The wildfires occurring in Southern California earlier this month - including the Witch Creek fire in San Diego - wreaked havoc throughout the area. Thousands of people - by some accounts even a half million or more - were forced to evacuate homes and businesses across the region with only moments notice. When they were allowed to return, no one was sure quite what they would find left and what condition it would be in.

Disasters like these point out the need to take stock of your readiness to face the scariness of an impending disaster, to identify those operations that can and must continue during its duration, and to create a strategy for quick recovery in a disaster’s aftermath. Additionally, security breaches and hardware and software failures can result in lost or corrupted data without a disaster ever occurring. Having an effective, up-to-date and well-documented backup and recovery strategy is a key component to minimizing the impact of data loss or compromise - whether it occurs from a disaster or not.

Your Backup Strategy - Preparing for the Unexpected

Disaster preparation involves taking stock and creating a plan for what to do in the event that your home or business is facing imminent peril. When you’re faced with a disaster or even a server failure, snap decisions will need to be made. Keeping calm in stessful situations will help you make smart and effective decisions. If advanced planning is adequate and up-to-date, your strategy can yield enormous benefits.

One important element of disaster preparedness is having backup records easily available if important data is compromised or lost. When devising your backup strategy, keep in mind that it’s important to protect your physical systems, your operating environments, your applications and your data – across all tiers of your infrastructure.

Backup planning involves examining the needs and operations of your organization, including, but not limited to:

• What must be backed up? In other words, what information is most critical for resuming operations, speedy recovery and, in the case of physical damage or loss to property, for documenting ownership and value of the property at risk? Is some data so critical that it warrants redundant backups so that if one version is unrecoverable you have a backup to your backup?
• How can backup information be stored safely? In the case of data backup, what type of media will be used, where can it safely be stored and what potential barriers could there be to accessing it easily if the need should arise?
• How often should backups be prepared/restore points be created? You want to be sure that reconstructing information that has not yet been backed up will not overly consume available resources such as staff, time and money. What is the frequency of restore points necessary for varying types of information and physical IT assets, like laptops, desktops and servers? As a rule, the frequency of backups is dependent on how often data is changed. For example, fixed asset information may only need to be backed up quarterly, semi-annually or annually, while transaction data and customer records and email would require more frequent backups. You also need to consider what data can be reconstructed accurately and what information, if lost or compromised, would present a higher likelihood for error or misinformation if it had to be recaptured.
• Who will be tasked with keeping your backup strategy up-to-date? Your strategy needs to be reviewed periodically as your needs are subject to change over time. Who will be responsible for keeping your strategy current and communicating your requirements to other members in your organization?
• Should you designate an alternate backup person? If your backup and recovery needs can be accomplished through just one person, it’s often a good idea to consider designating an alternate who is fully versed on your plan who can spring quickly into action if your primary designate is not available because he or she is unreachable or injured. Others in your organization need to know who these people are and how to reach them.
• What parts of your plan need to be formally documented? A backup strategy that no one else is aware of isn’t very useful if no one else knows about it. Additionally, the person or persons responsible for backup planning,implementation and recovery may leave the company on short notice. Will you be better served with written documentation that explains what needs to be preserved, how it will be preserved and how it can be recovered?

Recovery Planning - Get Up and Running Fast

Once you’ve determined your backup needs and how your backups will be stored, maintained and accessed, you need to think about recovery. What steps will you need to take in order to get your organization up and running quickly in the event of a disaster, a security breach or a hardware or software failure?

If you’ve clearly identified the most important information, preparing a recovery checklist for a system-wide failure can make the process go much more smoothly. Items in your checklist should be prepared in the approximate order in which they will need to occur in your recovery process. Less experienced or newer people in your organization will find an orderly recovery checklist especially invaluable because it will provide them with a step-by-step road map of what needs to be done. Including locations of your backups and physical assets on your checklist can also save considerable time and confusion.

Selecting the Proper Backup and Recovery Tools

Once you’re backup and recovery strategy is developed and the people responsible for implementing the strategy have been identified, you’ll be in a much better position to decide on the best tool to use. CopiaTech often recommends Symantec Backup Exec.

Symantec’s Backup Exec is available for Windows Servers, Windows Small Business Server and for NetWare servers. The Backup Exec solutions provide simple, easy-to-use, reliable and fast data protection and recovery in Premium and Standard editions to meet your specific requirements. Symantec’s tools allow administrators to perform bare-metal restorations in minutes — not hours or days.

The Symantec Backup Exec solution captures a system’s entire live state — including all files, applications, operating systems, and settings — in one file, without disrupting user productivity or application usage. It also allows administrators to recover entire systems to dissimilar hardware platforms. And, it can allow recovery of systems in a remote location or a locked environment.

Take the Backup Exec Challenge!

Does your backup stack up to Symantec Backup Exec 11d? Take the Backup Exec Challenge and answer five quick questions to learn the answer today!

Ready to give Backup Exec a try? Download a free trial of Symantec Backup Exec and take it for a free test drive!

Contact a Backup Security Expert

Stop losing sleep over the ghosts and goblins lurking over your sensitive data. Use our Backup Security Expert Contact Sheet. Just give us your backup and recovery problems and we’ll give you security. Period!

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