Who is your backup admin?

Who manages the backups at your site? I.e., who has primary duties for administering and maintaining the backup system?

I’m not a gambling person, but odds are if your organisation is “average” based on my experience, it’ll be the most junior person in the responsible team. That’s how I started in backups, by the way – I joined a system administration team in 1996, and was told to start managing the backups.

I’m all for giving junior people experience in complex and important systems – hands on experience significantly outweighs formal training or certification programmes in my estimate. But there’s a vast gulf of difference between hands on experience and manages.

Let’s compare backup to a few other realms to see what I mean.

• When you consider an insurance company, do you take into consideration how long they’ve been in the industry?
• When you take your car to a mechanic, do you hope it’ll be serviced by the apprentice, or the actual mechanic?
• When you go to the doctors, do you want to get seen by a fully qualified doctor or someone doing their first placement after 6-12 months through their university degree?
• When you get tradespeople in to do work, do you want the apprentice that started last week doing the work, or the experienced tradesperson?
• If you call the police, do you want to see a rookie turn up, or an officer with real experience?

I’m willing to assume that in the majority of instances, regardless of whether it’s in health, repairs, trades, insurance, etc., most people will want to be looked after by someone with real experience. If there’s a “junior” involved, you want them supervised and their work double-checked.

Yet many companies time and time again push backups down to the lowest rung in the administration team. It just doesn’t sit well with reality. It’s not how we want to deal with people and situations in real life, and yet because it’s supposedly not a glamorous job, it gets assigned to juniors.

I have a great friend who is a paramedic. He is, quite literally, a hero, though he denies it. He’s saved peoples lives, he’s given people hope, he’s dealt with people at their very best, and at their very worst, and all done it as part of his job. For some time he worked with students who were studying to become paramedics themselves, as an instructor. They’d be teamed up with him, and he’d do his call-outs with the student. The student would be forced to learn, but he’d be a safety net – not only for the student but equally, if not more so, for the patient.

I think a lot of companies forget the safety net when they assign backups to the most junior person in the administration team. Sure, in many instances, the senior staff will pitch in and participate during a critical recovery, but that’s not a safety net, it’s an umbrella in a hail storm. A safety net, in backup systems, would be where the senior person is there monitoring, watching and assisting not only in the recovery processes, but also in the configuration and ongoing checking of the backup system.

(Another example: EMC have a “Disaster Recovery Guide” for NetWorker. The worst mistake a backup administrator can make is read this for the first time when they need to do a disaster recovery. It should actually be read well in advance of a recovery situation, as it gives important information pertaining to getting backups that are useful in disaster recovery situations.)

By all means have your junior staff teethe on a backup system – they’ll rarely get a better cross platform and cross system exposure to your environment than by working with backup. But equally, remember where and when you want to see inexperienced or junior people working on your health, your car, your house repairs, etc., and make sure you deploy an appropriate safety net.

If you don’t … well, have a nice fall.