Plan, Backup, Test, Repeat—It's Not Just a Good Idea, It's a Necessity (Continued)

Create a Communications Plan
The most overlooked disaster backup and recovery issue is the one no one ever thinks of: communications. You must have a procedure for notifying the appropriate people about any serious system failure. Everyone in the New York office may know that the intranet servers just died, but the people in the San Francisco office may be clueless.

You also need to make sure that the location of the backups is known to the appropriate people. For example, if the Chicago office goes up in flames, you need to plan on who restores the data and where they will be restoring it. For the biggest disasters, everyone in the company should be kept in the loop, starting with the IT personnel in charge of backup and recovery.

This is also true about restoring data. Everyone who will be affected by data recovery needs to know exactly what was restored successfully and what was lost. For example, will transactions be lost? Will the local offices need to resynchronize with master information at the data center? You need to answer these questions as soon as answers are available.

Test Your Entire Plan Regularly
With all your backups in place, are you safe now? Hardly! One of the most common mistakes is failing to test your real-world recovery methods on a regular basis. I've seen one 400-employee company locked down for a couple of days because the old recovery software no longer worked with the new drives. Don't let this happen to you.

Test, and then retest, your recovery methods. If one site is totally lost, can you restore its data at another site? How long will it take? Yes, testing like this will blow away the weekend for IT staff, but you must be sure that your recovery methods will work. If you don't, you're all too likely to find that all the effort you've put into backing-up data was a waste of time.

Along with testing recovery procedures, you must also test your communication procedures to make sure they'll actually work. If your star recovery person has a new, unrecorded cell phone number and is fishing for marlin off Key West, you're dead in the water.

Become an Uncompromising Enforcer of the Plan
Let there be no doubt about it—this is a heck of a lot of work. No one will really want to test the procedures, but you have to enforce them. IT staffers, end-users, CTOs, CIOs… it doesn't matter—no one likes spending time on backup and restore issues. It's like life insurance; we know we need it, but most of us want to spend as little as time as possible dealing with it.

You can't do that with corporate backup and recovery, though. You must set up your plan, deploy it, and then constantly test and retest it. It's not just a good idea, it's a necessity.

About the Author
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (sjvn@vna1.com) has been writing about technology since 10MB PC hard drives were considered huge and 5.25" floppies were the PC's backup media of choice.

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