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Ten Tips for System Backup and Recovery By Brian Wistisen, Product Manager at Symantec Corp. In the IT world, not all disasters are natural. While the environmental impact of power outages, floods, tornadoes, and other disasters can be significant, system failures can produce equally destructive results to businesses and their information assets. Malicious attacks such as viruses, worms, Trojan horses, phishing attacks, and spyware can bring down systems and destroy data. Hardware and software problems such as hard drive or system corruption, motherboard or power failures, or failed patches or updates can also render systems useless. And then there are simple user mishaps. Errors, accidents, and even intentional mischief can wipe out hours and days of work in the blink of an eye. Consequently, now more than ever before, organizations need a backup and recovery strategy that will help ensure not only the security of their information assets but the availability and recoverability of those systems as well. With such a plan in place, organizations can protect their existing environments while leveraging opportunities for future growth and profitability. The following tips represent a guide for establishing an effective backup and recovery strategy for enterprise organizations. 1. Put a backup plan in place. After all, a recovery plan is only as good as the backup plan and processes that it follows. Recovery picks up where the backup plan leaves off. Yet, far too few companies have backup strategies in place that can deliver a complete recovery 100 percent of the time. To that end, organizations must first establish what their backup needs are by determining whether they must be able to recover files, configurations, settings, or the entire live state of the system. They must also establish the frequency of backups based on how often the files, configurations, or settings that are being backed up change. Using this information as a guideline, organizations can then devise a schedule for full, baseline, or incremental backups that ensures the availability of mission critical systems should disaster strike. 2. Identify acceptable losses. An organization that is not willing to lose any system information requires a comprehensive backup and recovery strategy—one that accounts for every change that takes place in the environment. Organizations must have a clear idea of how much systems downtime they are willing to accept. 3. Make sure backups are valid. For many organizations, simply performing backups at a regularly scheduled time is challenging enough; testing or validating the backups is an afterthought. However, in a time of crisis when recovery is urgently needed, having a tested, validated backup on hand will be well worth the investment in time it required. Fortunately, a growing number of backup and recovery solutions now include validation capabilities that quickly and easily verify the recoverability of the system. This is important for both local and remote servers and workstations. 4. Have a plan for the duplication of recovery points. A variety of software solutions enable organizations to store recovery points on disk for easy and rapid recovery purposes; however, to be compliant with industry and government regulations, these solutions also allow organizations to archive to tape. The combination of disk-to-disk and disk-to-tape capabilities helps ensure redundancy. 5. Make sure backup images are stored in a safe but accessible location. If end users are allowed to create backup images on their local machines, then partitioning can provide a viable storage location. However, in many cases, backups must be output to a secondary destination. A variety of recovery tools enable recovery points to be saved to virtually any disk-storage device, including CD, DVD, USB, FireWire, or Network Attached Storage (NAS). 6. Use tools that enable centralized system management. For organizations with hundreds or even thousands of systems across the enterprise, it is essential that IT administrators have a single, centralized location for seeing a consolidated view of enterprise-wide backups. With these tools, administrators can see how many devices are enabled for recovery, how many have jobs scheduled, how many have missed scheduled jobs, how many are offline, and more. IT administrators can also enable protection on remote servers and workstations, check backup status, and deploy, modify, and maintain backup policies from a central location. 7. Ensure the recoverability of systems located in remote, unattended environments. For many organizations, recovery is not just a local issue. Mission-critical systems are located in geographically dispersed sites, many of which are not staffed by IT personnel. To recover these systems, organizations must either send IT staff onsite or, as a more cost-effective alternative, utilize recovery tools that enable administrators to restore servers in unattended environments from their own desktop, laptop, or even a personal digital assistant (PDA). This can result in significant savings in both time and resources. 8. Make sure to have adequate hardware for recovery. Newer recovery tools obviate the need for organizations to invest in duplicate hardware just for use in the case of recovery—a very costly allocation of scarce resources. Today’s tools allow administrators to quickly recover entire systems to dissimilar hardware platforms or even to virtual environments. Using a combination of hot imaging and the ability to restore to different platforms, these tools can also be used to upgrade hardware or repurpose systems to perform a different role. The result is that administrators have greater flexibility in managing their recovery environments while reducing hardware investments. 9. Make sure backup and recovery staff understand their roles in the event of an emergency. While organizations often put in place various security mechanisms to protect assets, they might be less explicit in other organizational areas. For example, although system access may be restricted, do the appropriate authorized individuals have the necessary privileges to perform their parts in a recovery process? And if regular staff is unavailable, are secondary staff on-hand, available, and qualified to follow the organization’s recovery strategy plan and processes? 10. Establish a hierarchical breakdown of systems in the environment. Which systems, and processes are most critical? Then determine dependencies; that is, identify which data is dependent upon which applications, which applications are dependent upon which systems, and so on. This information is then used to determine the order for recovering files, settings, and systems. According to Infonetics Research, large companies lose up to 16% of their annual revenue due to unplanned network downtime. IT professionals in today’s world have their work cut out for them, but a multi-faceted organization encompassing these ten strategies will ensure that organizations can recover mission-critical systems after any incident, large or small, while providing much-needed peace-of-mind for IT managers. About the Author With over thirteen years of computer hardware and software experience, Mr. Wistisen has managed several successful products at WordPerfect, Novell, Coresoft, and LANDesk Software. Most recently, he served as senior product manager for the Norton Ghost 10.0 product line, working closely with the Consumer Products and Solutions division in making Norton Ghost even easier to use and more automated than ever for mainstream consumer use. During this time, he also managed several new and existing OEM relationships for Norton Ghost 9.0 and 10.0, including Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, Iomega, and others. He can be reached at (601)679-7884 or by email: Brian_wistisen@symantec.com
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