The Perfect Way to Protect Your Backup System

The Flawless Method to Protect Your Backup System

As you might expect, setting up backups is only the beginning. You'll need to keep it going forever. Likewise, you can't assume everything will work as intended. You need to remain constantly vigilant over your backup system, media, and everything it protects.

Monitoring Your Backup System

Start with the easiest tools. Your backup software almost certainly has some kind of notification system. Configure it to send messages to multiple administrators. If it generates logs, use your operating system or third-party monitoring software to track them. Whenever possible, prefer programs that will keep sending notifications until someone manually stops them or the issue is resolved.

Set up a schedule to manually check your backup status. In part, you want to verify that your notification system is not failing. Mostly, you'll want to search through the history of your monitoring system for things that didn't trigger it. Check for small warnings and do what you can. Keep track of issues that recur frequently but only work after several retries. These may serve as early signs of a more serious issue.

Testing Your Backup Environment and Data

You can't even rely on the most careful monitoring practices to keep your backups safe. Pending data can become corrupted. Thieves, including malicious insiders, can steal media. You need to implement and monitor procedures that verify your backup data. After all, a backup system is only valuable if the data can be restored when needed.

Keep track of your media inventory. Set up a program to check every piece. When you remove media from use due to age or failure, destroy it. This works for strong magnets, tapes, and disk drives. Alternatively, drill a hole to make mechanical disks unreadable. Break optical media and SSDs as you like.

Organizations that don't track personal or financial information may not need to monitor media this closely. However, everyone who has backup data should periodically check that it hasn't been compromised. The only way to be sure your data is in good condition is to restore it.

Create a regular schedule to try restoring from old media. If successful, verify that the retrieved information contains what you expect.

Use this article as a basic discussion on testing best practices. We'll revisit the topic of testing in more detail toward the end of this article series.

Setting up and implementing these activities will take time. Don't let the fatigue prevent you from tracking these items or encourage you to abandon them. What you need to do:

• Configure your backup system to at least send warnings for failed tasks
• Create an accountability system to manually verify that your backup program runs regularly
• Set up a monitoring system that will notify you if your backup software stops working
• Create a regular schedule and accountability system to test whether you can restore data from your backup. Test a representative sample of online and offline media.

Too many organizations don't realize that their backup environments aren't protecting anything until it's too late and everything is lost. Some of their backup systems sit in a failed state for months before they discover it. A few minutes of occasional checks can prevent such disasters.

Monitoring backups, especially testing restores, is undoubtedly tedious. However, it's crucial. Many organizations suffered irreversible damage only after learning too late that no one knew how to properly restore their data.

Maintaining Your Systems

The intuitive scope of a business continuity plan includes only the relevant software and equipment. However, when you consider that the primary purpose of a plan is data protection, it makes sense to think beyond backup programs and hardware. Also, your backup consists of all components that are part of a larger technological environment, so you need to protect it accordingly.

Fortunately, general maintenance can be automated. Microsoft Windows will update itself over the Internet. Package managers in Linux distributions have the same capability. Windows also allows you to set up an internal update server to deliver patches from Microsoft. Similarly, you can maintain your Linux systems and software by keeping internal repositories.

In addition to the convenience these internal systems provide, you can also use them as a security measure. You can automatically update systems without allowing them to connect directly to the Internet. In addition to software, keep your hardware in good working condition.

Of course, modern computer cards and chips can't be easily repaired. Instead, most manufacturers offer some kind of replacement warranty.

If you purchase fully assembled systems from a major system vendor like Dell or Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, they offer warranties that cover the entire system as a whole. In addition, there are also options for fast delivery or on-site service by qualified technicians. If possible, don't allow out-of-warranty equipment to remain in service.

Taking Action

Most operating systems and software have automatic or semi-automatic update procedures. Hardware typically requires manual intervention. Keeping up-to-date is the responsibility of system administrators.

• If available, configure automatic updates. Ensure that they don't conflict with your backup or that your backup system can successfully navigate operating system outages.
• Create a model to check for product software and driver updates. These shouldn't occur too frequently, so you can schedule them as one-time events.
• Monitor for known attacks against your systems on the Internet. Larger manufacturers have entries in their common vulnerability and exposures (CVE) lists. Sometimes they stand alone, but you can also check them at https://cve.mitre.org/. Vendors usually publish fixes in standard patches, but some of them publish "fixes" that may require manual installation and other steps.
• If your hardware has a way to notify you of failures, configure it. If your monitoring system can check the hardware, configure that as well. Create a regular routine to visually verify the health of all hardware components.

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Final Words

Maintenance activities consume a significant portion of a typical administrator's workload, so these procedures serve as best practices not only for backups but also for all systems. However, since your disaster recovery plan depends on the health of your backup system, you cannot allow it to become neglected.

Source: The Flawless Method to Protect Your Backup System - Hornetsecurity