The job of a backup administrator should be to facilitate the backup and recovery process, of course, but that role should be one which ensures that the resources and configuration are correct so as to enable the sys/app/db administrators to perform their role.

As I suggest in my book, everyone in a company has a role to play in backup and recovery. While there is a certain amount of familiarity that should be expected of backup administrators with all the backup/recovery operations, the core aspects should be tested and (where possible) handled by the people with the primary responsibility in these areas.

I’ve had an intense discussion with my management today about the responsabilities of my job (being responsible for the backup service)

Do yo consider that a restore test is a task to be perfomed/initiated by a backup administrator or to be initiated by an application owner.

My point of view was that restoring data alone is meaningless. This is not the goal of a restore and as a backup admin, i can’t do more. Only the application owner is able to restore all elements of its application and ensure that the system is restorable from the backup.

What do you think ?

I ask you the same question when specific modules have been deployed to ensure the consistency like NMM for MOSS. Who is responsible of performing the restore/consistency check ? The backup admin or the moss admin ?

It also ties in with the budget and purchase cycles, both for CapEx and OpEx for the company. I.e., you need to be across the capacity management such that you can slot in CapEx requests and make OpEx expenditure in a planned, logical way that fits into the fiscal operations of the company. Of course, there’s always the chance to have exceptions, but the goal should be to keep the process as smooth and straight forward as possible.