Sunday, February 12, 2012

The Efficacy of Automated Backups

By Bryan Shaw


Automated backup has a bunch of benefits over its manual opposite number but is not in any fashion perfect or fail evidence. Consider the points below.

Tapes are not fail-proof. It is a rather annoying fact that many dear tape backups fail just when the need for them ensues. The tape media may simply have gone through normal wear-and-tear or they might have become mucky and badly needed cleaning. An example is the way in which the tape backups of Alaska's Office of Revenue became incomprehensible, endangering the $38-million oil account and the 800,000 electronic images therein. It needed to be reconstructed by 75 workers and a number of data recovery experts.

Tape Maintenance is Tedious

Aside from tape media being prone to wear, maintenance of them is dreary and labour radical. Many staff are wanted to rotate the tapes at a schedule. Inserting of the incorrect day's tape and switching of the recovery sets can render the backup system worthless. Manpower is needed to monitor and track the schedule of backup.

Data Could be Transferred

Databases, email accounts and other data may be transferred across many departments in one institution (example: from the Public Relations Department to the Promoting Dep.). If the backup operations are not updated to keep up with this location change, vital information may be misplaced. An easy cut'n'paste of an important folder may result in it not being backed up, always be sure to check with your network or systems administrators.

Backups Should be Tested

Power outages, thunderstorms, media becoming filthy, media getting filled up or systems freezing would derail backups. As such, backups should be customarily evaluated by restoring a few selected files on a regular basis.

Backups Should Have Copies

Maintaining many backup sets gives the company several options for recovering data which could have been accidentally deleted, a common occurrence in a company with lots of users. Think belt and braces when doing the planning for your back up technique.



Databases and Exchange Servers Need Complex Backups

Some applications store urgent information inside many database files (like SQL or Oracle databases) and the complex links between those files also have to be backed up. E-mail exchange servers are quite as complex.

Info Should be Guarded

There are stories abound about info being nicked or lost and this is made so much easier with the use of very compact back up tapes and drives which can just be lifted and removed from site. Unsecured back up devices offer competitors, hackers or other sneaky folks a current, copy of your entire company information, so keep them in a safe, locked (ideally fireproof) safe.




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