Peer to Peer Magazine

www.iltanet.org 86 Peer to Peer LESSOnS LEARnEd Skip Lohmeyer Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, P.C. DiREctoR of tEchnoloGy oPERations GREEnvillE, sc number of attorneys: 450 number of offices: 37 Up the Creek WITH a Paddle E xperience in paddling the roaring rapids of disaster recovery has taught me there are three priorities to consider in both the planning and testing stages: data recovery, communication re-establishment and business services resumption. the dos and don'ts of each of these are covered below. DATA ReCOVeRY If you can't recover your firm's critical data, you're up a creek without a paddle OR a canoe! You must have a resilient backup/restore plan for business-critical systems. backups fail. If you don't pay attention, that little hole in the boat will cause you to sink! Do monitor backup failures and successes • , and account for every job to prevent missing the time(s) when your job doesn't send the alert about a failure because a hung process is holding your backup job in an open state. Don • 't rely on the system's notification that a backup job was successful. You might be surprised to find data is not recoverable due to corruption, bad media or human error (for example, someone forgot to add the newly created client data folder to the backup job last week). tape backups fail (a lot!). Human error, bad media and data corruption plague recovery from tape. Do train the staff in each regional office where you • have a tape solution, especially if you must rely on non-IT employees. If you have continued problems, plan to move away from tapes in those regional offices. Common mistakes with tape backups include: ejecting tapes before a backup job completes; forgetting to remove/rotate a backup tape, which results in overwriting the previous day's "good" backup; and failing to move tapes offsite. Don • 't ignore the "wear and tear" of your tapes and tape drives. Bad tapes and drives have an adverse effect on your backup procedures. Don • 't assume the "techie" employee can handle simple tape rotations. Don • 't think you can restore quickly with one of the larger Dlt tapes. It may take many hours to restore a copy of your 75GB Exchange Priv from your DLT IV tape. You may just miss your recovery time objective expected by the firm. Don • 't allow employees to take tapes home as part of a daily offsite storage plan. COMMUnICATIOn Re-eSTABLISHMenT With good backup/restore in place, you have your canoe and your paddle. But, if you can't communicate to firm personnel on how to access restored data, you're up a creek in an empty canoe. Planning and testing communications with firm personnel and with clients are vital in getting the firm operational following a disruption/outage.

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