Beyond backup: 5 other needs for World Backup Day

Whether it’s Mother’s Day, Veteran’s Day, or Administrative Professional’s Day, we like to assign days to remind us to pay attention to important things. World Backup Day is no different. Started a few years ago by a group of Redditors, World Backup Day is primarily aimed at reminding people to protect their digital lives with backups.

Many of us in IT would benefit from reminders to test backups, too. But there’s a litany of additional items IT has to stay on top of to keep operations running smoothly and to aid recovery when disaster strikes. Along with ensuring that backups are made and frequently tested, here are five details you might not think about every day. Consider using this awareness day to double-check that you have all your ducks in a row, not just your backups.

1. Software media and licenses

If an application needs to be reinstalled following a restore, do you have the media readily available? What about the licensing?

This may seem not to be a big deal in a day and age where you can download virtually any piece of software from the Internet. However, I’ve seen several instances where a client needed to reinstall software released a few years ago, only to find it could no longer download the required version. Worse, the client had made customizations that didn’t work with a newer version. Worse still, the license keys on record didn’t cooperate with the new version without paying for an upgrade.

It’s wise to keep a software repository that contains installation media (installers, ISO images, and so on), as well as copies of the license keys for every piece of software you run. As with network device configurations, don’t store these on a device that could itself be affected by the disaster you might find yourself recovering from. A small NAS or even an external hard drive can do the trick.

2. Labeling

If I pull two cords out of out of a switch in your data center, how quickly can you figure out where they should go? How about if I pull them from the back of a server rack? If you’re on vacation and need to describe to a nontechnical coworker which server he or she should turn back on after a power failure, could you do it over the phone?

If you answered no to any of those questions, it could be because you haven’t labeled your inventory very well. Labeling is one of those tasks that some in IT (typically the perfectionists) can’t get enough of, but many of us can’t stand to spend our time on. After all, the data center changes so frequently — why bother labeling anything? The answer is that it can save you a tremendous amount of time in a disaster (think swapping out a failed high-density switch) or even in a simple accident.

3. Network device configurations

If a switch or firewall on your network fails, do you have the configuration backed up so that you can easily restore it to a replacement? If you don’t, imagine how long it might take you to reconfigure your firewall from scratch. If you don’t have good documentation, it could go on forever. That’s especially true if you’re running site-to-site VPNs: Getting those running again could require coordinating with the owners of all the VPN peers.

Backing up most network devices is easy to do and can save you huge amounts of time if you ever have to replace one in a hurry — just make sure you store those backups somewhere you can get at them without the network being operational! There’s nothing worse than having awesome documentation you can’t access when you need it.

4. Restoring in an unfamiliar setting

Just about everyone keeps archival backups offsite or at least in a fireproof safe. But have you ever really thought through how you’d use them if you needed to? If you use tape, where will you find a compatible tape drive? Do you have a copy of the software you used to perform the backups stored with them? Who would you call to get compatible server gear shipped to you? How long might that take? Where might you be able to set up if your office is destroyed or inaccessible?

More and more, IT shops are answering these questions by using the cloud — either to store their backups or for failover using disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). But those approaches raise their own questions: If you need all your cloud backup data in a hurry, can you get someone to ship it to you? How long might that take? If not, how long would it take to download? If you’re using a service that charges based on restore throughput (especially Amazon Glacier), do you know how much an emergency restore might cost?

5. Working remotely in a disaster

If your office were rendered inaccessible (from a snowstorm, pandemic, and so on), how would your employees work? Are whatever remote access methods you’ve deployed for teleworkers sufficient so that employees can work all day? If you use DRaaS to provide cloud-based failover for your on-premises environment, have you determined how your users will access it?

As with any plan, the best way to test how employees will react is to try it. Some companies require their employees to work from home at least one week a year. The goal is for both IT and the employee themselves to learn from the experience and be prepared in case it’s ever required. Some workers (especially those with children or loud pets) will need to make simple adjustments to their workflow. In other cases, employees with unusual application demands may find that IT hasn’t provided the tools they need to do their jobs. This approach is certainly disruptive, but it’s substantially less disruptive than all of a company’s employees learning these lessons in the midst of a disaster.

Most of the areas I’ve ticked off here fall more into the realm of IT preparedness. However, at its heart, that’s what World Backup Day is all about. Even simply mulling some of these points now can help you respond more quickly and decisively in the event of a real disaster — it’ll be too late when all eyes are on you for an answer to begin that thinking.

This article, “Beyond backup: 5 other needs for World Backup Day,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.