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Of Earthworms and System Administrators

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Article from ADMIN 39/2017

By ADMIN Magazine

I'm fascinated by the stories of disasters and near disasters related to me by my IT peers, especially those involving backups – or the lack of backups, as is so often the case.

I'm fascinated by the stories of disasters and near disasters related to me by my IT peers, especially those involving backups – or the lack of backups, as is so often the case. I understand that no technology is 100 percent foolproof and that no human is 100 percent on the ball 100 percent of the time, but, seriously, with the availability of cloud-based backups, disk-to-disk backups, and technologies such as Microsoft's Distributed File System (DFS), there's just no excuse for all this backup angst. Yet, here we are in 2017, and the stories of lost data and angry users continually arrive in my Inbox.

Backups are an essential part of any well-run and well-maintained business. There's no excuse for not doing backups, not checking on backups, and not performing some sort of disaster recovery drill to ensure backup and restore integrity. The most often asked question in any so-called postmortem disaster discussion is, "What have we learned from this experience?" The response that most often pops up in my mind is, "We should have had good backups."

Unfortunately, my response is an oversimplification of the issue. I don't want you to think I'm standing myself up as the backup realm paragon of virtue or taking the moral high ground on this point. I'm not. I've had my share of backup and restore failures over the years. Any system administrator worth his or her salt will admit to the same. The problem is that we know better. We all know that once you have a new system in place, backups are the next task on the list. Second only to getting a new service online and available to users is setting up a backup schedule.

To me, dealing with backup and restore duties is much like watching earthworms commit suicide on summer sidewalks. The earthworm lives life in the cool soils beneath our feet, providing half of a mutually beneficial relationship that we've both enjoyed for eons. However, some earthworms must take a life-threatening

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