The Backup accident

I still see a lot of clients using hand-operated backups to backup prominent files daily, picking and selecting what files to backup in the event of a disaster. Every time there is a problem and they need to recover data they all the time come up short. Either someone forgot to do the backup that day, they forgot to update the backup to contain an prominent directory, or they become overwhelmed with the restore process as the basic principles was not properly backed up.

There are no real savings by using hand-operated backups as opposed to using faultless backups to tape or disk. The labor and costs complex in recovering from a single failure generally will net a break even with the strict backup equipment. You can not as a matter of fact put a label price on loss data.

Backup Strategy

Complete self-acting backups are also considerably simpler to achieve and even easier to recover from. You also minimize the risk of not backing up prominent files.

While I am on the topic of backups, I am amazed at how often clients will delay bringing in help when their backup does fail to backup for the day. Either they do not monitor and confirm prosperous backups daily, or they keep waiting for weeks hoping that it will just start backing up properly. A failed backup is likely useless in the event of a disaster. Thus addition the number of data lost due to a failure. It is disappointing to get a call to help a client recover data only to find the backup stopped working 3 weeks or, or sometimes even 8 months ago. Every backup strategy requests daily confirmation of its success and failure and on going effort to ensure prosperous backups.

One of the most common problem we find is that most clients never test their backups. In an event of a failure, often we find their "successful" backup is incomplete or unavailable when you as a matter of fact need it. In an ideal world, every company would have double hardware to be able to drill the saving process on cut off hardware. Unfortunately it is not common to see this properly implemented and documented.

Another common problem we find is how often clients clean their tape drives. A lot of clients believe a tape drive should be cleaned once a year or never. Proper cleaning is very prominent and will often be the source of failed backups and tapes that just don't recover when you need them to. Typically manufacturers advise cleaning a tape drive every month or two depending on how many hours in assistance it has. Improper cleaning can and normally is a common cause of data loss.

The Backup accident