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Plan, Backup, Test, Repeat—It's Not Just a Good Idea, It's a Necessity (Continued)
Meet With Cross-Division Staff
You, the rest of the senior IT staff, and representatives from your company's other divisions need to sit down and determine exactly what you need in the way of an emergency backup and DR plan. Backup and recovery is not just a problem that affects the IT team.
Determine What You Need to Back Up
Everyone knows you need to save your server data and applications, but what about data on local systems? Does anyone keep mission-critical data on a desktop? Do you want to keep backups of individual desktop programs, or will you keep master copies of the standard desktop for emergency deployments?
Do you want to archive your e-mail separately, or just store it as part of your system backup? It doesn't matter if company policy is to keep important mail messages at the central mail server, if your senior-level employees always delete them and keep them in their e-mail client's local storage.
You need to ask all these questions and get the real-world answers. Find out how your company is really using data so that you can arrange for the appropriate backup methods.
Decide How Often You Need to Perform Backups
The backup part of your plan must also detail exactly who does what, and when. Do you backup every evening? Every weekend? I favor full system backups on the weekend, with incremental backups every night.
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Introduction
