Bancopious; Chicago, Il & Oahu Hawaii: Shortcuts to Losing Your Data

Monday, February 13, 2012

Shortcuts to Losing Your Data

In this chapter we’re going to explore the 7 shortcuts to losing your data one-by-one. We’re going to do so by discussing each of these causes of data loss from the perspective of paths. In each section, we’ll first discuss the path associated with the shortcut to losing your data. As illustrated in the picture to the right, this shortcut is designed not only to facilitate your losing your data - but to put you on the fast track for early retirement.

After the shortcut to losing your data is explored, we then describe taking another path - one in which you don’t lose your data and don’t put your job at risk. This path, depicted at the bottom left of this page, is of course the one we recommend.

NUMBER 1: Ignore Hardware Failure

Shortcut to Losing Your Data

Hardware failure is the leading cause of data loss; thus ignoring hardware failure is the most important shortcut you can take in order to lose data. You have several choices with respect to taking this shortcut. The most straightforward technique to lose your data is to imply ignore that hardware failure can occur and simply not backup your systems and data. Of course, that’s a bit crass - there are more subtle ways to ensure data loss.

Another age-old option to help you lose your data is to use tape as your backup medium. With the high failure rates associated with tape, sooner or later you’re assured that you’re going to need to recover your data and not be able to do so.

A creative technique to ensure you will eventually lose your data is to use your SAN or NAS storage device as both the source of the backup and the target of a backup. Note that I’m not referring to snapshots in between physical transfers of data off the SAN or NAS; I’m talking about using your SAN and NAS for primary storage and for backup storage exclusively.

Taking Another Path

To protect yourself from hardware failure, you have to move your data from primary storage to a completely separate secondary storage. That secondary storage can be (and should be) less expensive than your primary storage, but it has to have RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) characteristics that are as good or better than your primary storage. Those

requirements rule out tape as well as ruling out partitioned primary storage (SAN or NAS) - although SAN and NAS snapshotting may be used between primary backup protection. The best approach is some type of D2D (Disk-to-Disk) backup. The advantage to D2D backup is that you are using secondary media with higher reliability characteristics than tape while still insuring that you have a physically separate secondary storage set so that you can survive hardware and system failure.