Developing and implementing a
backup and recovery strategy for
your organization is a step-by-step process. The following outline
describes the actions that take place
at each step.
Step 1: Fund
Determine what budgetary support
exists for your comprehensive data
protection plan, and actively seek
management support for the plan.
Step 2: Evaluate
Conduct a backup needs analysis to
help you determine which technologies are most suitable for your backup
needs. Understanding what data and
storage you must protect will help you
develop effective and comprehensive
backup and recovery plans.
Step 3: Plan
Develop separate backup and recovery plans that address the data protection requirements that your needs
analysis identified.
Step 4: Implement
Deploy backup hardware and software and perform the initial backup of
the entire data store. Begin schedule
of regular full backups and incremental data backups. Move backup
data off site (either via tape storage,
network links to offsite storage, or
Internet-based offsite storage).
Step 5: Test
Regularly test backups to confirm
accuracy and test data recovery procedures to guarantee data availability.
Test client-side backup and recovery
software to assure full functionality.
Retest client-side and server-side
backup and recovery software after
system updates and upgrades. Regular testing will help you catch problems that updating OS software can
introduce in otherwise correctly functioning backups and restores.