Section 8.17. Robustness

8.17. Robustness

Horrible things happen to backup systems. Systems reboot and get powered off. Backup drives hang, libraries jam, and networks die. The "robustness" of a product can be measured by how well it deals with these sorts of problems. Can the product reroute backups from a failed backup drive to a good one? Will it even notice that a backup drive or process is hung? Is it able to recover from a client rebooting while the client is being backed up? Will this client rebooting in the middle of its backup corrupt the index?

These are very important considerations. Things will go wrong, and when they do, you want to know the backups are still OK. If the backup product is able to reroute around failures, retry open files, and restart failed backups, the worst that should happen to you is a really long report when you come in the next morning.