Dependency tracking is an absolutely essential feature within a backup product. It’s there to ensure you can recover data through the entire specified retention period for your backups, regardless of what mix of full, differential and/or incremental backups you do. It’s staggering to think there are some backup products out there (*cough* net *cough* ‘backup’), that treat backup retention with such contempt that they don’t bother to enforce dependency preservation.
Without dependency tracking, you’ve always got the risk that a recovery you want to do on the edge of your specified retention period might fail.
NetWorker does dependency tracking by default. In fact, it only does dependency tracking. To understand how dependency tracking works, and what that means for protecting your backups, check out my video below. (Make sure to switch it into High Definition – it’s not about being able to see more of my beard, but it is to make sure you can see all the screen content!)
Dependency tracking is such an important feature in data protection that you’ll find it’s also covered in my book, Data Protection: Ensuring Data Availability.
On another note, I’m starting a new project. I may work in IT, but I’ve always been a fan of philosophy, too. The new project is called Fools Rush In, and it’s going to be an ongoing weekly exploration of topics relating to ethics in IT and modern technology. It’s going to be long-form in its approach – the perfect thing to sit down and read over a cup of coffee or tea. This’ll be an exciting journey, and I’d love it if you joined me on it. The introductory article is …where angels fear to tread, and the latest post, What is Ethics? gives a bit of a primer on schools of ethical thought and how we can start approaching ethics in IT/technology.