Will Your Business Survive?

A disruption in the technology infrastructure can cause a serious threat to the stability of any business. Click here to review Disaster Recovery Planning & Prevention - Part 2.

This month we will address backups, the final line of defense against disaster. Backups are copies of the important company data and applications. This information must be transferred to a removable medium on a regular basis. Unfortunately this is one of the most overlooked aspects of any system. Companies spend years amassing and storing critical information such as customer and vendor lists, project bids, and accounting and payroll information. What happens if these archives are lost and cannot be recovered? It is essential that your most critical files are protected. Tape backups are the most common and economical form of protection. But that is only part of the equation. Simply owning a tape drive and a few tapes cannot ensure protection.

If backup procedures consist of owning a couple of tapes, putting them into the servers every night, and replacing them the next day, your business is not protected. Data must be verified. Too frequently data restoration from backup reveals a bad tape or an incomplete or partial backup. If data cannot be recovered from these tapes, the data is lost. Many programs, like Microsoft’s SQL server have special backup needs. Ordinary backup programs will not work. Many business applications use SQL server as a “back-end” in order to process information. The applications manufacturers must be contacted to verify the proper method of backing up data from their software.

Using industry-standard backup programs such as Backup Exec does not ensure a good backup. Since many programs leave files open all the time, an open file agent is essential. This allows files that are in use during the backup procedure to be backed up to tape. Other applications like Exchange may need a special agent also. Once the proper backup procedure has been determined, several questions must be addressed.

Tape media will suffer from degraded performance over time. Replace the tapes annually. Make sure bad media will not cause a failure in the restoration of data. A good tape rotation is essential. A good rotation will have a minimum two week cycle of tapes and enough extras so a tape can be pulled out of the rotation on a monthly and annual basis. These removed tapes must be taken offsite for additional protection in case of fire, natural disaster, or theft. An adequate rotation also facilitates a comprehensive historical archive. If you require the
restoration of a file one week or older, two or three backup tapes will not allow for the retrieval of data beyond a few days old.

Backup logs must be checked daily to verify good backups. Backup logs indicate whether the backups are successful, what is being backed up, and any errors that may be occurring. Test restores must be performed on a regular basis to ensure that data is restorable. Tape drives can go bad and allow backups but not restores. Backup logs can show successful backups even though there may be a bad spot on the tape that would prevent the proper restoration of the data. Performing test restores will eliminate these surprises during a crisis.

Backups are crucial in protecting the company’s data. This data is irreplaceable and the proper procedures and techniques must be in place before a crisis and all data is lost because of bad planning. Next month’s newsletter will cover other often overlooked items.

Contact us at 616-776-0400 for a free brochure containing backup tips.