IT Controls

[RGS0907]

I’m sorry to learn about your crash.. At least you have all the history prior to 2005. As an IT Auditor, I preach this stuff every day. My advice would be to make a backup schedule & stick with it.

Every Friday, make one full backup & incremental backups daily after that. (Incremental’s take MUCH less time). At least once a month, send a full backup off-site to another location. There should be 12 offsite backups. Then repeat the whole process. If you use tape, remember to feed in fresh tapes into your backup scheme otherwise the tapes may be bad when you go to recover. Just my $.02

Bob S.

 

[Route666]

Sounds like a good plan, that's exactly what Halliburton used when I worked there in the IT department. I think they only rotated 5 or 6 weeks of tapes though, not 12. During my short stint the engineers managed to not follow the suggestion of backing up and removing unnecessary data from the server and the whole office stopped because the server froze - too full to even boot. Luckily the guys got it working again - booted an 800Gb server off a DOS floppy just so we could delete enough to get the server's usual software going again.

 

[Edbert]

I am an IT Director. Our backup schedule consists of fulls every friday and differentials Monday through thursday. Incrementals are good if your window for completion is tight but if you ever have to restore it could take up to five media sets (!!!!) to complete. With our environment a Thursday differential only takes about 8 hours to complete, the Monday one is about 1.5 hours.

Getting the backups is important of course but so is rotation and retension. We label the last Friday-full of every month as a monthly and never overwrite it. The other Friday-fulls are kept for 3 months (one quarter) before they are overwritten. The daily-differentials are kept for a month before they are overwritten. The only tapes onsite at any time are the one for the upcoming night if it is after noon, or the ones from last night if it is before noon. All other tapes are kept offsite at all times.

EDIT: Two more things...
Backups/rotation/retension is all worthless if you don't also test a recovery strategy. Just because your software says it was sucessful doesnt mean you can recover your data and applications. Email and database servers can be tricky compared to file/terminal/application servers.

Speaking to the problem where the server filled up the disks so it wouldn't reboot, this is why you need to restrict access to the OS partition. Give them a playground if you must but don't let the users anywhere NEAR the system files.

 

[RGS0907]

There is nothing like a big crash like this to make you get religion.. It only needs to happen to you once.

 

[Jester67]

Backups are only important if you care about the data. Don’t get me wrong it breaks my heart that we lost this information. But due to the fact that it happened and 3 months of information was lost it might lead one to believe that the data is not the primary goal of this site. These sites exist because of advertising and not as a repository for information. That is a secondary aspect required to achieve goal #1 advertising. Do you think people will not come here now because the information was lost? I for one do not think so. So what is the risk of not backing it up? Very small. What is the cost of implement a robust backup strategy? Very expensive ” all relative”. It is risk versus reward.
I’m not downing these guys they offer a great site for FREE and I have learned a lot of great information and I have on intention to stop coming here.

 

[65fastback2+2]

i dont understand why a nice raid 5 isnt in the server using say 80gb sata hard drives

 

[rbohm]

There is nothing like a big crash like this to make you get religion.. It only needs to happen to you once.

our father, who art bill gates, hallowed be thy name........

 

[Edbert]

Backups are only important if you care about the data. Don’t get me wrong it breaks my heart that we lost this information. But due to the fact that it happened and 3 months of information was lost it might lead one to believe that the data is not the primary goal of this site.

Well, there's a million sites I can go to if I just want to view ads, I come here and contribute mostly to tech threads because...wait for it...I do care about the data. I have lost a great deal of pages and threads that I had bookmarked, they were full of information that i was using to restore and modify my Mustang. Guess since data is not important here it should be renamed from Stangnet to Spamnet. The way this was run (or not run actually) is Mickey Mouse at best, I do better backups of personal machines/data and I'm not doing those for a profit or presenting it to the public as a professional-class website.

I'm not sad, I'm pissed.