Unix Backup and Recovery

Monitoring Your Backups

If you are not monitoring your backups, they are not doing what you think they are doing—guaranteed. This is one pot that will not boil if you don’t watch it. Every backup should have a log that is examined daily. This can be automated as well. For example, here’s how I automate the monitoring of dump backup logs:

Give me a summary

dump gives a whole bunch of messages that I couldn’t care less about, Pass I, Pass II, % done, etc. When I’m monitoring the dump backups of hundreds of filesystems, most of that is so much noise. What I really want to see is what got dumped, where it went, when it went, what level it was, and the ever-popular DUMP IS DONE message. To get a summary of just these lines, the first thing I do is use grep -v to exclude the phrases I don’t want, leaving only a few lines. This is much easier to review.

Show me anything weird

You can do this in either of two ways. If you know the phrases that show up when things go wrong, then grep for those. Another way is to use grep -v to remove all lines you’re expecting, and see what’s left. If there’s nothing, then great! If there are lines left over, they are probably errors. You may see lines like I/O Error, Write error, or something else you don’t like to see in your backups.

You Can Always Make It Better

I don’t care how good your backups are; they can always be better. You could spend every waking hour tweaking and improving every piece of your backup program, know everything there is to know ...