So every IT person worth a penny knows that RAID isn’t a replacement for backups and that backups are worthless if you don’t test them.

So why do so many of us find ourselves “too busy” to bother testing backups? So today I almost found myself burned. After noticing that a drive failure in a RAID10 array had taken out my server, I started thinking about that that nightly backup. Luckily for me, only one drive was down and the array was able to come backup (albiet in a downgraded state). So I immediately kicked off a manual backup.

Now, the output of the backups are always emailed to me and I had noticed for quite some time, that it oddly reported skipping files in /var twice. I would occasionally try to figure out why star was skipping files in /var when it was supposed to be backing up /home, but I never tried too hard to figure it out.

So as my manual backup was running, I figured I’d once and for all figure out this oddity. Imagine my shock when I realized the obvious… I wasn’t backing up /home, but rather /var twice.  “Oops.” Oh well… better to have figured it out now then when I was trying to restore some critical file in /home.