World backup day is approaching. (A few years ago now, someone came up with the idea of designating one day of the year to recognise backups.) Funnily enough, I’m not a fan of world backup day, simply because we don’t backup for the sake of backing up, we backup to recover.
Every day should, in fact, be world backup day.
Something that isn’t done enough – isn’t celebrated enough, isn’t tested enough – are recoveries. For many organisations, recovery tests consist of actually doing a recovery when requested, and things like long term retention backups are never tested, and even more rarely recovered from.
So this Friday, March 31, I’d like to suggest you don’t treat as World Backup Day, but World Recovery Test Day. Use the opportunity to run a recovery test within your organisation (following proper processes, of course!) – preferably a recovery that you don’t normally run in terms of day to day operations. People only request file recoveries? Sounds like a good reason to run an Exchange, SQL or Oracle recovery to me. Most recoveries are Exchange mail level recoveries? Excellent, you know they work, let’s run a recovery of a complete filesystem somewhere.
All your recoveries are done within a 30 day period of the backup being taken? That sounds like an excellent idea to do the recovery from an LTR backup written 2+ years ago, too.
Part of running a data protection environment is having routine tests to validate ongoing successful operations, and be able to confidently report back to the business that everything is OK. There’s another, personal and selfish aspect to it, too. It’s one I learnt more than a decade ago when I was still an on-call system administrator: having well-tested recoveries means that you can sleep easily at night, knowing that if the pager or mobile phone does shriek you into blurry-eyed wakefulness at 1am, you can in fact log onto the required server and run the recovery without an issue.
So this World Backup Day, do a recovery test.
The need to have an efficient and effective testing system is something I cover in more detail in Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability. If you want to know more, feel free to check out the book on Amazon or CRC Press. Remember that it doesn’t matter how good the technology you deploy is if you don’t have the processes and training to use it.