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As IT professionals we know that server backups are our sole responsibility. There is no one else in the building worrying about it (until they lose stuff) and no one is looking over your shoulder. But when the crypto-virus hits, when a catastrophic power event kills your servers, when your boss deletes the same folder for the tenth time…can you get it back?
All the training in the world will not prevent every user from clicking on that download. I do training, I tell users not to click on unexpected attachments, but it happens. Are you ready? FYI, not selling anything.
Backups are easy. In fact, with Server 2016, they are easier than easy. In each of my VMWare machines there exists and “extra” 6TB drive. On this drive I added an extra drive to each virtual server and setup automatic daily backups. In general, this has been a flawless technique. I can restore files in minutes. Users do not have access (so the crytovirus doesn’t touch them) and they can be archived. I use a daily batch to copy these backups weeks to another backup server, giving me redundancy. I also have a copy in the vault that I remake every once in while.
“The cloud is better!” I have heard that alot, but I don’t think so. If all our user documents are on Google we are a slave to the internet. Yes, an IT guy just said that! Our internet goes down every single year! There has not been a single year since I became Technology Coordinator that it hasn’t happened! Does teaching stop when the internet goes down? It might, if everything a teacher uses is in the cloud. Instead, we keep most things internal. Our LMS (Moodle,) file servers, web servers, you name it. If the internet goes down, we lose the internet. Most teachers can continue without it. Maybe a lesson is altered for the day, maybe not. But teaching still happens. In districts where everything is in the cloud, it comes to a standstill.
Consider monthly or weekly archival moves to the cloud, not all. With the low cost of 6-8TB drives these days I would far rather have all these files local, and save my bandwidth for what isn’t our content.]]>