‘When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly 40 years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident… or any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.’ – E. J. Smith, 1907, Captain, RMS Titanic
When considering disasters, consider yourself lucky if one has not yet happened to you, as it gives you the opportunity to do something to pre-empt it. Remember, the only measures you can take are by their nature preventative. Once it happens and it will, you can only rely on the preventative measures you took. After the fact is too late.
The old adage ‘Prevention is better than cure’ is so true. If at all possible, you should try to prevent the disaster from happening in the first place or at least take steps to minimise the effect. You can do this in a number of ways.
Firstly, make your mission-critical systems as robust as possible. You could mirror system disks, use RAID systems, cluster those systems or any one of a number of steps. Obviously power protection is a prerequisite. Somewhere in the region of 70 per cent of hard-drive
Second, employ technologies that will allow you to recover quickly and easily when disaster strikes. Backing up your data is fundamental. In an ideal world we would all backup all of our data every night. You may have to do full backups at weekends with
incremental backups in between but do the best you can. A few Backup guidelines would be:
• Backup all your data. It’s all of value. You won’t know just how valuable until you need it.
• Backup regularly. Do full backups daily if at all possible.
• Take copies off site. I’ve heard of one company who dispatch their backup tapes daily to themselves by courier. If the building is still there the following morning they accept delivery of the tapes. If not, they can have them redirected to a disaster recovery site.
• Keep older backups. Don’t rotate your backups too quickly.
• Test your backups. Was your data backed up properly?
• Secure the backups. Store the media securely in a fire safe or bank vault.
• Ensure the integrity of the backups. Ensure you’re not backing viruses or corrupt files.
A relatively easy method that most can employ is to use a disaster recovery option from your backup software supplier to allow you to rebuild your system more quickly. This will generate a disaster recovery set which you can then use to recreate your system, either on to a new or repaired server.
You can use technologies such as replication to have live or relatively live copies of your data offsite. Remember replication does not replace backup, as it will replicate deletions and viruses etc. Replication can help, for example, if your primary site becomes
unavailable. You could replicate to another building in your campus or a completely separate location. Alternatively you could contract to replicate your data to one of the companies specialising in offering business continuity services.
There are many services and technologies, which will help in either building a more robust environment or helping you recover from the diisaster. Your friendly IT providers await your call.
The author is Technical Director of CMS Peripherals
11/10/04
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