Overview
Many
organizations have inadequate contingency plans relating to physical
interruption, computer equipment failure or many other calamities.
Computers always fail and they fail at the most inconvenient times.
While every user’s environment differs to some
degree, there is a common requirement shared by all which is to
conduct systematic backups.
Regular backups minimize the cost to recover
after a system crash, hard disk failure, corruption, accidentally
deleted files or any other event which can require the recovery of
files stored off-line on tape or in some other medium.
Backing up data is one of the most important,
if not the singular most important tasks that system administrators
must perform.
Administering backups requires a degree of
discipline and behaviors that need to be instilled in operators from
the onset of their employment. Both the duties and responsibilities,
along with a clear description of the repercussions of failure to
backup and restore data need to be clearly articulated to employees
and included in their job descriptions.
Users also need to be trained. It should be regularly reinforced
that users are required to store any critical files on a server if
they are to be backed up. There should be a provision in users’ job
descriptions that note this responsibility.
Organizations with a large workstation base should devise a strategy
for which server disk drives are backed up regularly with systematic
differential or incremental backups of the workstations. |