Interesting FTP commenced before file fully written

Just sharing something that was a little surprising.

We were testing a process to copy the nightly backup to a DR system using
FTP.

This was an adhoc test only.

Backups normally finish before 2:00am so we scheduled a ftp job to copy
the file from production to DR starting a 2:00am.

Unfortunately the backups ran late (reason does not matter) and did not
complete until about 4:00am

The image is 475GB and the link between Production and DR is 1GB - the
copy took 10+ hours.

Rather than killing the job when we were advised the backups ran late I
was thinking that it is just a stream file and ftp is just going to read
from start to finish.

Well I was most surprised when the image loaded into the image catalogue
successfully and a dsptap showed all the libraries - I was still not
confident the restores were going to work but they did!

Now I am not suggesting this is the way to do things and while there have
been no errors detected it was only a test.

But quite surprising all the same.

Cheers

Don




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