You’re not the boss of me

Consider the following two questions:

Do you manage your backups, or do your backups manage you?
Does your organisation decide how backups should be done based on SLAs, etc., or do the backups dictate how production operates?

As you can well imagine, the answers to the above questions will very quickly tell you whether you’ve got a healthy, or a sick backup environment.

While it’s obvious how both questions should be answered, I’d wager that at least some readers will be getting that little twinge reading the above knowing that I’ve just described their backup environment as sick. And I don’t mean sick as in Gen-Y “fully sick”, I mean unwell.

If your backup environment manages you (most specifically your time and the amount of hair you’ve got left), or your backup environment dictates how production works, then you’ve got some problems you need to address. Now.

A lazy backup admin is a healthy backup admin

In 1996, I joined a system administration team that had one guiding motto: be lazy. Their attitude towards work was without a doubt the most influential one I’ve ever encountered, and it still guides my work life to this day.

I don’t mean lazy as in “avoid work”.

I mean lazy as in “automate! automate! automate!”

As far as they were concerned, the goal of the system administrator should be to automate all regular activities to the point that they should either be only ever doing one of four activities:

Automating processes.
Checking results of automated processes.
Waiting for something to go wrong/intervention to be required.
Working on a project.

The same approach should be taken in backups. You should not be say, mindlessly doing repetitive tasks that could be automated – you should be automating them and then checking the automation results. You shouldn’t be fixing errors on a daily basis, you should have a zero error policy, and error processing as an exceptional rather than an every day task. Or you should be working on the next phase of expanding or updating the backup environment.

Et tu, defendo?

The backup system shouldn’t be ambushing primary production. It should be there as a guardian, a defender – not the system that stabs from the shadows, or hogs the limelight.

Every backup product, and every backup system, will of course have limitations. But these limitations should not prevent critical activities in production from being undertaken. Instead, limitations should be ameliorated such that what needs to be done in production can still be done, with appropriate workarounds in place. If the limitations are hard ones which require a rethink of how production is done, it should not be at the expense of the business functions or the end users. This may require mitigation with other technologies – for instance, a classic scenario in situations where the backup product can’t run backups as frequently as SLAs require is to mix traditional backups and snapshots.

Some SLAs, in the light of the available budget and technology should be reassessed. However, that’s not to say all of them should in such situations. A sick backup system is where any SLA, no matter how justified, that can’t be immediately met by the backup system “as is”, is abandoned.