Written by SolarWinds
Today is World
Backup Day, and while it's always important to run your backups regularly, this
annual holiday is a good reminder to make sure your current backup strategy is
up to speed and effective.
Backing up your
data is critical to business continuity. Especially as the new enterprise
security perimeter extends beyond company offices to home offices, coffee
shops, airports, and remote locations, backups are now more than ever a
critical consideration when it comes to ensuring business data is protected,
recoverable, and available immediately after disaster strikes.
However, a
backup strategy can also get complicated quickly-hardware failures, cyberattacks,
natural disasters, and human error can get in your way when trying to keep up.
What matters most is how prepared we are to act in recovery.
Members of the
SolarWinds® THWACK® community came up with a list of backup
headaches, success stories, and advice to emphasize the importance of a backup
strategy. Here's what they shared:
●
Backup support
wizard
"The best backup support
experience I've had was back in the 1990s when I was first exposed to a small
HP DAT cartridge array. I purchased it to back up a firewall daily, and it
would automatically rotate through a small number of DAT tapes, and it worked
well, until the day it didn't.
"Fortunately, I wasn't
relying on it for a restore, but I could see it had errors, and I had no
technology documentation or training for it. I called HP's support number that
was printed on a label on the DAT library and was immediately in touch with an
engineer-I don't mean a Help Desk person who had experience with it, I'm
talking about the actual engineer who designed it and who'd written its
operating code. Talk about competence on a landline! I was in heaven.
"This fellow was not only an
uber-geek, but he had social communication skills that would make a hostage
negotiator humble. It's a tech support experience I don't think I'll ever
forget-he was able to remotely use my eyes and hands to diagnose the issues and
correct them quickly and efficiently.
"This is a lesson I remember
each time I pick up the phone to answer a call from someone with a challenge. I
wish more magic phone numbers put me in touch with the root wizard for any
system I'm working on."
-
User: rschroeder
●
Backups: the life preserver of IT
"The EURO conversion which
took place over the year end 1998-1999 required us to recalculate the Mutual
Fund portfolios managed at the firm where I worked.
"The software vendor for the
book of record system gave us a set of steps to follow-when we were at the next
to last step (waiting for the country to EURO final values) I had my team snap
another backup of the system ‘just in case.'
"A few hours later, the data
came in and we were clear to apply the conversion rates and do the
recalculation, 45 minutes later we got a panic call that there was something
wrong with those rates and we would have to start again (picture 8 to 10
hours). We restored the backup, applied the new ‘validated' rates, and 2-3
hours later it was adult beverage time!
"I heard horror stories from
my peers at other firms that used the software package about recovering. When
asked why I did the backup, my comment was ‘stuff happens' and ‘Murphy lives!'
Backups are the life preserver of IT!"
-
User: gfsutherland
●
It's all fun and
games until a restore is needed
"In the early '90s, I was a
CNE working for a Fortune 500 company in Silicon Valley that relied on cc:
Mail. We'd recently taken over the support contract and hadn't fully
explored/comprehended the scope of the infrastructure when one of the
Gateway/Router systems failed to cause a frantic call for action because
business processes were interrupted.
"The system had to be
returned to service quickly, so I poked around the computer and noticed the
disk was reported ‘missing' during POST and it seemed a rebuild (no backups or
documentation available) was imminent. In desperation, I removed the hard drive
and gave it a good shaking, installed it and crossed my fingers. The computer
‘saw' the disk during start-up and mail began to flow again.
"After that incident, I give
more thought to business processes and how service interruptions should be
evaluated for their impact and mitigated. I think backups are a useful tool and
it should be one resource in the SYSADMIN tool kit. Backup wise, it's all fun
and games until a restore is needed."
-
User: jcrhoten
"In the 2000s, one of our teammates was
not familiar with restoring to a different location. The files were for the VP,
so imagine our surprise when emails were missing because files were being overwritten-not
the best way to learn how to use your backup system."
-
User: ferrashoo
"Best
backup/recovery day was when one of our new shiny host servers decided to melt down
overnight. I was first in at 6 a.m. to do the morning checks and Nagios had so
much red over it and enough dead systems to look like the last battle in a John Wick movie.
"Fortunately, the backup for that server
completed about 20 minutes before it failed, so with some creative space-saving,
we were able to restore everything."
-
User: scouseroy
●
A disaster recovery plan is always needed
"Around six years ago I
received a call from a client asking if I could help them with some server
issues. When I arrived, I found out that the night before someone had
accidentally left the water running in the janitor's closet that was right
above the server room making a waterfall down the server rack and over the
servers. After shutting down the waterfall and figuring out what was water
damaged, I asked about their disaster recovery plan and their answer was they
had none.
"The whole process took 36
hours or so. It was quite the learning experience, and after it, I ended up
meeting with the rest of my clients to make sure they understood a disaster
recovery plan is always needed."
-
User:
martian_monster
●
General words of
advice
"Backups are required for
everything-because you have never had an issue, doesn't mean you won't. You
need to make sure you're backing up all your services-including cloud and other
items like email. I am surprised when companies stick with the cheapest
solution when they want to protect their most valuable asset-their data.
"I celebrate a day which
reminds us all to back up by testing my backups. No, I do not trust a single
solution-you test backups by how well you can recover by looking at the speed
of the recovery and accuracy."
-
User:
jeremymayfield
"Your backups are only as
good as your last restore!"
-
User: zennifer
##