You have followed my tips on Part I and now it’s time to advanced tips.
Create Backups of your Backups!
Always remember that your backup is a safety net. If the server fails, the backup is the major solution (then occasionally only one) to make the server work again. Because backup is very important, do not just have one backup. If possible, make backups of your backups. You firmly do not want to be in a condition where you can not do the recovery because the only backup you have failed.
Do Anticipation of Change!
Suppose that every tree months you make backups that are resuscitated as an enduring documentation. However, with the time backup technology is change. Although modify is foreseeable, you should always ensure that you have the software and hardware to read old backup tape, to anticipate in occurrence you necessitate restoring data from tape archives.
Consider the Impact of Security Backups!
Sometimes recovery can not be done because no one recognizes the password on the backup tape. Sometimes there are also companies that use the encryption hardware and then upgrade to a new tape drive that doesn’t support encryption that is used before (which means, old backups can not be used). There is no rebuffing that secure backups are important, but it is as properly imperative to suppose the results of security measures. If you have to recovery data after a severe system failure, the last thing you need security mechanism, which turned out to obstruct the path of the recovery process.
Don’t Just Backing up Data!
If the server is problematic and should make an extensive recovery, you really can just reinstall the operating system and applications. After that you can restore the data. However, time is the most crucial thing when recovery from crashes. It will be much more rapidly to restore everything from backup instead of installing the operating system and applications. It’s often not easy to configure the server manually to match the prior configuration. By doing a totally backup then the configuration will be exactly alike before the crash.
Don’t Just Rely on Backup Server!
Backup server offers many advantages over traditional tape backup. However, do not just rely on backup solutions like this, because backup servers are susceptible to risks akin to a protected server. Fire, lightning, storms, or flood could wipe out the backup server along with another server. Therefore, move the contents of the backup server to tape on a regular basis.
Use the Long Tape Rotation System
Suppose that your workplace is doing a two-week tape rotation. This is not problematic, until one day you get corrupted data on the server. When trying to restore, it turns out the backup already contains data that is corrupt. It turned out that data corruption has occurred for some time and got worse. These is the reason for the necessity of testing backups on a regular basis, but also do a long rotation system or at least save some tape as a long-term archival backups.