Modern Data Protection

Chapter 1. Risks to Your Data: Why We Back Up

You might think you don’t need this chapter. You know why we back up data, and you don’t need someone convincing you that backing it up is an important thing to do. Nonetheless, there might be a few reasons for backing up that you might not have thought of. These will be helpful in meetings that start with the question, “Why do we spend so much money on backup and disaster recovery?”

Note

No one cares if you can backup. Only if you can restore.

—Mr. Backup

This chapter covers a variety of reasons why we need backup and disaster recovery (DR), listed in the order they are most likely to happen. Let’s start by looking at the most common reason why you’ll find yourself looking for your backup manual: Someone did something wrong. A natural disaster might not be likely in your case, but a human disaster most certainly is.

The One That Got Away

“You mean to tell me that we have absolutely no backups of paris whatsoever?” I will never forget those words. I had been in charge of backups for only two months, and I just knew my career was over. We had moved an Oracle application from one server to another about six weeks earlier, and I missed one crucial part of the move. I knew very little about database backups in those days, and I didn’t realize that I needed to shut down an Oracle database before backing it up. This was accomplished on the old server by a cron job that I never knew existed. I discovered all of this after a disk on the ...