Every year, Kinetics sees the same Christmas and New Year’s holiday issues recurring.   Luckily they are quite easy to avoid!

By far the most common problems are tape backup failures, normally resulting in servers running out of disk space.  Normally, the backup routine will flush (remove) certain log files.  But if the backup stalls for any reason, those log files will build up and eventually disk space runs out - crashing the server! 

So, why do Christmas backups fail?

Commonly the backup routine will eject the tape at the end of the backup.  If the tape isn't replaced, then the next night's backup will fail for want of a tape.   We monitor many of our client backups, and if we see the failures, we'll try to contact you - but sometimes that can be easier said than done.  Especially if key contact people are on holiday and out of town, and the office is closed.

I know that many people like to have the tape eject at the end of the backup, it’s how they “know the backup ran”.  That's actually a bit misleading because technically a tape can eject for many reasons, not all of which are good!  It can be much better to have the tape not eject at the end of a backup, because then, during public holidays, a scheduled backup can still run. 

What can we do?

Now is the time to have the backup changed to retain the tape.  It takes only a few minutes, and at the same time we can setup e-mail notifications for you.  E-mail notifications are a much better guide to the success or failure.

Either your engineer can make these simple changes for you, or your Account Manager can arrange to have this done for you.  Just ring or email us to arrange it.