Servers & Company Data

Monitor, Manage and Protect Servers and Company Data

This section is primarily about making sure you have backups of your Company's data so that when a hardware failure or physical disaster occurs, your business can recover:

Situation A: As quickly as possible, or
Situation B: Before your restored data must be used again.

Situation A tends to be about a random hardware failure without theft or physical disaster. Example: A hard drive failed, and you need to restore a backup and get back to work.

Situation B requires far more planning and expense. If your facilities suffer a physical disaster, it may not matter that you need a few days to replace hardware, retrieve your backups from an off-site location and rebuild things. That depends a great deal on your business and whether or not you have multiple locations.

NOTE: Window Book recommends the use of battery power backup devices for all servers.

How often do we need to backup Company data?

The easy answer is daily, weekly, and monthly. Unfortunately, the easy answer is seldom enough.

Focus on what is necessary to satisfy your Company's ability to recover from a failure or physical disaster (fire, flood, sprinkler problem, tornado, etc.). While backups may seem like a burdensome task, we encourage you to look at this decision strategically. To that end, we have provided a few questions to help you with an ideal time between backups that makes the most sense for your Company's situation. The thing to focus on is restoring your Company's critical systems within a time frame that allows you to meet SLAs, keep all your Clients, and avoid as much re-work as possible.

Situation: You've had a hardware failure that required you to purchase replacement hardware (such as a hard drive). Before you can restore your files and get back to work, you must remove the old drive, install the replacement drive, then take additional steps so that you can boot. Once you can boot to Windows (or a recovery environment), you need to restore the data from the backup media.

Given the situation described above and the amount of time you have already been down, consider these questions:

How long can the business survive the inability to do the work that you are backing up?
How long did it take to restore the backup media to the new drive during your practice run?
Are you using an online (internet-based) backup service? How long will it take to download and restore the files?
If your business is rural, how long will it take to get a replacement hard drive?

If it takes longer than you are willing to wait to resume work or longer than you can afford to wait, you should have a replacement drive (or drives) in stock. If a replacement is always (yes, ALWAYS) 10 minutes away, it might not be worth stocking reserves.

All these questions speak to your Company's ability to recover from computer-related problems promptly. In the checklist provided below, you will find practice/test restores. If not done regularly, your Company risks finding a surprise failed backup or backup media, a backup that did not run as expected, or not having the people, equipment, and media needed to recover in the time frame your Company requires.

How often do we need to backup programs?

As long as you have the installation file required to re-install the program after a failure, backing these files up as often as upgrades occur is typically sufficient. What's often more important is making sure you have a backup of any registration information, license keys, and the like.

Why do we need to take backup media off-site?

Your backup media needs to go off site because fires, floods, tornadoes and theft happen. Backup media needs to be rotated off site because your media isn't likely to survive a flood, mudslide, tornado, fire or theft. If someone is trying to ruin you, taking your backups is a good way to do that. If you need to recover from a physical disaster, there's almost zero possibility that you'll find healthy, intact backup media after a flood, mudslide, tornado, or fire. Even if your most recent backups aren't offsite, at least 2 recent copies need to be kept at a location separate from your shop so that you can be sure that you have a backup even on the worst day in your Company's history. I have witnessed a burglary where the robbers took both the computers and the backup media that was sitting on top of the server.

How often should we take our backup media off-site?

We suggest rotating media off-site at least every week. The longer you wait, the bigger the risk, and the more work to get back to normal. While a safety deposit box is an ideal place to store your media for safety purposes, it is not particularly easy and quick to access. Taking it home is OK as long you keep it in a place that will not be affected by strong magnets, moisture, and other things that are not good for backup media. If your home is close to the office, we suggest letting someone else take the media home or rotating the responsibility among trusted employees who do not live close to the office. Why avoid the ones close to the office? Because physical disasters are more likely to affect homes near the office. The How-To / Checklist goes into more detail about off-site backup media rotation.

What's more important than backing up?

The ability to restore. If you do not test this capability, you cannot thoroughly test the process steps for restoring a backup. You also do not know if all the effort of doing backups is protecting you.