The question of backups is one that faces every system administrator. The real question is weather they have a backup in place and is it up to date enough? How many organizations do not have a practical backup policy in place?
Our backup strategy is good, but has room for improvement also.
All new work we do is maintained via a SVN repository or something similar so this qualifies as code level backup, but what if that goes down? Well, in all likelihood we’d lose a lot of data, and have to revert to our local copies to rebuild a new repository so not all is lost. Many firms undoubtedly do not do this and if their development machine goes down they lose it all.
From a backup management point of view, ideally data should be backed up in the local machine, local network and off site, after every change. Of course, if you have a multi-gigabyte database this might not be a practical solution! Balancing the weight of the likelihood of failure against the frequency of significant changes is a task that needs to be considered carefully.
If you want to discuss a backup strategy and solution we’ll be willing to have a chat with you.
