Best Practices for Backing Up and Restoring your Data

Key Concepts To Remember:

        

-Back to Basics 

It can be simple or exotic.  Whatever it is, it just has to work.

 

-Practice, Practice, Practice

You must constantly train and practice with real data and real systems in an environment that is ideally identical to your production environment.

 

Backup, restore, and recovery is often something that is not seriously considered by IT departments and business owners until it is too late.  The reasons for this are numerous. 

 

• Some administrators and managers don't see backup tasks as very attractive, exciting, or something that you can "see" or show off. 
• End users and business users never know if backups run or don't run, but they do see and notice things like faster servers or new features and capabilities like IM features, email, web applications, or faster databases. 
• Also, among IT professionals, it could be said that "no one ever says that they want to be the backup administrator when they grow up."  For a variety of reasons, thinking about backup, restore, and recovery often gets pushed to the back burner by more immediate day-to-day needs.

 

Make No Mistake:  This is the most important part of your job.

 

Emergency Services Analogy:

A good analogy might be the concept of emergency services in your local community.  When you don't have an immediate problem, do you really notice if you have excellent fire, police, or EMS services?  The real test only comes when you yourself have an emergency on your hands.  How do you know that you will be safe and that your needs will be met?  Fortunately, most municipalities have extremely competent and dedicated professionals working 24x7 to provide coverage.  Furthermore, excellent planning, logistics, and communications teams did a lot of work up-front to set up and establish these services.  Also, think about how the design of the community has requirements set by the emergency agencies.  Police, fire, and EMS require certain road designs, parking designs, and also specify building designs and materials with the idea of creating infrastructure which preserves human life and provides easy access by emergency personnel and vehicles.

 

Think about the safety of your businesses data and the continuity of business operations in the context of emergency preparedness. 

 

It all starts with design and ends with practice, practice, and more practice. 

• Design your infrastructure so that it is easy to backup, restore, and recover. 
• Think about backup windows. 
• Upgrade your network to the highest speed possible to speed up backups over the network. 
• When you are choosing tape or other backup technologies, choose the fastest technology available. 
• Also, think about what to do in the case of whole server failures.  Many customers choose to standardize on one or two Dell server platforms in order to aid in standard image creation and ease of restore and recovery across their enterprise.  If one server is more-or-less interchangeable for another, spares can be kept on hand in the event of a whole system failure. 

 

Dell can repair your critical systems very quickly with our 4 hour onsite service, but consider the impact to your business of just a few hours of downtime.  Remember, you need extra servers anyway in order to practice your restore and recovery plans.  Rather than having to buy one of each kind of server in your environment, standard server types allow you to maintain a few extra systems fitting the standard server model and use those for recovery drills.

• Then, once you have provided your team with the right tools to do the job, you must provide them with the time to practice and drill.  Most IT professionals would agree that recovering systems is several times more difficult than setting up or maintaining those same systems. 
• Also, lessons learned from paying close attention to backup and restore issues will often translate into better deployments in the future and possibly into better ongoing maintenance of those systems.  Time to practice restore and recovery is time very well spent.    

 

Consider a Multi-Tiered Approach to Data Safety:

 

A good design for backup, recovery, and data security involves thinking about all the threats to

your important data and then coming up with solutions to address those threats.                        

Physically, you must have quality systems on which your data lives.  Dell rigorously validates and tests the design of every system we ship and we test every unit leaving the factory.  Dell rigorously tests at both the component and system level to ensure the highest product quality.  However, modern magnetic hard drive technology, from all vendors, is not perfect and there will be failures.  Therefore, almost all enterprise customers choose RAID disk subsystems as their first line of defense against physical disk failures. 

It is critical to understand the very important distinction between "physical" and "logical" failures / data loss. 

 

A physical failure is characterized by something like a bad hard drive whereas a logical failure might be something like data corruption, deletion of data by a user, or hacker or other malicious destruction of electronic property. 

Any "hot" or "online" mirroring, parity, replication, or other mechanism used to protect data does not in any way protect against these things.  RAID it is excellent, inexpensive, and industry-standard way to guard against physical failures, but if a user deletes critical data which resides on a RAID 1 mirror, that deletion is instantly and permanently replicated to both halves of the mirror. 

Similarly, using technologies like Microsoft DFS/FRS replication, rsync, Replistor, or even EMC Mirrorview present the same challenges.  This is where near line and offline backups using tape, disk, or other media are required.

Offline backups are needed to protect against logical threats such as data deletion, corruption, or malicious modification as well as to protect against whole site failures such as fire, natural disaster, or terrorism. 

The traditional media for backup in the Enterprise is tape.  However, the speed and economics of single-drive tape backup in comparison with hard disk backup have changed in recent years.  Many small business customers are using removable disk storage instead of tape now.  This may take the form of the cartridge-based Dell RD1000 removable disk backup drive or simply a collection of external USB hard drives that are rotated in order to offer backup of the small enterprise. 

On a larger scale, tape libraries are still the undisputed industry standard.  However, many enterprises are supplementing the removable nature of tape with near-line disk-based backup solutions.  This may mean simply backing up all servers to a large backup server and then later backing it up to tape or might include SAN snapshots using EMC Snapview.   

      

Conclusions:

No one can ever be 100% safe.  However, major risks can be anticipated and systems and procedures can be put in place to minimize the effects of disasters or failures.  Out of the numerous choices for backup hardware and software, your enterprise only needs to choose one.  Whatever it is, you must constantly practice and maintain the readiness of your team.  Again, whatever it is, it just has to work…and your team needs to know how to use it! 

Dell can help with an excellent line of hardware, software, support, and deployment services.

Message Edited by DELL-Siobhan on 06-11-2007 08:32 AM

Message Edited by DELL-Stephen on 06-11-2007 10:10 AM