Make History, Not Backups
That’s the tagline from Lenovo 3000 C Series notebooks. I saw it along Edsa’s northbound tunnel intersecting Shaw Boulevard (in Tagalog, the tunnel in front of Edsa Shangri-la).
From the above tagline, I’d say Lenovo was trying to capture an audience that wants to:
- Make history - perform breakthroughs that will be remembered for years to come.
- Make history, Not Backups - have a system that can run forever. Don’t bother with backups, it won’t go down.
I’m all for both types of intended audience, but I don’t think such tagline is a good slogan from an IT security perspective. While such tagline was not meant to be taken literally as it is, it has a subconscious message preparing computer users for a big disaster.
I’ve had many people asking me once in a while, “Do you know how to recover data from a broken computer / hard drive?” To which I honestly reply, “If it’s a broken operating system that won’t let you in to see your files, I can help you with that. If there’s physical damage to the hard drive itself, there’s nothing much that I can do.”
While hard drives today are less prone to bad sectors (a common occurence 10 years ago) and have increased life times (mean time before failure), there is no reason not to make backups - whether we want to make history or not. While it may seem the most crude of IT security solutions in case of a disaster, it is still a basic and fundamental standard operation.
A year ago, I wrote about the same topic. Attached is my entry on the same topic.
Backup and Shoes
A backup is one of the most primitive but fundamental aspect of business continuity planning. In this world of 99.9999…s % uptime, backups provide a way to recover from information systems-related data meltdown.
Got sneaky data corrupted by a transaction? Restore the backup!
Erased/added/updated data accidentally? Restore the backup!
Feeling sad and blue? Restore the backup!
Backups can be a real business saver if implemented properly. As such, several strategies have been made known to man:
- Incremental
- Differential
- Full
When exactly do companies backup? Some with an 8-5 punch card do it after office hours while others with a 24/7 business do it when there are the least amount of users or transactions using their system.
Backups, i’d like to end with, are much like shoes. If you keep using the same and single media for backup, wear and tear will eventually produce a bad sector from the floppy or tape. if you keep using the same pair of shoes (or any equipment, for the matter), your shoes will have a short (but hopefully meaningful) existence. That’s why it has been common practice to rotate several tapes / backup media for physical data storage integrity.
- Grandfather-father-son
- Tower of hanoi
- Round-robin
Listed above are possible implementations of tape rotation to keep backup media from getting worn out.
As a last note, remember that backups are good in as much as they work. So when you do create backups, make sure that you test them if they work.
