I’m going to need you to go ahead and restore…

• It’s 09:00 on a Monday morning. Like any Monday, it is not going well and you haven’t had your coffee yet. Your manager is frantically looking for you. He has a 10:00 meeting with the CEO about a new project he has been working on and is getting a lot of “C” level attention. He accidentally deleted file while cleaning up some folders. What do you do?
• Your laptop was recently compromised by a new piece of malware that encrypts your files and holds them for ransom. The “ransomware” (http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4544&rss) is holding your data hostage. What do you do?
• You are a small company that sells products online. A day without a website will put you in the red. You arrive to where your company use to be, that is, until a fire destroyed the facility overnight. What do you do?
• You love taking photos of friends and family. You are affectionately known as the “family shutterbug.” With over 50GB of photos on your computer, you haven’t missed a moment of your newborn growing up. Your hard drive comes to a screeching halt. What do you do?

What do all of these events have in common? They are all easily remedied by a valid, working backup and restore process. While one of these events (the business disappearing overnight) will take much more than a simple backup and restore process, they all have the same underlying theme.

Do you know what your backup and recovery plan is? Have you tested it? If you answered “No” to any of these questions, you had better find an answer before the unthinkable happens. Your backup and recovery methods will vary based on the data you are protecting and the amount of data you have to protect.

While a backup plan is great, you need to make sure it works. You need to test backups regularly. Otherwise, your hardware and/or software may be lying to you. I have heard of horror stories of data gone forever because the admin thought everything was ok, after all, no errors or problems were ever encountered. Tapes can go bad, backup drives can wear out leaving your backups useless and data stranded.

Your backup plan must also include security protections. Are your tapes encrypted? Do you have the correct decryption keys? Where do you keep your Off-site storage medium? How are they protected and who has access? These are all important things to consider for your backups.

Corporate users and home users each have different needs. We will discuss these needs in a future column.

Lets hear about your disaster plans. What was the worst thing you experienced and did you recover? Post your sanitized stories in the comments.