March 22, 2007 - The recent early switch to Daylight Savings Time (DST) caused an issue for one of our customers running Mac OS X. One of the backups they scheduled completed successfully at 02:10:05 on March 11th, 2007.

Later that morning, following that backup, and perhaps better late than never, the customer installed Apple's DST patch. March 11th at 2:10 in the morning no longer existed and the backup timestamp became invalid. In an instant, the data contained in the archive became inaccessible and BRU Server was unable to start because of this invalid entry (since DST causes the time to jump from 01:59:59 to 03:00:00).

TOLIS Technical Support received the customer's call and addressed this not-so-readily-obvious issue. Remember, we are located in Arizona and are always on Mountain Standard Time. DST is not particularly in our consciousness since it does not apply to Arizona.

All was not lost. TOLIS Support determined the cause, and, consistent with BRU's ability to always return the most data of any tool; the following actions ensued:

• Support was granted SSH access to remotely log into the customers system.
• The affected archive was pulled over to one of TOLIS' lab systems.
• Support manually reset the archive completion date to 03:00:00 (a now valid timestamp with DST active.)
• And, the archive was transferred back to the customers' system.

The customer had renewed access to his data and BRU Server was again able to start. All of this in a matter of hours.

This kind of creative engagement to solve a customer's problem exemplifies the level-of-service the TOLIS Group Technical Support Department delivers.

To quote the customer, "Many thanks to you and your engineers for your persistence in solving this mystery. I'm afraid I threw quite a curve ball at you! In any case, I'm glad to have BRU up and running again."
- Customer name withheld.

BRU: Backup You Can Trust^SM.