Backup

A voyage through the nether regions

Project status

Nebulous pre project phaseGather informationTalk to vendors, staff, stakeholders

Develop a PID (Project Initiation Document)

Project Initiation Document

Contains project plan (what we plan to do)

Says who is going to do itSays when we plan to do it byLists risks and constraints (funding, staff falling off their bikes, etc)

What’s the problem with backup?

Three fold :Lack of capacity to run backups reliably

Windows backup problemsStorage policy

Capacity

We can’t always write all our backups reliablyCheapest way to fix is add disk as a buffer Need to evaluate d2d, vtl’s, and anything else out there to get a quick win

Capacity

Need to analyse and classify to ensure we make best use of capacityAre we backing up some data too often or not often enough

Is some data more important than other? Triage (Crucial to business, important, less important)

Publish policy

Windows backups

General feeling Backup Exec not up to jobNeed to keep things running in the mean time

Need to develop an exit strategy Netbackup SQL and Exchange tools? Commvault?

Storage Policy

In future we need to incorporate backup in storage policyBefore adding new storage or filesystems need to consider how we’re going to back it up, and what additional capacity, licenses etc are required

Backup is not sexy, people need to be made to think about it

And the future?

This is only fixes today’s problems

We need to think aboutRetention periodsArchiving (regulatory requirements, life time learning)

Migration (moving data from old storage to new)