Spring ahead, Fall backup

I got a call from the fine folks at Maxell the other day. It seems that they’re promoting their second annual “Fall Backup” day on Nov. 2 — an attempt to encourage people to practice good backup hygiene, and of course to encourage them to buy lots of Maxell backup media.

“We’re just trying to create general awareness of the need to back up,” Al Dripchak, the manager of technical support at Maxell, told me. Considering how many small and medium enterprises just flat-out ignore backup best practices, he’d seem to have his work cut out for them.

It’s not like there’s any lack of cautionary tales out there about what happens if you don’t check your backups and your media. The State of Alaska’s Department of Revenue had a memorable episode reported in March, when a failed backup — and an inadvertent wiping of not one but two disk drives — left the agency with a massive data re-entry task that cost it over $200,000 in extra labor. While that Windows server will probably never miss a tape change again, there’s still a vast untapped reservoir of exposed data out there waiting to be zapped by nature, software failure, a happy little malware infection or user error.

Most of what Dripchak is preaching is pretty much common wisdom in the sysadmin world — daily incremental backups and weekly full backups on servers, at least bimonthly backups of desktop systems, depending on whose desktops they are. It’s just a matter of getting the data on the media. The problem is that while that sort of thing is largely automated in most large enterprises (at least as far as critical servers go), it seems like the last thing many smaller and mid-sized enterprises want to deal with.

Of course, when someone says “backup,” Microsoft is probably not the first word that comes to mind — unless you’re thinking about the things you have to worry about backing up. Microsoft’s main claim to the mindshare of those blessed with responsibility for storage management and disaster recovery comes from all the Exchange, SQL Server data, SharePoint and Office application data that needs to be backed up, archived, policy-processed and restored. Microsoft has long been in the demand-creation business for data protection, but it’s not exactly a household name in data protection itself.

Now, it’s true that Microsoft Vista has an archival system built in, called Volume Shadow Copy Service, built right in, which Randall Kennedy recently raved about. But as far as business continuity goes, Microsoft’s offerings have made life easy … for third-party developers of backup software to make a living.

But Microsoft is starting to change that a bit. The company announced its latest version of its entry into that market earlier this month: Data Protection Manager 2007 R2. While it had some basic saving graces — such as self-service for users who lost files — the previous version of DPS 2007 didn’t support the aforementioned Microsoft applications that create all the backup angst in the first place. DPS 2007 R2 is due out before the end of the year … just in time for the end-of-year archiving.