WORLD BACKUP DAY - Your Data, Your Responsibility

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It is #WorldBackupDay again, and I wanted to tell two stories that happened to me personally as a student and as an employee. from those stories, I learned one major lesson: my data is my responsibility

1- Student

A long time ago, I was in my final year of college. I really liked my study in nuclear engineering, and I assume that I was a good student (top 10).

then, I had an old PC with limited storage capacity. Due to lots of materials and resources I had, I bought a CD burner and started to “burn” CDs to save my data. This wouldn’t be enough. I was afraid to lose those CDs for any reason, like accidentally breaking them.

The solution comes on a silver plate, my neighbor bought a new PC with sufficient storage. We made a cross-connection over the network and started to share data together. It was a good solution for me to save my spare data on a “trusted” machine rather than CDs. That was a relief. isn’t it??!!

No, it is not. My neighbor was complaining about his PC’s slow performance. and he decided to hire someone to re-format his PC. He was happy as his PC turned new again. on the other hand, I asked one important question for me: Where is the data?

It is gone for sure, he wouldn’t care as all his data was just games. so nothing really important. For me, I was really shocked. I tried many nights just to remember what was the data I sent to my friend’s PC. Eventually, most of the data is gone forever….

2- Employee

I was hired to work as a senior system engineer in one of the regulators. I was responsible for backing up the critical systems and data in the infrastructure. The work was very smooth, and every day, I checked the status of the backup jobs in the morning. And that’s it…

One day, LUN was removed accidentally, and I was asked to restore the related data from the backup I already had. Ok, it is fine, I said with confidence as I do my check every day.

The result wasn’t pleasant. Backup files weren’t verified and were somehow corrupted. I tried many times with different copies but with no luck.

This year, I was looking for something to verify my backups. I tried to do it manually as I restored the entire machine just to test it and delete it again. It was a headache process but I had to after the incident.

here, I introduced to SureBackup feature from Veeam. I made the shift to Veeam basically for this feature. to be sure that my data is really backed up as expected and that I can restore them as expected.

Lessons learned

In both cases, the fault was mine. It is my data, and I should be ready in mind if something happens.

In the first case, I just needed more storage, I ran to store my data without thinking of the safety and reliability of the destination repository. I wish I had known the 1-2-3 backup strategy earlier

In the second case, I only needed to verify that my data was restorable, as well as I did to check if it was backed up or not. It was a minor incident, but who knows…

In conclusion: your data is always your responsibility. People sometimes show some of “Oh, you lost your data? Just try different things” and they walk away. In this specific case, you discovered that it is your job to think like you already losing it. Think “backuply” if it is a word 🙂

Happy World Backup Day…remember how many times you’re saved