#WeekendWisdom 088 Speed of Restoration from Backups

Welcome to #WeekendWisdom number 88. This week we’re going to talk about Speed of Restoration from Backups.

What inspired this post?

This week’s video is prompted by an excellent article from Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security. The article is here.

So what is my story?

But it put me in mind of one of my early clients, they wanted me to come in and look at their business continuity plan and IT disaster recovery plan and make sure that they were adequate. They had a backup situation where all of their data is backed up to Cloud and every night all the files that were changed on their network during the day were copied up to the cloud and backed up there, nice and safe. So that every night’s backup was really, really quick as it was only to changed files for the day.

What’s that got to do with Speed of Restoration from Backups?

But they had quite a large amount of data. When I looked at how long it might take for them to be able to recover that data in a crisis situation, say if their server had failed or something like that and they had to restore their data. They were recovering that data over their internet connection, I sat down and worked out the figures and it would actually take them two years over their particular internet connection to download their server data from this cloud backup.

WHAT???

That’s just not sustainable and they just did not realise that this was the situation because their IT managed service provider had persuaded them this cloud account for backups was perfect and ideally suited for them. It was fine for backups, not for restoration. So make sure you test how long it will take you to recover any backups that you take, because you need to do that in a calm fashion and not in a crisis scenario.

So that’s it for this week. Lets be careful out there and we’ll talk to you again next week.