Just been dealing with a chap who is now faced with endless, endless difficulties because he has lost all documentation and records for his own small business since its inception a few years ago - the tax people are going to have a field day, never mind his customers and suppliers.
Of course he is at fault and he did all the wrong things, but oh dear.
You *MUST* assume that at any moment your computer, all attached hardware and all software and data on it, will simply disappear.
You *MUST* consider that impact and decide if you care.
And if you *do* care.....
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
Backup.
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yes thats fabulous advice, multiply so.
however
When I was part of a team offering consultancy on availability, continuity and recovery we were frequently told about how and how often backups were taken by our clients. The really fun part was when we said "Thats fabulous - now lets see you do a restore".........
TEST THE BACKUPS
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You're not wrong.
"Saveset is not first element of list" is an error message burned into my brain.
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An FE college sacked their admin IT person - saving money!!
An IT academic was to oversee matters.
Everyday the system, Unix, spilled out masses of "daily reports" which nobody looked at.
One of the pages highlighted the need for a 2nd tape. Over the years the Student Records+ Accounts/Payroll had grown - obviously the tapes were the same size.
Stumbling the problem did not panic them - they took 2 weeks to source a bigger tape drive and even grudged paying for someone to split the backups into Records and accounts and backing accounts up 1st thing in the morning & the student records overnight - to a PC disk & tape to ensure a 2 x routes if anything happened..
A Unix disk failure, although rare, would have been catastrophic, £25/£30m turnover, 400 staff payroll and 10,000 student records effectively unrecoverable.
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Really good point that.
In the early 90s we had a major travel company as a client. They'd been backing up to a high capacity tape on a robust cycle etc etc but the tape unit (or something) had a problem where it could not read the data back. I forget the detail save that we charged them them £100k's to recover the data from the crashed disk....
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I've got a few tales to tell about backups in my line of work. My first ever day at work with my employer I went out with a colleague (and someone I already knew) to a customer site. A really important service to the community they provided but I won't say who/what they were.
They had a problem with a server and it was decided the best course of action was to recover it from backup. They had a good backup regime it seemed. So we started to restore.... and it was way too quick. In fact there wasn't enough on the tapes.
It turns out they got muddled with their tape rotation system so the original full backup which was needed had been overwritten... Oh dear.
Another customer decided the best place to store their tape backups was offsite at their paper store. It burnt down.
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From a personal perspective, my important files are backed up to the cloud. I ought to also get another drive and store one backup at my father in laws house.
I've assumed something could get stolen hence offline drives in fire proof safe and a NAS (could also get stolen of course). But who knows what could happen to anything in the house.
Good point from Zero about restores. I'm willing to risk my cloud backup without a full restore because it would cost a lot to restore in a short space of time. Over time it would be minimal cost.
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There's other things that ought to be tested. A customer were on the ball and tested their generator would start if they simulated a power outage. So UPS's kept things going in the data hall and then the generator quickly kicked in.
In a real power outage the generator did not start... because it was plugged in to a power socket on the unprotected, non-UPS side of the power distribution. No power to start the generator. Oops.
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Back in the days of floppy floppies, I asked someone for the copies they had made of their original installation disks.
She gave me a folder containing photocopies of all the disks.
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I like the one where the backups were stored in a building off site - another building they owned. In the basement. In a flood plain. It was a water utility company as well.
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>>..photocopies of the disks>>
That made me laugh out loud...:-)
Last edited by: Stuartli on Fri 5 Jun 15 at 18:16
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Now that i've had the wind put up me and i,m not computer savvy, my computer recently prompted me to "insert disc for back up" i inserted a CD-R disc to which it said "unable to copy to disc" What sort of disc should i have used ?
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maltrap,
It is likely that you used the correct disc.
I assume that you were trying to do a backup and that you had started this deliberately rather than simply a Windows prompt out of the blue?
What software were you using? Or were you using a windows application?
I assume that the CD-R was new and unused and that it wasn't noticeably damaged or scratched?
Are you sure that you have a CD writer (they usually are) rather than just a CD Reader?
If you can give a few more details I'm sure that we'll be able to guide you through it.
Last edited by: No FM2R on Fri 5 Jun 15 at 21:13
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A few years ago now, but my brother-in-law started his own business, and I begged him to do a backup of his documentation. He did, but it all went on one floppy and he thought it strange it was so quick. Didn't take long to find out he was backing up only the shortcut links.
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"Back in the days of floppy floppies" and when these were the boot up disks, even for the mini computers...
...we gave our resident engineer a minor heart attack when he saw the critical system diskettes on our magnetic noticeboard, held in place with magnets.
Oh how we laughed... he was sooo gullible
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And when you do restore the back ups make sure you use the right tapes.
Years ago we used a system called Solacs running on a Boroughs 96 'mini' computer - it was the size of a decent drinks cabinet. Was supposed to be capable of being run by ordinary office staff and had been for several years. However, following a pregnancy epidemic all those who understood it were on maternity leave. Solution was to hand it over to the 'specialists' in the air con'd suite on the 4th floor.
Not long after it threw one of it's periodic wobblies and the professionals had to restore the back ups which comprised two tapes - each neatly labelled Tuesday. Unfortunately, of the two the clot selected one was Tuesday 8 April and the other Tuesday 1st April
It seemed to work OK for about a week until somebody from floor 4 thought to ask what the error messages on the shut down prints meant.
Had to have a roomful of staff in over a weekend to re-key a weeks worth of data and another day's work for me sorting out balance trail mismatches.
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Sat 6 Jun 15 at 12:04
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>>
>> TEST THE BACKUPS
>>
Like he said. I've got 5 year old DVD-R photo backups that won't read, and 10 year old CD-Rs that won't either - the latter are all one specific brand (others of that vintage play back fine), so it seems it was a bad batch.
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Our company had new company-wide manufacturing and management software installed. In order to fine-tune it some of us had access to a test version of the same software. One day, come going home time, I discovered I had spent the last three hours entering new incoming sales orders on the test system.
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Me banging on about backups.... - Zero
