Security Watch | Matt Hines » Backup, backup and more backup

July 01, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Backup, backup and more backup

TAGS: Security

I've noticed recently that more and more of my clients and friends are having drive failures.

Now I don't know if it's the recent heat waves, global warming, or the fact that most of the drives that are in play right now were purchased quite some time ago and have just run their spindles out, but at least once a week for the past two months I've heard about a full on drive failure or seen a drive showing the signs of impending doom.

Since we're at the halfway mark for the year I'm suggesting that we all take a look at our backup solution and make sure that the whole end to end backup process is working.

If you've got VMWare running (and who doesn't these days) make sure that your image restore process works by creating a full server and workstation restore into a VMWare session.

I've worked with several backup packages over the years where it looked like the backup process worked, but once a restore was tried there was nothing but failure.

So, give your backup a good shaking out to make sure there are no surprises waiting for you if you do have to deal with a failing or failed drive or drive array.

Remember your laptops and other miscellaneous endpoints that are usually missed because they're not always connected to the network.

And don't forget to backup your router, switch and router configs while you're at it. You'll be glad you did.

Posted by Victor R. Garza on July 1, 2006 06:21 PM

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