Backup Management

When was the last time you lost data because of a hard drive failure? Perhaps you accidentally deleted a file, whose name you did not recognise or felt you no longer needed? Have you ever lost data because of a fire, theft or flood? All of these represent real situations that people face every day. How long before you encounter a similar situation?

Backups are one of the most critical, and most often neglected, tasks in proper data management. Both home users and administrators have lack attitudes towards backups until the day comes when they lose data, especially important business-related data. With the refinements in hardware and software technologies backups are easy and relatively inexpensive, even for small office and home users.

How effective is a company where the list of customers is lost because of malicious activity by a former employee or Internet hacker? Can a company survive if its financial system lies in ruins because a hardware failure rendered it useless? As systems administrators your responsibility is to protect corporate computing assets. Since data is becoming one of the most valuable assets a company has, implementing a reliable backup system is essential. As a business owner, you must take interest in the processes used to protect your assets. According to common opinion taking no appropriate steps to preserve data is the greatest mistake. Some people still follow the old paradigm of "it will never happen to me”. Now this should be changed as data loss can be faced at any time and by anyone.

Full back up, Incremental backup, Differential backup or Archiving. Do you understand the difference between an incremental and differential backup. Do you need to understand it? Do you even want to know what is it all about?

In many ways, backup strategy should be the heart of any design of critical systems. Handled properly, they represent the last line of defence against just about any catastrophe. Even if your building or your entire city is wiped out, your business can be restored on other computers from properly generated and protected backups. But there are many "if" conditions that must be satisfied for everything to work out properly and data to be recoverable.

Which approach is right for your needs?

• Tape
• Hard disc
• Removable disc
• Optical Disk like CD, DVD etc.
• External Hard Drives
• Remote backup service etc.
• Which files need to be backed up? decide on incremental backup or full backup.
• When to perform a backup? what time of day, check for system load, etc.
• How to restore ? does the user needs corrupted file now or in few days.
• How to backup, which media (tape, disk, etc), commands/programs (tar, cpio, dump, restore, mt, mc, Fbackup...), etc
  
  

Picking the Right Path is a complex process, and this the area where we help.