Emergency service
- Article 24 of 26
- M-iD, October 2005
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If a tape contains a back-up of a record with a specific retention period, that back-up needs to be deleted at the same time as the record. This will involve restoring the tape, deleting the record, then re-archiving its content - a challenging problem for most organisations.
One consideration for a long-term back-up strategy is to try to ensure records with the same retention period are stored on the same media, so that they can be deleted in bulk. An alternative is to use disks for long-term storage, but hard drive storage is still more expensive to buy, requires far greater physical space and typically has a shorter life span than tape.
Problematically, back-up systems do not integrate well with records management systems. The equivalent to single sign-on for security is not available to ensure that access, audit logs and retention periods of back-up systems can be managed from the records management console. So some degree of duplication of systems and processes will be inevitable and will need to be managed accordingly.
Ensuring that only authorised people can access back-ups is important and can be achieved through physical security or through use of encryption. Companies such as Decru provide appliances that encrypt and decrypt information at network boundaries and on storage systems. Then, while it is possible for someone to 'unarchive' data from back-up, it is impossible for them to read it without a key - something that also prevents the common problem of the IT staff being able to access the organisation's most important information.
Restoration
A further vital part of any back-up plan is to ensure that it's actually possible to restore the data from back-up. Many organisations have thought their data was safe, only to find that in the event of an actual disaster, back-ups were missing, damaged, obsolete or had never even been made.
"Imagine customers retaining back-ups for several years," says Voo. "Often, physically retrieving and recovering from those back-ups is quite difficult. One customer even changed [back-up] architecture and didn't account for the old back-ups - the applications didn't even exist any more."
Voo suggests checking long-term back-ups at least once every quarter, particularly for anything kept for retention or legal purposes. With tapes, this may amount to just checking that they are still viable, but a full restore provides far greater peace of mind.
Once an organisation has developed a comprehensive back-up strategy, it needs to examine it at regular intervals to see if it needs to make any changes. Static back-up strategies will often fail to take account of changing data usage. Quarterly or half-yearly checks are sufficient for most organisations, but larger organisations will benefit from continuous checks, after each operation if necessary.
Developing an effective back-up strategy can be a difficult job that requires considerable effort by an organisation. Doing it badly can cost the organisation and if disaster strikes, even result in its demise. Doing it well will not only safeguard the organisation, it will also save it money.
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