Given the importance of information and the potential high cost associated with data loss, reliable data protection has become an obligation, but backup and recovery seems very complicated and time consuming to undertake. Don't spend another day without protecting your valuable business data, or without understanding your options and what they mean. 32
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Traditional data protection tech-nologies, such as tape backup and fault-tolerant storage devices, protect business data from failures and human errors that can damage individual devices or buildings. However, corporate data is vulnerable to site- and region-wide disasters even if tape backup and RAID devices are both in place. Network data mirroring complements these traditional backup methods by protecting organizations from events that can destroy fault-tolerant storage devices. If your organization risks losing valuable time or business information due to wide-area disasters, network data mirroring may be a wise technology addition to your disaster recovery program.44
Store one backup tape off site. This will ensure your files are preserved if your site experiences a fire, flood or other disaster. Some companies swap backup tapes with other offices. With some smaller businesses, it often makes sense for one employee to take the backup tape home with him. Another option is using an off-site storage firm that provides fire-protected storage facilities for print and digital media as well as tape.3
Instead of having folks pull tape cartridges for distribution to off-site storage, why not write your second tape copy directly to a remote vault across a network? Services exist, and have been discussed in this column, to facilitate that modus operandi. They will even send the tape electronically to your recovery center, if you prefer.17
Make sure you verify your backups. Most backup software will automatically do a quick "read-after-write" verification and will optionally do a full verification. The latter is more thorough and more time-consuming, roughly doubling the backup time.24
There are a number of enterprise tape backup solutions, such as Sun StorEdge Enterprise Backup Software, VERITAS NetBackup, and LEGATO NetWorker, geared toward larger corporations. Many sites, especially smaller ones, don't wish to pay the license fees that some of these solutions command.9
Store your tapes properly. With backup tapes on site, keep them stored in a stable environment, without extreme temperatures, humidity or electromagnetism. Do not, for instance, store the tapes in a safe on the opposite side of the wall from a large generator, whose electrical fields can wreck havoc with the data on them.3
Tape backup involves the uses of tape drives that store data on magnetic tapes. The number of tapes required will depend on the capacity of the tapes as well as the amount of data stored on the computers that need to be backed up.55
You also should consider having an authorized maintenance person from the manufacturer of the tape backup drive or from a third-party repair firm check the alignment of the drive every 12 to 18 months. Most businesses just send the drive back to the manufacturer when it begins to have problems, but if a drive has problems, so can the backup tapes.24
Companies can backup stored tape data across low-cost and readily available IP connections, using both newer native Fibre Channel tape drives as well as older SCSI drives. In addition, open systems servers such as UNIX and NT can be incorporated into remote tape strategies.56
VXA is a revolutionary tape backup technology that uses digital packets to store data rather than traditional, linear-based methods. VXA's zero tolerance for error makes it very appealing to IT professionals who demand reliable tape backups. VXA technology offers fast, reliable computer tape backup options for companies of all sizes.55
Computer tape backup has become the industry standard for backing up data in most companies around the world. Tape backup offers several advantages over other backup options. One of the advantages of tape backup is the ability to easily store the backup tapes off site, in a secure location. This protects the data from harm that could occur if some kind of natural disaster strikes. It also protects against fire, theft, or any other potential harm that could occur if the data were simply stored on site.55
Email has become the number one method of business communication, exceeding even the telephone in importance within an organization. It is a key application in corporate data centers and email servers contain an increasing percentage of corporate data assets. As a result, email has become the mission critical application for enterprises. With this growth in importance comes an increasingly daunting challenge for IT administrators--ensuring that in the event of errors or failures, email can be recovered and restored as soon as possible.66
Businesses are now open for longer hours and support a global community of customers which drives requirements for round-the-clock operation. The two backup options are available including hot and cold backups. Cold backup relates to the scenario where application data is tied up for the duration of the backup. However, a hot backup relates to the scenario where a system is performing the backup while applications are updating data.59
Current implementations of backup processes are manual, labor intensive, and inundated with problems caused by human errors. Backups that failcan often go undetected leading to potential data loss following a failure. Tapes must be manually inserted, rotated, and removed for off-site transportation to ensure recoverability. Due to the high expenses associated with manual administration, a case for automation can be made where robots are used to improve tape management. Centralized backups group tapes together by pools whereby a number of backups can be multiplexed onto a tape. As a tape is filled the backup continues using another free tape within the pool which significantly enhances manageability. A reduction in the number of tape drives to be managed leads to cost reductions.59
For the home system owner nervous about tape backup and put off by having to install the SCSI connector that tape systems need to operate, the Rev plugs into a USB 2.0 port or can connect internally as a standard ATAPI hard drive. Once connected to the host computer, it appears as a regular drive with a letter designation, just as CD and floppy drives do. For businesses looking to back up servers, SCSI and S-ATA Rev drives are planned.60
With the odd/even system, you use one tape on one day, a second tape the next day, reuse the first tape on day three, and so on. With the five-day rotation system, you use a different tape for each day of the week.47
Make sure you have more than one copy of a backup tape. Instead of using the same tape time after time, use multiple tapes, rotating through them.47
Periodically test the backup tapes and restore procedures. You can, for instance, restore the data on them to a different server or to a different partition or folder on the same server where the original information is stored.3
One last thing worth mentioning is your constantly shrinking window for backup. Each day your servers contain more data than the day before. But so many companies are turning into 24/7 operations that administrators are often being asked to back up huge amounts of data during a tiny window of time each night.10
In the case of tape backup, label the tapes A-H and use the same order to rotate tapes through a tape drive, each day putting a complete backup on the tape. The Towers of Hanoi backup strategy is often used because it creates the longest possible data retention period (the length of time archived data is kept around) with the minimum number of tapes. For example, using the Towers of Hanoi backup strategy with a set of 10 tapes allows for retrieval of data up to 1023 days old.62
The fastest – and most expensive – backup option. If a primary system fails, a fail-over automatically switches to a standby database, server, or network. A fail-over site redirects requests from the failed system to the backup system. Websites are big users of fail-over.41
This flag requires the -f device flag. This flag causes lssavevg to display information such as volume group, date and time backup was made, uname output from backed up system, oslevel, recommended maintenance or technology level, backup size in megabytes, and backup shrink size in megabytes. The shrink size is the size of the data on all filesystems. The full size is the total size of each filesystem (unused + data). The -l flag also displays the logical volume and filesystem information of the backed up volume group, equivalent to running "lsvg -l vgname".21
Verifies the physical block size of the tape backup, as specified by the -b block flag. You may need to alter the block size if necessary to read the backup. The -a flag is valid only when a tape backup is used.21
If the filesystem is from a machine named netapp (the number is unimportant and just distinguishes between multiple NetApp machines), then disk backups are available. If the filesystem is not from a netapp, only offsite backup is available.5
This flag will display the past 256 backups (roughly). The log is in alog format and is kept in /var/adm/ras/vgbackuplog. Each line of the log is a semicolon-separated list of the file or device name, the command used to make backup, date, shrink size, full size of the backup, and recommended maintenance or technology level (if any).21
Analysts also advise that other types of information be available within hours of a manmade or natural disaster. The most cost effective way to meet both needs is to use the same network infrastructure and remote facilities for both synchronous disk backup (for business information essential to continuous operations) and for asynchronous tape backup (for less time-critical but still important data).56
Specifies the number of 512-byte blocks to read in a single input operation, as defined by the blocks parameter. If the blocks parameter is not specified, the number of blocks read will default to 100.21
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