How good are your backups?

Monday 30^th November 2009 - 09:42

This should have nothing to do with RAID. I should not even ever have to comment on such an issue. You’d think in this day and age with all our fancy technology we’d have this right by now … NOT A CHANCE FOLKS!

Chatting with the tech support folks over a few ales is like watching an apocalyptic movie … you know the kind where the world ends in the next ten minutes with huges waves and crashing thunder etc etc. Except in this case the waves are the tears of workers who have lost their last three weeks work and the thunder is the sound of the door slamming behind the ex IT person as the boss boots him/her out the door.

Whenever anyone rings Adaptec for help, we always ask them: “what state are your backups in?”. This generally gives us an idea of whether we are dealing with a professional, organised organisation or otherwise. More often than not its otherwise.

Yes, we still hear the old chestnut “I don’t need backups … I’m running RAID 5″. OK, have a laugh. Think to yourself “he’s making this up”, then think again. There are still people out there (my editor won’t let me describe them accurately) who don’t do proper backups.

Almost everyone has good intentions. Everyone has a backup of some description lying around the place. Most people have a backup that is at least a month old they can “probably” restore. The problem lies in checking your backup and restore processes. Try this quick quiz … delete (rename to something you can remember) a document that is vital to your business operation (ie your accounts database). Then sit back with the stop watch (or generally a sundial will do for this one) and see how long it takes the IT gurus to get your workers back working again.

Then do some rough calculations on what those minutes, hours, days, weeks cost your organisation. If I asked you to give me $10,000 out of the goodness of your heart you’d think I’m slighly bonkers. If you lose your server in even a medium sized organisation for just 1 day you’d come close to losing the same amount of money. So why not just give the money to me and get your backups sorted.

RAID won’t save your bacon every time. It’s designed to save your data from disk failures … not viruses, corrupt operating systems and/or less than intelligent users (of which there seem to be plenty out there). And sometimes, yes just sometimes things even go wrong at RAID level and you’ll need to rebuild your system.

(Edit: What brought this rant on? A customer who had a total system crash/failure/calamity in the middle of a RAID rebuild on 4 old SCSI drives whose backups were 3 weeks old. Got the news today that we saved his data and he was able to retrieve it all after following a very long, tedious and stressful process I gave him. So while he didn’t lose his data he lost a lot of sleep and several years due to stress … all of which could have been avoided.)