The backup of the information contained within your IT system or systems is probably one of the most singularly important issues you will need to address in the management of your IT. All of the money spent on the physical assets of your IT infrastructure will, in a short space of time, become relatively insignificant compared to the value of the information your organisation will have collated. You need to ensure you have complete, up to date and reliable copies of your organisational information and also have the ability to access and restore those copies in a very short time span should the need arise.

It should be further emphasised that the restoration of backups is equally important to the backup process. The restore process needs to be tested and monitored on an on-going basis. Many organisations have to their detriment, discovered at the worst possible moment that the backups they have been performing are completely useless due to their inability to be recovered during the restore process. This should not be something discovered after the loss of important information but rather fully tested prior to the loss of any data.

This article looks at the steps to developing a backup strategy, as well providing an explanation of the different types of backup devices and various types of backup regimes. The article also discusses the importance of the restore process and testing that this process works. Disaster recovery is covered, along with issues relating to major system outages and fault tolerance methodologies.

For the complete article see …     Backup and Restore