[GTALUG] Man deletes his entire company

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2016 at 05:59:02PM -0400, Alvin Starr wrote:
> Rotating backup media is becoming a thing of the past.
> A lot of organizations are moving to cloud backup or backing up to some
> NSA/SAN or other connected device.
> In an environment where changing disks/tapes is hard like in a data centre
> then the single backup device is attractive.
> 
> I do work for a backup provider and they have a large number of companies
> who in essence have a single point of failure for their backups.
> 
> For better or for worse people are moving their backups offsite but into a
> single location.

Well at the very least you should use multiple remote instances that you
can mount and backup to.  If you have a single remote storage pool for
backups, then you do in fact have zero backups while doing a new backup.

There is no reason you could not have multiple separate storage pools
that you only ever mount one of at a time to avoid anything stupid wiping
out old backups while doing a new one.

But I supose this cloud stuff really is making people stupid.  They can't
imagine anything could go wrong with the cloud.

> True enough but testing your recovery processes is something that is seldom
> done.
> Taking systems offline to do a full recovery is just too big a pain.

Yep, but it means you very well might not have a backup.  If it really
mattered you would have spare hardware for testing and disaster recovery
already, in which case the test would not be that hard.

> You also have to do the recovery testing on a regular basis.

For sure.  Even less likely to be done than testing it once.

-- 
Len Sorensen