The Usefulness of Automated Backups
Automated backup has a considerable number of advantages over its manual opposite number but is not in any fashion perfect or fail explanation. Consider these points.
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 info could be transferred across many departments in one institution (example: from the Public Relations Office to the Marketing Dept). If the backup operations are not updated to stay abreast of this location change, critical data could be misplaced. A straightforward cut & paste of a vital folder could lead to it not being backed up, always make a 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 1 or 2 options for recovering information which may have been incidentally removed, a usual occurrence in a company with several users. Think belt and braces when planning your back up strategy.
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.
Information Should be Guarded
There are stories abound about data being taken or lost and this is made much easier with the utilising of very lightweight back up tapes and drives which can simply be lifted and removed from site. Unsecured back up devices offer rivals, hackers or other underhand folk a recent, carbon copy of your whole company data, so keep them in a secure, locked (ideally fireproof) safe.
Brian Shaw runs a hard drive recovery business called Kingdom Data Recovery Edinburgh who service all the United Kingdom. He's got many articles on his web site which refer to issues with storage devices and helpful data about stopping data loss.