Guidelines for Network Server Backup

Backup is one of the most crucial and often overlooked aspects of data management in many offices. To assist you with planning and performing a consistent, reliable and well-working backup system for your office, LanTech recommends the following:

• Maintain a minimum of two weeks worth of backup tapes. This practice allows for easy restores from any day within the last two weeks (e.g., Monday1, Monday2, Tuesday1, Tuesday2).
• Remove a tape each month from the weekly rotation archive, replacing the weekly tape with a new blank one. This practice allows you to restore files that existed a month or so ago (e.g., the Monday1 becomes September). Your office should decide how many months of backup tapes they want to save. It depends on how far back you want to be able to restore files.
• Use a cleaning tape per manufacturer recommendation. If the heads on the tape drives are not clean, they will not read/write reliably to the tapes.
• Take backed-up tapes offsite regularly in case of disaster (fire, flood, robbery, etc.). Imagine the worst-case scenario and think about what data would be essential to your office. Can you afford to lose one day, one week, one month of data? Your offsite tape should rotate accordingly.
• Store tapes in a cool, dry place if possible, and away from magnetic fields such as monitors or anything with magnets in them.
• Discard tapes after they’ve been used for one year. After tapes have been written to repeatedly, the reliability of the media decreases significantly.
• Have several blank tapes on hand just in case a tape goes bad.
• Perform test restores monthly! Doing test restores is the only way to guarantee that the backup is REALLY working. Testing also gets the person responsible for the backup familiar with the restore procedure in a non-stressful situation ("Oh no! I just accidentally deleted the annual budget report and I'm supposed to do a presentation in 15 minutes, can you restore the file for me?"). We suggest you create a test file, let it be backed up, then the next day delete it, restore it, and access it.