Welcome back to The Pro Tech Show. Today we'll be giving you three tips to create
an effective backup and recovery strategy, as well as one common mistake that you need
to avoid. Now, you've probably noticed a bit of a format change - there's no green screen today
because we've got a guest on the show. Hello Eric! Now you are a Microsoft MVP and the
author of the Altaro Backup Bible. So can you quickly summarise for us what being an MVP means?
MVP is an award that Microsoft gives out in recognition for voluntary contributions
to a community. In my particular case I focus on Hyper-V but the larger award category is for cloud
and datacentre management. So I try to do anything Windows Server related to on-prem and then kind of
connecting into... There's a separate group for Azure. I'm not in that one but our cloud portion is still,
like, we manage on-prem cloud and then I do work with the hybrid technologies and things like that.
The way I got in touch with you was Altaro sent me a copy of their Backup Bible
and asked me for my thoughts. My thoughts are: it's really good! It's really comprehensive,
yet it's really easy to understand at the same time, so I was really impressed by it. To be
clear from my viewers here, Altaro haven't paid for this video. They've not given me any money. They did
ask my thoughts I said "It's great." and they said "Cool, will you do a review on it?".
I said "No thanks, but what I would like to do is speak to the guy who wrote it." and they put
me in touch with you. So unless they've tricked me, that's you, isn't it? All true as far as I know!
I don't actually work for them, either. I don't know if you knew that, but I am an independent.
They give me a platform and I take advantage of their platform. One of the stipulations for
MVPs: we are not paid for our work, for our contributions, so... I will admit whenever I got
the email from them initially I was a bit suspicious; because it's a document about how to design your
backup strategy, by a company that makes backup products; but looking at it, it's like 200
pages long and I think I counted two pages of "Hey, we make a backup product as well!". That's 99% useful
content to 1% sales, which I think is a good ratio. It's not actually specific
to Altaro's software, though, is it? It's useful for anything. And that was, actually, when
they approached me about producing this that is what they wanted. They said you know we would
like to sprinkle in because we are we are paying for this, you know; but we really want it to
be universally applicable. One thing I quite liked about it was it doesn't start with "Here's how you
configure your backups.". It starts with how to build that business case and get the stakeholder buy-in;
which is really important because one of the things I quite often see technical people fall
down on is getting that business level buy-in; and then they end up with no money to do it and end
up with a hooky solution because they didn't get the business on board in the first place.
And then one day you get that phone call... Yeah. "I told you so." doesn't go down too well, does it? No...
I'm going to put a link to that in the video description. For anyone watching it is free.
You just have to go to the Altaro website and it's on there. I do recommend it, it's a really good
document, but while we've got you, Eric, I wanted to get your top three tips on designing a good
backup and recovery strategy. So my biggest tip, the thing that I would lead off with when you're
designing is that we always come to backup as technology professionals, and that's how we look at
it. Like, we need to get our data back. Really, we're the supporting infrastructure for the enterprise.
We need to cast our net wider and look out at the entire enterprise - what else is going on,
and start asking the bigger questions like: when things break...
How do we then bring them back to functionality? Because sometimes you can restore your data and
then that's just not enough, if that makes sense? So that's that's my number one lead-off point
is you have to really look beyond just data and just the datacentre and just the IT department.
My second biggest tip is you you have to test those backups. It's boring and it's
just unpleasant, and we all have other things we'd rather be doing, but you have to test them.
I have seen many times when we go to get data that should be just fine, and then you discover well...
somebody forgot to check something in the backup, or somebody decided well this was unnecessary,
and it would save time to not back this up and then they think well it is necessary and all sorts of
things like that. You really just have to test your backups. They're no good if you haven't tested them.
I learned that quite quickly in my career. One of my first jobs was to recover a site that had
a significant failure. I got there and found their backups had never been tested, and there was
a problem with the system files on their main server that basically meant it could run, but it could never
reboot; and they hadn't rebooted it in about a year, and they had six months of backups... you can kind of
see where this is going! Every single backup had the same fault and we ended up having to
rebuild the entire thing by hand from scratch, and it was not a pleasant experience. If I could do
anything I would save people from that first burn; because I think a lot of us have those stories.
You don't want to be doing that with a gun to your head! It's just.. this is not, it's not the
right time! It needs to be: "Yeah, this is boring.". Well, boring is good when it comes to backup, you know?
You don't want an exciting day in the backup field! Yeah, it's one of those things... it's doing its job
if nobody knows about it, in a way! All right, great. So first tip is to make sure you look beyond
just the IT department and consider more than just your data - how you're going to actually get
access to it. Your second tip was to make sure you test your backups, because until you test
them you don't actually know if you're going to be able to recover anything. What's tip number three?
So the third one is really to remember that this is ongoing. I have gone to a lot of places where
we forced them to set up a good rotation and we go through all the steps and everything, and then
they go through a reorganisation or they have a lot of personnel changes, or they grow
the business... You know - all the things that happen normally; but they're still running the exact same
plan that we left them with, initially. And turns out, well... you didn't add your new business unit
to the backup, or you didn't you don't even know what the encryption password is... things like that.
The biggest part is to remember that this is an ongoing process. You have to continually...
It's got to be part of every checklist that you do. We bought a new server,
we installed Windows, we installed the app, and then we put it in the backup rotation. It's
got to be part of it every single time, and go through the analysis and all that fun stuff. I
mean, after a while becomes much faster than it is. Like, you've seen the book - it's 200 pages, right?
You don't go through 200 pages of work every time, fortunately; but you know it's something that
people have to get accustomed to seeing on their calendar. Yeah, definitely. There are certainly
ways of making it so when you add a system it's automatically backed up, but I guess you still
have to do that brain exercise to decide what are your recovery objectives, how quickly do you
need to get it back, how much can you actually afford to lose? And I guess you need to have
some engagement with the application owner in the business as well. Right, so unless you just
have an infinite pot of money and you can back up everything continuously you have to think about this.
Those are all really good tips, but I want to flip things around a little bit. So those are
three tips on how to create a good backup strategy... what's the biggest mistake you see people making?
Well, the biggest one really comes back to that first tip and probably to a bigger deal it's...
you have to be functional. Functionality is always the first thing that we strive for, right? Is that
we need the system to work, and it needs to be responsive, and it needs to do all the things we
need to do so we can work our business. That's always number one, and then in the process of
doing that you'll bring in this system... like oh we forgot about this, we forgot about that, the budgets
inevitably get bigger, the timescales get longer, and then all that's done and then somebody's like:
"What about the backup?". And at that point you have no more willpower anywhere to just
deal with it anymore. Just make it go away, right? So then what you always find out is somebody's
out on a forum going "What's the best free backup solution for my 3000 server datacentre?".
OK... you know? And "Well I wrote this great script." and it's like...
OK... and for very small businesses, absolutely; but there's always this trade-off, of if it means that
much to you... why did you? You know if your entire business is going to collapse if this isn't there...
maybe this should not be the afterthought? That is always the biggest mistake,
and then as time goes on it only gets worse. It doesn't get better. It's not like it just heals
itself, you know; because once they get into this place and we didn't do it right the first time,
then they just live with it and they just... that's it. I wrote it in the book, too. The longer you
don't have a failure the law of averages says the more likely you are to have one, but in the human mind
it's like... well it worked yesterday, it worked, the day before, it worked the day before that...
it's just going to keep on working! And so that is the number one big problem is this idea
that it won't happen to me, because it never has. In a previous role I used to do a lot of IT audits
where I'd go in and look at people's infrastructure and their processes, make recommendations...
and the two things always came up were patching and backups; because no matter how much money or
time you sink into it, the best scenario is you don't see anything! So people don't
want to spend money on it because they don't see a return, but then when you don't do it...
And so when you walk into the boardroom and you talk about it they're like... "This
is just like paying taxes, and I'm already paying taxes. I don't want to do this anymore!".
OK... Well, I understand that mentality... but. I work for an IT company so they get it. One of the
founders has a story from her early days when a customer rang up to say they were
having a fire in the building. You know - the classic "Oh what if what if the building burns
down? scenario? It happened, and they didn't have good backups. So she rushed the site to see if there was
anything she could do to help, to see I think it was the finance director dragging a massive great Unix
server out through the front door by the power cable; scorch marks up the side of it; because they
didn't have a backup. So not only did that nearly cost him the business... it nearly cost the guy his life!
I'm not recommending that! If anyone's watching this thinking about running into burning building,
don't do it! But it happened. Don't do that... no, no, no. I hope I was clear in most of my writing but
human life comes first, so always plan to not put your people into a fire! All right, that's great!
Thanks very much for coming on the show, Eric. I really appreciate that - there's some really
good tips, there. Thank you for your time. Thanks for having me on.
For the rest of you guys, I'm really interested to get your feedback. This is the first time I've had someone on the channel so I'm
interested if you found it useful or not. If you did then I'll make sure to sprinkle a few more guest
appearances in as we go along. I'll put a link to Eric's Backup Bible down in the description.
I genuinely think it's a really good piece of work. I wasn't just saying that to butter him up.
As always, if you found the content useful then give it a like, and don't forget to
subscribe to the channel. Thanks for watching, guys. See you next time!