Data Safety

Dec 2, ’10 4:45 PM
Author Categories Hardware, Practice, Standards, Workflow Tags ,

We’re an office. We have stuff on hard drives. They go kaput every once in a while: count on it. Here’s the data protection overview.

What data do we back up?

Office data on the various servers or in the cloud. We do not back up workstations, except for the laptops. Laptop users administer their own TimeMachine backups to local firewire drives.

  1. Basecamp projects – backup html is manually copied to Vol. 2 once a week.
  2. Google Apps – mail and calendar backups handled by Google.
  3. Server HD – Server system, Filemaker, and BIM Server.
  4. BDA Mirror (Vols. 1, 2 and 3)

What Digital media do we use?

Server Internal Drives

  1. Server HD. The server operating system.
  2. BDA Mirror. Two 1.5 TB disks in a RAID configuration. Our data.
  3. ServerBackup and TimeMachine. These appear as separate disks, but actually are a single 1.5TB in 2 partitions.

External Drives

  1. The Orange Drive. Two partitions: “Offsite Server HD and “Offsite Data”.
  2. Nameless External Drive. Lives at Tim’s house.

What data loss events are we planning against?

  1. Hardware failure.
  2. Rollback to previous file versions – human error or software crash.
  3. Complete data loss caused by office catastrophe

How does it work?

Hardware Failure … getting everything back online in a hurry

Vols. 1, 2 and 3 are on the BDA Mirror. A disk failure triggers the mirror drive to take over service while the primary disk is repaired or replaced.

The Server HD is cloned daily at 1 AM by Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to Vol. 2/computers/Backup – Server HD.  If the Server HD drive fails, we can recover data quickly from that location.

Rollback to previous file versions

The disk named TimeMachine is the dedicated time machine disk.  It is an internal drive on the server and is available to the office at all times rather than taken off site as we used to do.  Time machine is invoked using Apple Remote Desktop. Steve and Tim have copies of ARD on their workstations.

Complete data loss … or office catastrophe

The Orange Disk labeled BDA Offsite Backup receives daily a cloned copy (CCC) of both the Server HD and BDA Mirror (except for Inactive Data).  This disk leaves the office daily.  The “Offsite Server HD” partition is bootable which means this disk could plug into any machine and be designated as the startup disk.
The disk at Tim’s house is brought into the office and receives Inactive Data every six months.  The six month cycle includes moving projects into the Inactive Data folder prior to the backup.