Think Your Business Data Backup Is Adequate? Not So Fast, Read This First Before You Answer

I have had some interesting experiences in my time of either working for, or consulting with businesses, especially in the area concerning data backups and data recovery.

Most businesses when asked can tell you that they have adequate backups in place, and a good portion of them do. However, when you really drill down into what their plans are, or how they are actually backing up their data things get interesting very quickly.

A good portion backing up to tape, have rarely, if ever test or verify if the backups are being completed the way they should and without corruption. Many businesses just swap out tapes and sign sheets when whomever the company they have picking up the tapes stops by to get the latest copies.

When was the last time your business tried to restore from tape backups? Granted some companies do this on a regular basis, and have it built into their regular practices, but few businesses do this, large or small.

Today, more companies are taking advantage of off-site, cloud, and colo-based solutions to backup their data, but the same issue persists. Failing to test your backups regularly is like playing a high stakes game of Russian Roulette, and eventually it is a game you are going to lose.

One of the more interesting things I have seen, and I have seen it on more than one occasion, is placing a backup server directly next to the main production server. Never mind it is located in the same building, but in the same rack.

This is great, when you want to do routine maintenance, or even failover tests rotating between the two servers. But, if you don't have a backup server at an alternate location, especially for your critical data you're asking for a disaster.

One un-named national retail business was doing this to host their critical payment processing system with no other backup server in place should their main building suffer a catastrophic event. In fact, a long term power outage at the facility would have taken this entire system offline costing the retailer a large amount in lost revenue coming in from around the country.

This set up I am happy to say is no longer the case, and they now have a "warm" server at one of their other facilities ready to go should such an event occur, but it took some doing to even get them to realize this was a good idea.

The interesting thing is I do not think the top executives at this business realized how vulnerable they were to a failure and potentially lost revenue, but I digress.

When considering your backup plan, also consider how and where you are backing up your data, and how often you test your solution to ensure that it works. Just knowing you have some plan in place is not enough. I can't tell you how many times I have heard, "Yeah, we backup our data to somewhere."

If that is your solution, I only have one thing to say...

GOOD LUCK!

Comments

[MPS]

I can concur that this is critical. A business i used to work for had all of its data corrupted during back-up due to a power outage.