First a warning and my confession: don’t click on dodgy web links. I did, and a virus crippled my PC.
Preface:
As an IT analyst, I am always keen to find out smarter ways of using IT in practice. So you often hear wonderful things about new innovation. Someone may say: “aren’t you using XYZ, it is fantastic, used it for years!” only to feel embarrassingly behind the curve.
As a storage analyst I would like to believe that I am OK at staying abreast at storage related stuff. This includes security and backup and DR/BC.
The human element.
Over the years I have had many private discussions with people I know in the industry. One particular category of discussion kept recurring. Namely, that these professionals had admissions to make in the area of backup or DR. In fact they called to get advice on how to get out of a pickle. There were many permutations, but they all meant that data had been lost. Irrespective of hardware, software or human failure they all involved a single point of failure. The damage had been done, but hopefully something could be salvaged. (Eventually I would ask a storage expert how they could get in such a bind.)
Perfection
As I have stated many times before, in the land of corporate IT there are still many potential flaws threatening the career of IT professionals. This often happens when backup/restore, and DR/BC become dull disciplines. The other version is where senior management instructs IT to downgrade vigilance and planning. This post is about the personal sphere, but corporate IT protection levels are often far from perfect. Just ask someone how often they test their contingency plans.
The incident
In my case I had not practiced my own recovery plans for some time, but the aforementioned dodgy web link scheduled a live event on my behalf. My virus software eventually issued a stark warning message, the OS crashed and then the drive would not boot. The data was fortunately still there (so the inability to boot was probably not a bad thing). Next my task was to ensure that data was safe, duplicated and a new boot drive was to be created. The greatest inconvenience was the time to scan my disk drives before removing potential threats.
The fix
My ability to recreate a bootable drive was due to a drive image backup application. In brief, this creates a separate image of a hard drive, which can relatively quickly be backed up or restored. I would also have had the ability to recreate unique data even if my image had been a little old and my main drive had disappeared. Ultimately my worst scenario would either be fire or the complete failure of my hard drives. In which case I would be able to recover my data from off-site backups although some applications would have to be reacquired.
One element of data protection, which I have not implemented, is Continuous Data Protection (CDP). I have resolved that I can endure my Recovery Point Objective counting a number of days.
The recommendation
This is for anyone with a computer, especially the technically savvy, and not least those who have not revisited their back-up strategy for a while.
And it is not really different in the world of Enterprise IT. Explore all the data which is unique or important; and decide which needs to be protected? Think about files, photos, music, applications etc. and decide what data are important. Then consider not only a backup on or next to the computer, but in a separate location (there are many off-site providers to explore). Then settle on a frequency that is workable and acceptable. Once you have thought all this through then you are off to a good start. Then you can add additional sophistication.
The verdict
My own personal verdict is that my set-up worked. It was slow and cumbersome and I have warmed somewhat to CDP. I did not lose any data and I fortunately did not experience aggravating factors compounding upon each other.
Please feel free to call me in the future about any data recovery problems. But I enjoy the ones even more where someone calls to show off just how good their plans worked out in practice.