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Confirming Backups/ Restore procedure

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Is there any documentation on how to confirm that backups will work when restoring? Also looking for a restore procedure documentation.

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Hello E.J. McNaughton!

Have you looked at these documentations?

Particularly "Section 6: Recovery" from the user guide has step by step instructions.

If the question is how can you be sure, then the answer is you can't. Not 100% sure anyway. There's always some chance that it doesn't work as it's supposed to. There are some steps you can take to maximize chance:

  1. Validate your backups
  2. Test restoring to hardware/infrastructure as close to the backed up as possible
  3. Test restoring to dissimilar hardware at the expected failure points, drives in particular
  4. Note which backup is in a known good state if possible.

I'm mentioning 4, because I had a system that had nothing wrong with it on a file system level, no crc errors when doing a backup, no validation error for its backup, but the system still took many tries to be bootable on a new drive, when it needed a restore. Apparently a bad drive (test it showed this) somehow subtly messed up Windows (7) so it was unstable, and we had to reinstall it to make it stable again.

-- Peter