Chapter 21: Backing Up Your Data

If you're the hapless network manager, the safety of the data on your network is your responsibility. In fact, it's your primary responsibility. You get paid to lie awake at night worrying about your data. Will it be there tomorrow? If it's not, can you get it back? And-most importantly-if you can't get it back, will you be there tomorrow?

This chapter covers the ins and outs of being a good, responsible, trustworthy network manager. They don't give out merit badges for this stuff, but they should.

Backing Up Your Data

Having data backed up is the cornerstone of any disaster recovery plan. Without backups, a simple hard drive failure can set your company back days or even weeks while it tries to reconstruct lost data. In fact, without backups, your company's very existence is in jeopardy.

REMEMBER 

The main goal of backups is simple: Keep a spare copy of your network's critical data so that, no matter what happens, you never lose more than one day's work. The stock market may crash, hanging chads may factor into another presidential election, and George Lucas may decide to make a pre-prequel. However, you never lose more than one day's work if you stay on top of your backups.

The way to do this, naturally, is to make sure that data is backed up on a daily basis. In many networks, it's feasible to back up all the network hard drives every night. However, even if full nightly backups aren't possible, you can still use techniques that can ensure that every file on the network has a backup copy that's no more than one day old.