Common Mistakes in Data Backup Strategies

So, you've got your backups all set up? You've joined the elite club of responsible data guardians. But wait—have you ever actually tried restoring those backups? Or are they just sitting there like unread terms and conditions? Let me paint you a picture: Imagine a disaster strikes—let's call it "The Great Server Meltdown of Monday Morning" (because disasters love Mondays). You spring into action, ready to restore your data and save the day. You click "Restore," and then... Estimated time remaining: 7 days, 14 hours, 27 minutes. Cue the awkward coffee breaks and frantic Googling of "How to tell your boss the data will be back next week." Here's why actually testing your backups is crucial (and might save you from becoming a meme): The Illusion of Security: Just because your data is backing up doesn't mean it's coming back quickly—or at all. Testing ensures that your backups aren't just digital paperweights. Time Warp Reality Check: Downloading terabytes of data isn't like downloading a movie on Netflix. It's more like trying to empty a swimming pool with a spoon. Over the internet. While it's raining. Bandwidth Bottlenecks: In a real disaster, everyone's scrambling. Network speeds can crawl slower than a traffic jam on a Friday afternoon. Avoiding the "Uh-Oh" Moment: Discovering that your backup is corrupt after a disaster is like realizing you've locked your keys in the car—with the engine running. So, what's the game plan? Regular Restore Drills: Think of it as a fire drill but for your data. Schedule regular tests to restore your backups so you're not navigating unfamiliar territory when it counts. Know Your Restore Time: Calculate how long it would actually take to get your systems back online. Factor in data size, network speed, and any potential hiccups. Prioritze your data: Do a Business Impact Analysis to understand what processes and data are critical for your business and make them a priority. Know your MTD! Optimize Your Backups: Use incremental backups, data deduplication, or even physical storage solutions to reduce restore times. Sometimes, old-school methods like shipping a hard drive can be faster! Document Everything: Keep a clear, step-by-step recovery plan. In a crisis, your future self (and your team) will thank you. Remember, backups are like parachutes—if they don't work when you need them, you don't get a second chance. Stay prepared, stay tested, and may your backups restore swiftly! #DataRecovery #Backups #AlwaysBePrepared

This IT Director told me that they haven’t invoked Disaster Recovery plans in 20 years, so there is no need to make any changes. A few months later a major storm caused an outage and it took them more than a week to restore their critical systems. In this video, I have shared five strategies I recommend to customers. But before that here are the common gaps I have encountered assessing several customers. ⛔ Strategy: They only have one failover site. The failover sites are within the same disaster zone, sometimes within the same campus or across the street. ⛔ Design: The architecture and technology selection is at broad enterprise wide infrastructure level and not designed for specific applications and business processes. ⛔ Capacity: The failover site typically does not have enough capacity to run the business for an extended period of time. ⛔ RPO: The data availability for restoring services do not align with Recovery Point Objectives (amount of data the business can afford to lose). ⛔ RTO: The processes and automation do not align with Recovery Time Objective (duration for which the business can afford to operate without the IT systems). ⛔ Business Continuity: The DR plans do not cover the entire business operations. They primarily focus on IT and include some business users to perform verification. ⛔ Readiness: The plans are mostly exercises annually and often run into hiccups due to all the changes made to the systems during the course of the year. #ceo #cio #cto #informationtechnology #agileleadership #businessgrowth #enterprisearchitecture Agile C-Level

Imagine your bank couldn't process transactions for 3 months. This isn't hypothetical…it happened to my wife's sister. Her bank suffered a ransomware attack so severe that customers couldn't access their money for over THREE MONTHS. Imagine: salary deposits trapped, bills unpaid, no access to YOUR money. Why? Their backup strategy failed when they needed it most. Here's what companies misunderstand about SQL backups: 1️⃣ "Fancy" backup technologies often fail when applied to SQL Server databases. When I say fancy, that means snapshotting or tools provided by cloud/SAN vendors that aren’t fully built for SQL Servers. 2️⃣ The cheaper, faster backup option often becomes the most expensive mistake you'll ever make 3️⃣ Many companies abandon old and time-tested backup methods after experiencing minor performance blips. 4️⃣ SQL Server requires specialized backup approaches that 95% of general backup solutions miss A good chunk of businesses we talk to are gambling with their data. They implement quick solutions that work for normal files (think MS Word) but fail spectacularly with critical database systems. SQL Server is different. It's always live, with data split between memory and disk, plus transaction logs. Additionally, there could be multiple data files which might live on different drives. When this backup happens, they all need to be backed up at that exact millisecond, or you run the risk of them being inconsistent. To make things worse, these files are 1000X times bigger than your Word doc. Snapshots are great for large volumes of small files. But they often fail in SQL Server world. On top of that, you don’t just want backups, you want the backup being tested regularly. It might sound overkill to be discussing backups in that much detail, but you’ll look like a genius when a disaster strikes and you can restore to last Tuesday morning at 9.37am and recover your data perfectly. That will be an amazing feeling. All too often we have seen the more ‘fancier’ options fail to execute this. Seen this in your environment? Let’s chat. I’ll leave a link in the comments for a free consultation.