There has been a huge evolution in backup technology in recent years. In the traditional backups that were mainly to tape we simply backed up files and folders which could be restored. Sound great? No. For us IT admins it was a nightmare if a system completely failed and needed to be restored from the ground up. In short, it would involve us spending hours if not days reinstalling the operating system and carrying out a disaster recovery of applications one by one, many times the text book procedure would fail and we would have to start the entire process all over again. With the introduction of virtualisation this improved somewhat as we could snapshot the machine before moving onto the next stage, giving us the chance to go back to that point if required. Still far from ideal when you’re up against the clock OR having to provide disaster recovery planning, testing and documentation.
What happened next? Two advances in backup technology.
- Image based backup software – built into Windows 2008 and above, backups would copy an image of the partitions to backup media, which would be replayed back to another system in the event of a disaster. This would restore all the files, folders, applications, users and settings.
- Deduplication – with the image backup is use, deduplication is a process of eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data being copied to the backup media. This means each time the same backup media is used a check is made to see if those bits and bytes already exist on the drive, meaning backups are completed a lot faster.
With these two technologies in place it is now easier to restore your servers. Can you sleep yet? NO! You still haven’t tested it.
Carden IT offer and actively promote this service. We can:
- Setup your backup plans
- Supply your storage media
- Design your backup strategy
- Design your Disaster Recovery plan
- Test your Disaster Recovery plan
- With the results document your Disaster Recovery plan
- Find improvements in recovery time
Don’t be fooled but the sight of the “success” message. Don’t devalue your data. Don’t be caught out.
Contact us today for more information on our services.