Backup is a concept that is often misrepresented as a simple “copy files here” and “carry files off-site sometime” in small/medium businesses and rarely is the real core of the issue broached properly. That issue is a single key question: How do we recover from a disaster?
if this questions sounds pretty basic it really shouldn’t. A good disaster recovery is hard to create and often even harder to implement however if approached methodically even a small IT department should be able to tackle this question. First in my opinion this key question can itself be broken down to three “sub” groups:
- What is our data (user and systems)?
- Where do users save their work data/documents (note not where are they supposed to, but where do they actually save)
- What makes each of our systems/servers unique from a base install
- What outside data do we use everyday
- and many more questions that identify all your data that doesn’t come on a CD or download from the vendor/manufacturer.
- What are our acceptable recovery time?
- what is our immediate time frame (5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day)
- what is our mid-term time frame (1 hour, 1 day, 3 days, 1 week)
- what is our long term time frame (1 week, 1 month, 3 months)
- What is our process to identify the problem and recover?
- How do we get number 1. back in less time then 2. dictates
- what is our process for each of the failures and time frame (think matrices layout)
classical album and although not fantastic it is with a full orchestra and does sound classical in nature. I offered my son to listen to some “rockin’ classical” and since “rockin’ ” is one of his favorite word he went along with it and low and behold after 5 minutes of listening in the car he didn’t ask me to turn it off and actually announced that he liked it. Don’t get me wrong this is by no means a master piece; probably not even a very good album but if it helps get the classical sensitivities out to my kids I am perfectly ok with that.