How useful are your backups?
Are you retaining a backup for 10+ years? Can you still use the data? How useful are your backups?
A necessary burden
Backups are a necessary task for all businesses. A hundred years ago, if there was a fire at a business, then everything would be lost – a paper focus and single site. The advent of computers and technology have made recovery possible – now if you have a disaster, all your work can be recovered – right?
How useful are your backups
Yet backups are rarely validated and tested, frequently just assumed to work, and largely ignored. There are requirements to retain backups for 7+ years for many tax and government reasons, and many businesses will aim to keep backups for longer.
But, how useful is the backup?
Can backups be recovered? Do you still have the same backup tape drives and backup software? Is the new software really compatible with the old backups? Have you password protected the backups, and so do you know which password is needed / relevant to the backup? What about encryption keys and certificates? Even keeping some old tape drives may be problematic, which SCSI connector are they? Do you have an interface card and cable to match? Is the Interface card a connector that will fit in your server? Have you kept the old tape drive in a dust-free, static-free, moisture controlled environment? Do you have a second tape drive / cable / interface card / copy of the backup software / copy of the OS / license keys / backup password \ encryption keys? Do you have people who have the skills to get it up and running?
So many questions
Even if you are able to get data back, is it a backup that must be restored to the same server name and instance? Do you have to restore it to the same drive letter (war story)? Will you be able to mount or read the data? Will you be able to start the services that are required to read the data?
If it is files, will you be able to open those files – aside from databases, do you still have that copy of AmiPro, Wordstar, Lotus 123, etc. – do you have the install media and license keys, or a converter? When your business was small, did you use software with a proprietary format, like Microsoft Money for accounting (war story)?
Perhaps your backups are not as useful as you think they are, but how do you address this? Would you restore each backup, perform a conversion to new or generic file formats, and then back up with the new software and tape media? Who makes the decision to do that, just in case you need to restore the data, or do you only deal with the problem when it happens, paying a premium the longer it is left to become obsolete?
Cloud backups
Backups for Cloud are another challenge – as the system you need to restore to may not be available for you to restore to! One of the common misconceptions of cloud is that you don’t need to do a backup, but this is not true – you just need to focus on the ability to recover the data into a useful form.
