MusicMaster Blog

By Jerry Parker

We all know about backups, right? We know how important they are, and how critical they can become in the event of a system failure. I’m not going to remind you again about them, as you no doubt are very much aware of their value. Instead, I’m going to ask you a different question:

When was the last time you tested your backup to be sure it worked?

I’ll pause for a second or two to let that sink in….

In my experience, most companies are pretty good at performing periodic backups. Naturally some are better than others, but I can say that in my experience with customers very few have actually (if ever) tested their backups to be sure all was well with them. Backups can fail too, just like any other software. An important part of your disaster recovery plans should periodically include testing your recovery processes.  It will do you no good to discover, in the heat of an emergency, that your recovery process was flawed and you didn’t know it. When formulating your disaster recovery plans, you should consider all foreseeable scenarios, including what to do if something you were counting on suddenly wasn’t there.  What would you do in event of an emergency, if you tried to restore your latest backup and it failed?

Here is the disaster recovery regimen I use for protecting my data:

I take daily backups, and keep them for one week on my local PC. Every Friday, I take a backup and store it on a NAS separate from my desktop. At this point, I delete the previous weeks daily backups. Once a Month, I take a backup for historical purposes and store on a USB Stick and keep it in a safe place. At this point I delete the prior month’s weekly backups. Additionally, when I take my monthly backup, I immediately restore it on another machine and compare the live and restored data to be sure all is well. Thus, at any point in time, I have the following backups I can fall back to if I need to restore. The last seven days of dailies, The last four weeklies, and the last 12 monthlies. Remember there is no difference between a daily, weekly and monthly backup. The only difference is where you store it and for how long.

For more information on testing restores of your backups of MusicMaster data, contact your Music Scheduling Consultant.

Protect yourself, because stuff happens.