Monomyth

It really doesn’t matter about which Back-Up technology, the myths are pretty much all the same and unless you are aware of them, life will be more exciting for you than it should be…but perhaps that’s the point of Myths…they bring excitement to a mundane existence.

1) 99% Back-Up Completion is great. I’ve been guilty of this in the past when telling people how great my back-up team is…look, 99% success rate; we’re awesome. Actually, it’s a good job that some of my customers in the past have not realised what I was saying. Depending what has failed; I might not be able to restore a critical service but I still have a great back-up completion rate.

2) Design Back-Up Policies. No, don’t do that; build restore policies and then work out what needs to be backed-up to restore the service.

3)Everything Needs to be Backed-Up. Closely related to the above; if you feel the need to back-up an operating system several thousand times…feel free I guess but if you’ll never use it to restore a systems and in these days of automated build servers, Chef, Puppet and the likes, you are probably wasting your time. Yes, they can probably be de-duped but you are putting extra load on your back-up infrastructure for no reason.

3) Replication is Back-Up. Nope, synchronous replication is not a back-up; if I delete a file, that change will be replicated in real-time to the synchronous copy. It’s gone.

4) Snapshots are a Back-Up. Only if your snapshots are kept remotely; a snapshot on the same storage device can give you a fast recovery option but if you have lost the array or even a RAID rank; you are screwed.

5)RAID is a Back-Up. Yes people still believe this and some people still believe that the world is flat.

6)Your Back-Up is Good. No Back-Up is good unless you have restored it; until you have, you potentially have no back-up.

7)Back-Up is IT’s Responsibility. No, it is is a shared responsibility; it can only work well if the Business and IT work in partnership. Businesses need to work with IT to define data protection and recovery targets. IT needs to provide a service to meet these but they do not know what your retention/legal/business objectives are.

8)Back-Up Teams are Not Important. Back-Up teams are amongst the most important teams in your IT organisation. They can destroy your Business, steal your data and get access to almost any system they want…if they are smart and you are stupid!