Data Backup

With migrating data from an older NAS unit to a newer one this week, it has brought to mind the issue of data backups and the progression of technology.

It is essential with any business (and personally) to backup data, but what do you back it up to? In the distant past, I backed up to tape drives, then Zip drives and then back onto tape...but with the progression of technology, reading those backups became more difficult [and in some cases impossible] as operating systems changed and were no longer supported, hardware became obsoleted and/or failed, drivers were no longer supported on new PCs and the media also failed.

With the advent of cheap disk storage, backups have moved onto multiple drives, network attached storage and SANS...but the same issues remain. The hardware gets older and is no longer supported; drivers are not updated for the latest operating systems; encryption methods change and hard drives do fail on a regular basis. With the typical PC being supplied with 500GB to 2TB drives these days, making sure you have a backup of all your files becomes increasing more difficult and expensive.

So the advice is to make sure you do back up your critical files but also to revisit your backup strategy once a year and look at how easy it is to restore your backups. Do you rely on a single machine to restore an older backup because it has a specific operating system on it? Does the backup application only run on a specific operating system and service pack level? Do you know what format your backup is in? Are all your machines able to access the backup files...how easy is it to restore them? What kind of backup have you got...a full, partial or incremental backup? Do you know which machine the backup media was formatted with (different filesystems may not be readable on all your machines). When was the last time you tried to restore the data from the backup media?

Take care...those backups may in time become a conundrum that you cannot solve (access)!