News came this week of a major Australian organisation that turned to its backups when it really needed them, only to find out that some software bug had been destroying the backups for months, unnoticed. There's nothing like burning your fingers to make sure you avoid touching a hot surface in future! The moral? Test your backups.
While for you and I, backups are not usually an integral part of daily life, for any organisation that depends on its electronic information, it is critical that the electronic information is protected, regularly, and that the protection is checked. How do you know if your organisation depends on electronic information? Switch off the computers, and see how long you can last before things get uncomfortable. At the very least, take 10 minutes to consider which files, documents, spreadsheets, emails and other such data you constantly refer to, and imagine if some or all was lost. How hard would it be to rebuild the data? How much time would it take? How much money would you and/or your business lose because of this lost productivity?
The Australian company that learned its lesson the hard way is EnergyAustralia, a state-owned company in New South Wales. Everyone had been happily performing backups for years. Some minor disaster must have happened that required them to restore important data – they turned to their backups only to find them useless. Oops. No doubt heads will roll, and no doubt it will not be those of the people who are really in charge ie. at the top. Who was more responsible, the technicians who installed and ran the backup system, or the executive who's business the backup system was meant to protect? Fundamentally, those at the top need to accept responsibility and take an interest in their own company's systems and procedures. If you pay for a backup system, confirm for yourself that you are getting what you paid for.
Testing backups can be quite straightforward – particularly for the boss. It can be as simple as a call to an IT person requesting a specific document to be retrieved from the backup. Or it can be a full-fledged disaster-recovery exersise where IT support are requested to rebuild an entire electronic filing system or database using only backups and spare equipment.
In this day and age, backups are not just critical, they are also easy. There is a range of alternatives (tape backup, external hard disks, mirroring to secondary computers, even internet-based services, as well as smaller-scale USB devices, writeable DVDs or CDs, or email attachments). Backups can be cheap, cheerful and manual, or expensive, all-encompassing and highly automated. Make sure yours includes everything that you would need, and make sure you can get stuff out as well as put stuff in.
And make sure you KEEP testing too, every month or so. There's no point wasting money on insurance that will not pay out when you need it to.
Questions?
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