SOP Friday: Backups Part 3 - Backup Monitoring, testing and management -
This is the third article in the miniseries on backups. See Part 1: Setting your client backup and Part 2 :. Philosophies backup and customer communication
See also previous articles on Document backups and daily monitoring procedures
These articles walk through the basics safeguards monitoring. Here we will take a step back and look at the bigger picture. When you manage backups for multiple companies, you should have a systematic way to keep track of what happens -. And document
Backups monitoring can be fully manual, fully automatic or somewhere in the middle. I strongly favors somewhere in the middle. A completely manual control backup means you sit either on the server or remotely connect and verify that the work was done, the finished work, and employment was a success. This is a very old school way of doing things.
fully automatic control means that you trust a system to verify that a job started, the job is completed, and employment has successfully completed. This looks like the future of super-cool that we all want. But it is very dangerous. The last time we talked about how How Pixar Toy Story 2. Almost Lost It was possible because they had a super-cool automatic backup system. . . it failed for a month and no one noticed.
The backup and restore () are absolutely essential and therefore need more attention than that. Good enough is not.
We strongly recommend that you use a professional backup solution like Backup Exec, which has rich reports. We never counted on the backup system built into Windows Server, but you could use. Make sure you check the backups! If using SBS, you can get reports on backups using the integrated backup, but no other solutions. Other solutions must provide their own statement.
If you have an RMM (Remote Monitoring and Management) tool, you should find a backup that integrates with this tool so you can monitor backups automatically and remotely. Strange as it may seem, you will get false negative and false positive reports of all these tools. Backups report a failure because they could not open a temporary file which just happened to be used when the backup occurred, but is unimportant and has since been removed from the system. Grrrr. And backups realize success, even when they do not end. Fortunately, this is rare
The bottom line is this :. You must actively monitor these systems. In truth, a backup system well designed with good hardware and good software will work fine. Human error is the cause of 99% of the time when there is a backup failed. So you're tracking your customers and their systems.
Create an automated system, but check regularly. trust but verify.
We recommend the process defined in section daily monitoring of client machines.
We certainly do not do a test restore every day, but we do plan a test restore every month and the monthly maintenance. As mentioned earlier, we are restoring the system state, something each drive that was backed up (for example, C: D: x :), something every medium used (for example, Disk 1, Disk 2 ), and from the key database (for example, a few emails in the Exchange database).
This takes time. And it may mean that you are on hand to perform these tasks. It is good for the customer to see you do a job rather than be 100% remotely. It is also good for them to see you when it's not an emergency. He breaks the habit of saying "Oh no" every time you walk in the door.
The Big Picture
Your overall backup management is probably the most What is important that your company does. It's the only thing that is guaranteed to keep your clients in business disaster. Maintenance is critical, but the backups are critical. Customers do not always see the importance here, but they will assume that you take care of it when something goes wrong.
In the big picture, backup management is really a subsystem of your great service managed operation. That's why you need a comprehensive philosophy that can be applied to all your customers. That's why you need processes and standardized procedures. That's why you need to train all your staff to understand your philosophies and how they are implemented. That's why you track regular daily and monthly restorations.
If you have enough customers, you can actually have one or two technicians who specialize in monitoring and managing customer backups.
I know it's easy to put it. After all, the backup is not working most of the time and stuff to break. But you must keep in mind that saving is more important than everything else. So spend a few minutes (per client) per day is a great investment of your time. Remember, one of my mantras is
Slow Down, do more
This is a great example of this. Af few minutes spent on backups each day can save many hours and dollars when something goes wrong on the road
Feedback Welcome
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about this series
SOP Friday - or standard operating system Friday - is a series dedicated to helping small computer consulting companies develop the right processes and procedures to create a successful and profitable consulting business
learn more about the series, and display the "table of contents" to complete SOP Friday http://www.smallbizthoughts.com/events/SOPFriday .html
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the subject of next week. Backups 4: Changing Technologies
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| life after SBS: Making order out of chaos please join us October 11th in Las Vegas, NV for a special all-day training on life after SBS More info Live Seminar - only one day with Karl W. Palachuk (CEO small Biz thoughts, author, blogger) and Manuel Palachuk (CEO Conceptual Age Consulting, author, blogger). In addition to writing The Network Migration Workbook, we have worked together for seven years and has developed some great "best practices" that serve us well as we prepare for SBS end of life. This seminar is part of the SMB Nation Preday events. Fall Conference SMB Nation is October 12-14 at the Rio in Las Vegas. Early bird pricing is now in effect in http://fall.smbnation.com/. This event is not associated with SMB Nation itself, but we worked with Harry for eight years to put on a kind of preday event. The theme this year is very timely and important: What next! The clock is ticking on SBS and you need both a business plan and a technical process to move from SBS to the Next Big Thing. 25% of the seminar will be on business model considerations to pass to stand-alone servers, cloud services and hybrid combinations. 75% covered by the click click of technical switch to other services. And of course, we'll show you how to do this with zero downtime. More details are http://www.smbpreday.com. This is a seminar $ 399 - and we believe that you save WAY more than that with the first customer to migrate from SBS. But we also have special prices for you. Here's the run down: Anyone who registers during August pays $ 199 September Registration is $ 299 And in October Registration is at full price $ 399 Do yourself a favor: Sign up today |
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