6 causes may damage your backup

TipsMake.com - Last week, many people were surprised to hear a big company like Danger Inc. It can be quite an amateurish problem of losing T-Mobile Sidekick customer data. As a system administrator, you must always ensure the safety of backups. Here are 6 possible causes of damage or loss to your backups.

1, Based on RAID

You have made a wise decision to ensure that company data is stored on redundant disks. Disk arrays using standard RAID 1, 5 and 6 can continue to function if a drive malfunctions. This is great, but what happens if a series of drives run into problems due to reasons such as power failure, fire, flood, or user error? And what happens if the data is corrupted or accidentally deleted? Indeed RAID is great in some ways, but it's not reliable enough to be a backup plan.

2, Based on external media

Do you intend to take advantage of cheap and large-capacity external drives to back up your system? This is not a bad idea if you later need to unplug the backup drive and move it to an alternate location.

However, it would be bad if you kept connecting that backup drive to the system regularly. Imagine that one day your system is attacked by a virus or hacked by the hacker, all data on all connected drives can be deleted easily. Keeping your backups in a place away from the system minimizes the risk of losing all of your data because of an incident.

3, Backup on-site

On-site backup is a backup method in which your system and backup media are located in the same building. Some problems make you need to resort to backups that can also destroy your on-site backups, such as natural disasters or fires from rooms with lots of electrical equipment. death. Not long after the September 11, 2001 event, I heard an anecdote of a company operating in a tower and kept data backups in the second tower. Of course, data loss is not the worst problem for this company, but losing data is the fastest way to bankruptcy.

4, Do not check the backup

When was the last time you conducted a data recovery test? If the answer is never, then how can you know if your backup is good? How do you know if you have backed up the right data?

5, Do not create multiple data backups

The reality is that most vehicles are reliable. However, whether hard drive, tape, or optical drive can be damaged or damaged. Conducting regular backups and rotating storage media is the best way to ensure that a failed drive cannot ruin your business.

6, Do not back up the system before making a significant change

If you are about to update a patch, or upgrade the software, or upgrade the hardware, it's best to back up the data before making changes. Making any significant changes, such as updating the system, may cause the system database to be damaged or prevent the system from starting. It is best to be prepared by backing up the data first.

Think of the incident at Danger as a lesson, because from now on the company will lose confidence from its customers, and their system administrators may lose their jobs.