Principle 5 – Verification

The apprentice kept his notes in a document that he saved on his computer frequently.

It had all his important information concerning everything he had learned from the Master.

One day while working on his notes, the Master issued an urgent request of the apprentice.  A palace contingent was coming to visit the Master and the apprentice was to travel to the village to obtain fare for the event.  In his haste, the apprentice typed the Master’s list of supplies into a new document, but overwrote his training notes.

At first he despaired, but the apprentice was confident because he backed up all his files consistently as he worked, he distributed them far and wide, and kept a history of his old backups.  So he loaded his day-old backup to restore his notes file, and found that his backup had failed.  He went back a week, 2 weeks, a month; they had all failed.  He had to go back 2 months before he found a good backup.

The Master quietly stated, “To trust in your backup is only half the task.  Without the ability to restore your files, is to backup in vain.”

Lesson to Learn:  Test your Backups