Business - Backup
This episode is about backup, something you know you should have but dont want to pay.
Backup is an insurance, in a perfect world its not required as accidents would never happen
However work is deleted, lighting does destroy power, server and computers, storage does fail
Hard drives are fragile, platters use magnetic methods, SSD's have no medically parts to them but tore data in a similar method
All of the above are highly venerable to electric and magnet fluctuations which are common in todays age
both man made power systems and the sun throwing huge amounts of energys (as seen in the auroras), are perfect ways to aid the destruction of your data store
Backup is the ability to roll back time to then get your data back, there are many ways to do this, only a few are reliable
In the 30 or more years of business we have tested many backup methods and corporate solutions.
We have seen the pitfalls, and problems resulting in restoring data ourselves
I almost lost years of work, the net result was only a few days, i promised myself it would never happened again
The first issue with backup is reliability
Copying your data to USB memory, CD, DVD or another hard drives, generally means it was not tested after copy to confirm it really is a duplicate
Also as said above, those stores are fragile, so needing to restore the data its not the time to find out that it was not copied correctly or the whole store has failed
The connect and dis-connect of a remote store such as USB or hard drive creates a huge amount of electrical stress, the perfect set of events for a failure.
The most common USB failures are when its removed from the system, normally found when trying to restore the data
CD and DVD have there own issues, mostly from warpage or the more common CD rot, yes they corrode
Micro fractures in the resin allow air to reach the reflective metal data layer, the corrosion results in data loss
All the above means data stores are "Schrodinger's Cat" in that you have no idea if it works or not until requiring a restore
The Backup data needs to be an identical copy of the original, the store location needs to be known to work, generally live with redundancy
Every time we attempted to restore clients self backed up data from a USB or external hard drive it almost always never worked out well.
Problems range from stores not working, the correct data not being copied or wasn't tested to confirm the copy is accurate, assuming the store worked at all
There are 2 main backup types:
Files - just a collection of folders, such as all the accounts or office documents.
Restore would be a case of tracking done the file then copying it back to the location required.
Systems - The ability to duplicate a complete system as it was in a point of time, used for both PCs and servers, both real and virtual
To restore a complete system, the hardware needs to be identical to the one originally used, so going from a Dell to Lenovo can be problematic, the original doesn't have hardware drivers for the new system.
Windows server restores generally results in a Blue Screen of death 0x7a error on booting
Complete system recovery is known as BMR (bare metal restore) which has always been problematic, and it the reason we deploy private virtual servers, the restore location is identical from the systems driver perspective
A complete backup solution stores a few revisions of the original data although generally only the latest copy is required
Backup should not be used as archiving whereby many years of revision history is kept, this would be a totally separate service
Well over 20 years ago while a corporate network administrator, i would swap the backup tapes, a server being around 20Gb, the DAT or DLT tapes were normally 20 or 40Gb with compression
It was time intensive, swapping the tape at night, next day confirming if the backup completed, then Fridays tapes would be different, to keep each week for a month
The internet back then could not handle the amount of data required for public cloud based services
We have used a few different backup solutions, Our current is a bespoke private cloud solution for which we offer to clients, for both file and complete system level backup
Our storage hardware have automation to monitor and alert on any mechanical problem, facilitating repair while live
Our new website backup page (live soon) shows a file level restore being completed
Some clients having over 5 servers had requested a private server on site, is possible under certain agreements, still owned and maintained by us, however means the data doesn't leave the site
We have an incentive starting, working with a few IT companies overseas who require backup and remote access based on Intel's AMT technologies to assist with supporting there clients
Our new (Not yet launched) website will have pages dedicated to those products (in the relevant countries)
We welcome contact to talk over your backup requires
