The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” dates back to at least the 13th century. Essentially, the idea here is that something is easily forgotten or dismissed as unimportant if it is not in direct view. Think about it. At some point in your life (home or work), you’ve strategically placed an “IMPORTANT document” on the remaining clear space on your desk. As hours and days pass, other “not so important documents” and Post-it Notes begin to invade the sacred desk space that had once been dedicated to that “IMPORTANT document.” While the value of the “IMPORTANT document” has not really changed, daily distractions and shifting piles have caused the “IMPORTANT document” to become lost in the mix and appear as “just another document,” one that you will eventually get to, eventually read and eventually take action. Sound familiar?
So how does this relate to RPOs and RTOs – recovery point and recovery time objectives – for remote offices? Simple. Even though remote offices/branch offices (ROBOs) are indeed “out of site,” they should not be out of mind – particularly the mind of IT. Only by taking time to classify applications and data at your remote sites, can you ensure adequate protection AND recoverability.
Here’s an easy way to classify data:
Mission Critical Data/Applications are those that could result in negative financial or legal impact on the business if they are lost for any period of time. Real-time data protection solutions often come into play here.
Business Vital Data is just that. This data is vital to the daily operations of your business. Plans for protecting and recovering may include bare metal recovery, backup to disk and perhaps even real-time data protection.
Important Data may be subject to a higher rate of change. Unlike static data, if you were to accidentally delete important data, there would be a higher sense of urgency and a desire to get it back relatively quickly.
Static Data doesn’t change much over time.Likely needs to be backed up once so that a copy does exist and can be accessed at some point if there is a requirement to do so.
So, don’t forget about the applications and data at remote offices. Don’t forget about your remote users. Take time to classify the data at these sites.You may find that the data protection solution you have in place to be sufficient in terms of delivering the desired RPOs and RTOs. However, factor in the need for recovery-ready offsite copies, seamless failover and failback and you may find that your current plan falls short. Only by first classifying remote site data can you begin to put a well-designed and comprehensive data protection plan into place.
In this podcast, BakBone customer Derek Kruger discusses the challenges he faced with his old backup solution and why he switched to NetVault: FASTRecover. He shares with us how FASTRecover helps keep the city’s financial databases up and running, how it has eliminated backup windows and how the product works quietly behind the scenes to keep Exchange and SQL data available for the employees and citizens of Safford. “No one cares if you back anything up, all they care is if you can get it back to them when they ask for it,” Derek says.
BakBone SVP Ken Horner was recently honored as an “Executive of the Year” Tech Awards Circle Winner for his innovation in the storage industry and executive leadership.
In this podcast, we learn how Ken got his start in storage and how the industry has evolved over the last 25 years. And finally, we wrap up the podcast with a few questions about Ken’s life outside of storage!
The entire IT world knows that we need to protect our data, but there are always questions on how. I want to talk about a strategy for storing backup off-site on tapes. I realize that tape backup is only one of several different approaches, and that your requirements may differ, but we’ll stick to the basics in this discussion.
One common method is based on a simple rotation from daily backups, so someone comes in every morning, takes a backup tape and then stores it in a safe location. The location however, may not be appropriate or safe and should be evaluated. One backup consultant heard of a customer who would take the tapes and put them in his desk drawer where he felt it was safe because the office door was always locked at night. Or another in which the tapes were stored in the trunk of the IT administrator’s car all week…. in Arizona! A safe place should always be temperature-controlled and off-site in case of a disaster.
There is a higher upfront cost to keep several copies of media off-site, but the security of properly protecting your data will always be the best choice.
You also need to bring the appropriate amount of data off-site. So if you are simply rotating one backup every day this can leave you vulnerable since you only have one roll back point from the previous night. Many people in the industry have used the strategy of Grandfather, Father, Son when it comes to backups and that approach still works as a basic way of protecting data. The way it works is that you do an incremental or differential backup every weekday and take that off-site, and continue to do this all week. At the end of the week you take a full backup, designate it as a weekly and bring all previous daily backups on-site for reuse. Continue this each week until the first week of the next month where you will keep your last full weekly as a monthly and then bring back all previous weekly’s for reuse.
Now you will then keep each monthly and rotate them back every 12, 18 or 36 months, depending on your requirements (don’t confuse these with archive tapes – that is another subject!). This strategy gives you flexibility to roll back to several points in time where the data is still intact or free from corruption by viruses. There is a higher upfront cost to keep several copies of media off-site, but the security of properly protecting your data will always be the best choice.
Disk-based backup is also a key element of data protection, and I will tackle the value of disk-based backup in a future discussion.
