[lexfiend]

25 years ago, junior sysadmin me had to restore our server's drives from tape. To my horror, all the backup tapes were corrupted. It took a while to figure out what happened; my 2am cron job script basically did this:

  run_backup & eject_tape

Fortunately, we were able to reconstruct the server's contents from individual workstations, but I had to endure "how's the backup?" ribbing for many months.

I also changed the script to:

  run_backup && test_backup && eject_tape

so if the tape was still in the drive when I got in to work, I knew to check on things.