Disaster recovery worst practices: Don't perform backups on a regular schedule

by Peter Herbener | Mar 30, 2007 7:00:00 AM

Tags: Backups, Peter Herbener, backup, disaster recovery

Takeaway: Consultant Peter Herbener has compiled a series of disaster recovery worst practices based on his experience. The number one mistake is not backing up on a regular schedule. If you're struggling with the basics, here are some tips to get back on track.

It's good to learn from your mistakes, but it's even better to learn from other people's mistakes. I've compiled some of the disaster recovery (DR) "worst practices" that I've seen in my consulting career. These practices obviously invite trouble, but because they offer an "easy way out" or a seemingly cheaper alternative, they continue to crop up. In this series, I hope not only to help you avoid the most common mistakes but also offer you some positive guidance on keeping your DR practices up to date.

One of the most common DR mistakes is to quit bothering with backups when you get too busy to do them or just get bored with the routine. I also call this the New Year's Resolution syndrome. Every year, people make resolutions to get in shape and lose some weight. In January, gyms and health clubs get very busy. Memberships shoot up; people come to the club regularly, and work out diligently. After a while, though, people get tired of working out. They stop going to the gym, and the club gets much less crowded.

DR worst practices

Don't miss the rest of the series:

Download the complete disaster recovery worst practices series in PDF format.

People do the same thing with backups. They'll get all the gear they need to do them, set up a system, and even perform regular backups for a while. After a month or so, it seems boring and pointless, so they skip a backup or two.

Did you resolve to do it at the end of the day? Sooner or later, you'll need to pick up a kid at day care and have to rush out. Did you resolve to do it first thing in the morning? The phone will ring with a quick question, or you'll need to get an e-mail out, and all of a sudden, it's late morning. Skip a backup here and there -- there's usually no harm. Pretty soon, they've stopped completely.

Nightmare: The backup is too old

A friend wanted help getting a new computer set up for his small business. It wasn't too hard to get his documents moved over from his old computer. We made sure he had a good system for doing backups. He even had a tape drive so he could back up the whole hard drive without the nuisance of swapping disks.

Not quite a year later, disaster struck. His hard drive failed. The good news was that it was still under warranty, so it got fixed without a problem. Unfortunately, his most recent backup was more than six months old.

He admitted that he had stopped running them: It didn't seem to be all that important, because his computer seemed to be working fine. While that tape had hundreds of older documents, all the additions and updates from the last several months were gone.

Yes, performing backups seems boring and pointless -- until you need them.

Better practices for scheduling backups

Establish a schedule you can live with.

Not everyone needs to do backups every day. How serious would it be to lose a day's worth of changes? How about a week? A month? Doing a regular weekly backup is better than planning to do a daily backup and not doing it for a month.

Consider how serious it would be to lose a week's worth of data. Are you losing the only copies of orders, invoices, and other important business records? Or is it data that could be reconstructed with a day or so of retyping?

Fit it in with another routine.

Do you have some other routine -- one that doesn't involve using your computer -- that you can combine with your backup routine? I know one manager who runs backups while reading a trade magazine in the morning.

Get in the habit of running your backup each morning while you're making coffee and taking care of other offline tasks. It really doesn't matter when you do it, as long as you do it on a regular schedule. (Note: Are you backing up a computer that functions as a server or is otherwise shared? You will need to find a time when the data isn't in use to do backups. Many backup methods skip files that are in use.)

Best practices

Automate it.

Can you set it up to run automatically when you're gone? Larger businesses regularly set up their systems to make backups to tape in the middle of the night. That way, they merely need to review logs and swap tapes in the morning.

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