“Why do we run backups?” This question was the opening of my Backup Exec trainings for many years. And I got dozens of different answers from my audiences. The one I liked most was: “Because my boss enforces us to do so.” Sadly though it was very seldom that someone answered that a reason could be to be able to run restores. Nevertheless, from my point of view, at the end of the day, that’s the only reason. Backup is a preparation to be able to restore data in case, it got lost.
But do we need backups then? Many companies I came to visit in the last years told me, they never had a situation where they really needed a backup. Sometimes I was even told that the company’s management asked, whether that whole backup stuff shouldn’t be decommissioned, because it was never needed, especially because all that virtualization was high available anyway.
To a certain point, this might be true. I agree, the possibility of a hardware outage is quite low, when we talk about clustered hypervisors and mirrored SANs. Nevertheless, all mirroring technology doesn’t help you in case of logical failures or human errors. And yes, storage outages happen, believe me, they do.
So having a solid backup concept in place means nothing else, than a good night’s sleep. For the management, as well as for the administrative team.
But was does “solid” mean regarding a backup concept and do you need a concept for doing backups at all? Well, lets see. If you’re interested in this matter, just stay with me for a while and form yourself an opinion.
Continue reading here: Chapter 1 – Let’s start with some theory