Monday, June 27, 2005

Great New Backup Resources from Storage Magazine

Searchstorage.com, sister website to Storage Magazine, has put together a Learning Guide on backup and recovery. Visit the site and go to Backup School, taught by Corian Douglas, author of the impressively readable (and impressively long) Backup Book. The classes are a combination of 15-minute webcasts and downloadable worksheets, with HTML course outlines. Once you finish the introductory course, you can go to Advanced Backup School.

The courses are aimed primarily at people who are entrusted with establishing a backup system for a business but don't have any background in this kind of technology. Douglas uses simple language and only occasionally slips in jargon, as in this statement from Lesson One: "Backup is always file or volume-based. It's a common misconception to say that you're backing up your hard drive. You back up the volume, you don't back up the drive."

The what? Okay, I've heard about volumes, and I know that you can partition a single drive into more than one volume or combine several drives into one volume, but how often do ordinary people, or even tech people, talk about their "C volume," or "D volume"? The only time I usually come across the word is when I'm reformatting a drive so I can reinstall the operating system.

I have to say, though, I'm learning a lot just from listening to Lesson 1.

Backup School isn't all that's on the site, though. There's a long list of links, including one to an a comparison of different backup strategies. Most of the articles are geared toward larger-scale setups than most independent professionals have, but it's a site well worth bookmarking and returning to.

I'll leave you with the Five Golden Rules of Backup posted by W. Curtis Preston in 2002:

1. That which has not been backed up cannot be recovered.
2. That which has not been backed up off-site will not survive a fire.
3. Any backup that has not been tested with a recovery is not a backup.
4. Ignored backup systems become poorly performing backup systems.
5. Back it up or give it up.

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home