Backups have only given me grief. Its restores that count & make me look good.

However I have gotten burned with "level of expectation"

1) A dual RAID-5 SAN died while I was on vacation. It was in the cleanest part of the city garage but too many disks failed. I came in, restored the database and maintanece jobs to another server in under six hours. I was proud - my boss was livid.

Why did it take six hours to restore and reconfigure an 18 gig database? He thought it should only take twenty min and the process be documented so anyone could do it.

Lesson learned - have a system up and ready.

2) We have several databases where we only keep six months or less of backups. I like to keep three years. Why? Problems do not always surface in six months. Year end processing has found issues with data from a year ago.

3) Would I use the cloud? Not even in an emergency - only a catastrophy. Why? (laughs) our internet connection is one of the things to go. Its not under our control - but the data center is. Those that can work while others are down make the money and keep their jobs.