Apr 6, 2010
Business continuity
Seatbelts, insurance, and fail-safe backups. All things that you don’t completely respect the value of unless you use them.
When I first started working at my consulting firm, they had an eye on continuity, and even had nightly backups to an external hard drive. This was reassuring, but still left something to be desired. First, the router, wireless router, and backup drive were all located precariously close to the coffee maker. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision an employee stumbling in for their morning brew inadvertently taking down the office connectivity, and our backup drive as well.
The solution for this problem was low tech and cost about $50. A portable laptop desk allowed us to move the electronics elements to a safer temporary location (we’re moving to a new office in a month where we will be able to correctly house all electronics in a dedicated location.)
This also forced us to visit the question about what would happen if the backup drive were to be needed, but damaged. An off-site solution was needed in order to reduce the risk of losing our data, or losing access to our data. After some research, we opted for mozy as an offsite storage solution. All local workstations now backup to the external drive nightly, and also push their changes to the mozy service.
Our online servers will require a slightly different solution. While Mozy does offer remote backup for servers, this is only offered for Windows and Mac OS X servers, whereas our servers are both running Ubuntu Linux. The solution for this was to buy a cheap desktop workstation (locked in a computer cabinet) and have it pick up nightly backups from the servers. This backup workstation would then back itself up to Mozy on a nightly basis. The backup server is attached to a UPS unit in case there are power issues. Now, each machine is backed up to one external hard drive, and backed up to offsite storage as well. In an upcoming post, I will post a script that I have used previously for backing up webservers. This will need to be modified a touch to support our alfresco/liferay/cas installations, but the basics will still be the same.
Good luck in your backup efforts. Don’t wait to get this set up.