World Backup Day

March 31st is the World Backup Day and I wish to remind everyone that protecting your data is one of the most important IT operations to consider even if you think that finally it doesn't do anything for your business. Think about the current situation.

So here are a key items I'd like to share without:

1. Backup and data protection are about copying data and having redundant information. The more you have the more you'll be protect in principle when failure will occur.
2. Understand the notion of RPO - Recovery Point Objective - and RTO - Recovery Time Objective -, the first is the time before the failure and is associated with the quantity of information you accept to loose. In fact, between the RPO and the failure, it is indeed that quantity of information. The RTO is how fast a business or just users will reuse applications to serve their activity.
3. Based on that, you should consider for some activities a CDP - Continuous Data Protection - model where every new data is copy somewhere in addition to its production residence.
4. External drives, shared secondary storage or cloud targets. Pick the one you prefer aligned with your goals.
5. To facilitate recovery indexing is key so think about it when you select and put in place a backup solution.
6. Same remark for versioning, try to keep several versions you will be able to pick.
7. Things like encryption for confidentiality of your backup images and deduplication are interesting if your volume is quite important in order to reduce the secondary storage bill.
8. Don't forget DR.

Happy World Backup Day. Don't forget to protect your data and yourself in our current critical moment.