You hear people talking about the importance of making backups all the time. Chances are that data is the life blood of your company – if your data goes down the pan, it could be curtains for your business.
And that’s why you want to have backups of your data.
But if the worse happens, and you lose your data, a backup isn’t going to be any help at all if you find you can’t restore from it, or if the backup is corrupted.
This truth is underlined quite delightfully in this video about how Pixar’s fantastic movie “Toy Story 2” was nearly flushed down the toilet due to not checking that the backups were working properly.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL_g0tyaIeE&rel=0&w=500&h=311]
For those who are interested, it appears that the backup software being used by Pixar at the time was failing to deal elegantly with a “full disk” situation, and thus hiding messages that the backup was falling over.
The full story is told with more detail by Oren Jacob, the associate technical director of “Toy Story 2”, in this post on Quora.
