server state but they were perfectly valid files and no amount of verification in the backup software would have detected the fact that the files were not semantically valid Neocron server backups. It was only when the faulty hardware finally went Tango Uniform did we realise the problem and by then it was too late.

Imagine if you have some software that copies a file to a remote machine to be backed up. The disk on the source machine is faulty and what you actually copied was a zero length file. Unfortunately the copy appeared to succeed and the resulting file is a real file, it's just not the file you started with. If you now backup and verify that file everything will appear to be fine - you backed up a zero length file and that's what the backup software says you have. Even restoring the backup won't immediately tell you something is wrong, you have to actually apply it to a server before you find that it's faulty. This is just an example to illustrate the problem, btw, so please don't just jump right back with "file copies wouldn't fail without errors".

In my "day job" I've seen a major corporation almost lose 2 years work on a project due to a similar issue to this (we managed to salvage some of the data in the end but it took months to get it back to where it was prior to the hardware failure). Shit sometimes happens no matter how careful you are and if you think that any company fully restores and tests every backup they make you would be wrong. Even companies with legal obligations imposed upon them (such as pharmaceuticals) do not test every backup.

N

[switchback]

D'oh my bad, didnt see the sticky was closed