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.