Check out the new USENIX Web site.

USENIX Home . About USENIX . Events . membership . Publications . Students
LISA '03 — Abstract

Pp. 7-14 of the Proceedings

Further Torture: More Testing of Backup and Archive Programs

Elizabeth D. Zwicky, Great Circle Associates

Abstract

Every system administrator depends on some set of programs for making secondary copies of data, as backups for disaster recovery or as archives for long term storage. These programs, like all other programs, have bugs. The important thing for system administrators to know is where those bugs are.

Some years ago I did testing on backup and archive programs, and found that failures were extremely common and that the documented limitations of programs did not match their actual limitations. Curious to see how the situation had changed, I put together a new set of tests, and found that programs had improved significantly, but that undocumented failures were still common.

In the previous tests, almost every program crashed outright at some point, and dump significantly out-performed all other contenders. In addition, many programs other than the backup and archive programs failed catastrophically (most notably fsck on many platforms, and the kernel on one platform). Few programs other than dump backed up devices, making them incapable of backing up and restoring a functional operating system. In the new tests, crashes are rare, and more programs function as backups of entire systems, but failures in backup and archive programs are still widespread, and dump is not inherently more reliable than other programs.

  • View the full text of this paper in HTML or PDF.
    Click here if you have forgotten your password Until October 2004, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers. The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2003 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.

To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 7 Nov. 2003 aw
Technical Program
LISA '03 Home
USENIX home