Chapter 12: Tales from the Trenches: My Life with Backup 2.0

In the second chapter of this book, I shared with you some of the horror stories of Backup 1.0. I did so primarily as a way of highlighting how poorly our traditional backup techniques really meet our business needs. In this chapter, I want to do the opposite: share with you some stories of Backup 2.0, both from my own experience and from stories you readers have shared over the year‐long production of this book. Names have been changed to protect the innocent, of course, but I think you’ll find these to be compelling examples of how Backup 2.0 has been applied. Where possible, I’ll share information about the infrastructure that goes with these stories so that you can see some of the creative and innovative ways Backup 2.0 is being used in organizations like your own.

Chapter 11: Upgrading Your Backup Mentality: Is It Really Worth It?

We’ve covered quite a bit of ground in the preceding ten chapters. It’s time to circle back and look at some of the original problems with old-school backups, and see what we may have solved with a “2.0” approach. It’s also time to look more precisely at what’s involved in redesigning your business’ backup strategy, and outlining a methodology for determining the real cost of a redesign. We should also look at some of the more human or, shall we say, political factors involved in a redesign.

Chapter 10: What’s Your Disaster Recovery Plan?

Much of this book has focused on backup and restore rather than disaster recovery. The difference? I regard “restoring” as something you do with a single file, or a group of files, or a single email message, or an entire mailbox—something less than an entire server. It might be a “disaster” that a file was accidentally deleted, but it’s typically a disaster for one or two people—not the entire business. A true disaster, in my view, is when an entire server goes down—or worse, when an entire data center is affected.

Chapter 9: Keeping Your Backups: Storage Architecture

All of the backups we’re making are going to require some serious storage, so Chapter 9 will focus on storage architecture. The chapter looks at how backup data is structured, and compares the advantages and disadvantages of things like storage area networks (SANs), tape drives, local storage, and so forth. The chapter also examines pressing issues of storage: compression, encryption, security, de-duplication, and so on. I’ll also look at unique ways that Backup 2.0 allows you to interact with your backed-up data more easily and efficiently.

Chapter 8: Other Concerns and Capabilities

There’s more to a backup strategy than just grabbing the right files and making sure you can restore them in a pinch—although that’s obviously a big part of it. A solid backup strategy also concerns itself with disaster recovery in a variety of scenarios. You need to make sure your backup system has some redundancy—nothing’s worse than being without a backup system! Because backups inherently involve data retention, in this day and age, you also have to concern yourself with the safety and security of that data as well as any legal concerns about its retention. That’s what this chapter is all about: Dealing with the “extras” that surround a backup strategy. It will look at how traditional Backup 1.0 techniques addresses these extras, and suggest ways in which you might rethink them for a Backup 2.0 world.

Chapter 7: Virtualization Server Backups

Virtualization has changed the way we think about our data centers, and has enabled a number of new, flexible computing scenarios that are saving businesses money and helping them to be more agile. At the same time, however, virtualization has upset many of the tried-and-true IT operations practices that have been developed over the years. In many ways, virtualization is “Computing 2.0,” and Backup 1.0 just isn’t a good fit. This chapter explains how people have been trying to make Backup 1.0 get along with virtualized infrastructures, and suggests ways in which Backup 2.0 could do a much better job and help fully realize the promise of virtualization.

Chapter 6: Rethinking SharePoint Server Backups

The last major server product to cover in this guide is SharePoint, which offers its own unique challenges. In fact, SharePoint—which has rapidly grown in popularity in the past few years—may be the biggest challenge that Backup 2.0 has to face. Chapter 6 will look at native solutions, cover problems and challenges, and compare the “1.0” way of doing things with a more enlightened “2.0” approach.

Chapter 5: Rethinking SQL Server Backups

More and more companies are using Microsoft SQL Server these days—and in many cases, they don’t even realize it. While plenty of organizations deliberately install SQL Server, many businesses find themselves using SQL Server as a side effect, because SQL Server is the data store for some line-of-business application, technology solution, and so on.

Chapter 4: Exchange Server Backups

Many folks take email for granted, although they expect it to be as available and reliable as a telephone dial tone. As one of the most popular solutions for corporate email, Exchange Server occupies a special place in your infrastructure. It’s expected to be “always on,” always available, and always reliable. Disasters simply can’t be tolerated. Discover how Backup 2.0 can better serve your Exchange Server backup needs.

Chapter 3: Whole-Server Backups

In Chapter 3, I’ll address the most common kinds of servers: file servers, print servers, directory servers, and even Web servers. I’ll show you what some of the native solutions look like, discuss some of the related Backup 1.0-style techniques and scenarios, and detail why they just don’t cut it for today’s businesses.

Chapter 2: Horror Stories: We Thought We Had a Backup!

Horror stories.  Tales from the trenches.  Case studies.  Call them what you will, I love reading them.  They’re a look into our colleagues’ real-world lives and troubles, and an opportunity for us to learn something from mistakes – without having to make the actual mistakes ourselves.

Chapter 1: Why Backup 1.0 Is No Longer Enough

Our decades‐old backup techniques are not sufficient anymore. They may be great for creating backups—although in many cases, they aren’t even good for that—but they do not excel at bringing the right data back into production as quickly as possible. Despite advances in specialized agents, compressed network transmissions, and so forth, we’re still just making a copy of the data, and that doesn’t always lend itself well to restoring the data.  Why?