Backup Your Data and Verify Every Quarter

Data backups are incredibly important; you probably don’t need me to tell you that. In the even t that a server fails your backups are the only place where that data still resides. If you can’t restore the data from your backup the data is lost along with all the work that was put into generating it. Given that it’s so important it’s shocking that most organizations never verify that their backups are working.

Attitudes towards painful events are always the same, it will never happen to me. Complete server failures don’t happen often, but they do happen. How much would it cost you if you lost your ability to conduct business for five days? How much would it cost you if after the five days of downtime you had no historical business data? The reality is that you can avoid problems like this with a few simple policies and services that are inexpensive when you consider what they are protecting you against. I have listed those out below.

• Create a data backup schedule that makes sense for your business. You are going to want to do daily backups at least once or twice per day. This will allow you to restore files that people delete or modify accidentally. Next, figure out how much data it is acceptable to lose in a disaster scenario. If your server went down and couldn’t be restored how far back would it be acceptable to start? One week, two weeks, one month? Once you have answered that question ensure that your data backup is taken or sent offsite at least that often.
• Ask your IT department or IT services company how much it would cost to accommodate your backup schedule. If the cost is too high modify your schedule until you reach a good balance between cost and protection.
• Test your file backups once per quarter, and don’t allow your IT department or IT services company to say “we checked and they are fine”. Give them the name of a file and what date you would like it restored from. Have them send it to you so that you can verify that it is intact and useable. If they can’t do it find out why and do a more detailed investigation. Things that get measured and verified get done, if they know that you are going to be looking for the data they will make sure that the backups are running properly.
• If you are backing up entire servers or applications have them restored from backup once per quarter or semi-annually to ensure that they are useable in the event of a server failure. There is no point in backing them up if you can’t restore them when you need them.

My first real world example involves one of our clients that runs an ERP application that is designed for apparel companies. This application houses all their data, without it their administrative operations are basically stopped. They recently had a simultaneous multiple hard drive failure on a server that was about 2.8 years old. The server data could not be recovered. Since we have a very strict process for managing client backups we were able to restore the server from backup within 24 hours.

My second example is a client that is new; they had no functional data backup when they became a client. The client’s old IT services company sold them a backup solution but they did not implement it correctly. The reason that we won the client’s business was that they had a server failure and the old IT services provider was unable to restore the server. If the client had been verifying the backup on a regular basis they would have caught this issue before it caused them problems.