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Counting the numbers
How many datacentres do you have across your organisation? It’s a simple enough question, but the answer is sometimes not as simple as some organisations think. The reason for this is it’s too easy to...
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Recovery survey
We talk a lot about backups, but we all know that backups are done for one reason – to recover when necessary. To that end, I’d like to get an understanding of how recoveries work in the broader backup...
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Recovery Survey Results
Thanks to everyone who provided responses into the recovery survey. It proved to be a very interesting insight into some of the recovery profiles businesses experience. It confirmed some generally held...
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NetWorker 8: Synthetic fulls
The history of NetWorker and synthetic fulls is an odd one. For years, NetWorker had the concept of a ‘consolidated’ backup level, which in theory was a synthetic full. The story goes that this code...
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The divisibility of eggs
The caution about keeping all of ones eggs in the one basket is a fairly common one. It’s also a fairly sensible one; after all, eggs are fragile things and putting all of them into a single basket...
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Windows block based backup with Linux AFTDs
One of the new features of NetWorker 8.2 is the expansion of Windows Block Based Backups (BBB) to support additional backup targets. When the feature was originally introduced into NetWorker 8.1, it...
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Backing up renamed directories
Long-term NetWorker administrators may remember that NetWorker used to have a somewhat odd mechanism of dealing with renamed directories. Nowadays the default option for any new client is to enable...
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A locale problem
I had a doozy of a problem a short while ago – NetWorker 8.2 in a big environment, and every now and then the NMC Recovery interface would behave oddly. By oddly: Forward/Back buttons might stop...
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NetWorker 8.2 and VBA Instant-Access
One of the great new features in NetWorker is the integration of Instant Access, whereby virtual machines backed up with the VBA appliance to Data Domain systems may be instantly accessed from the Data...
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Testing (and debugging) an emergency restore
A few days ago I had some spare time up my sleeve, and I decided to test out the Emergency Restore function in NetWorker VBA/EBR. After all, you never want to test out emergency recovery procedures for...
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Recovery survey
Back in 2012, I ran a survey to gauge some basic details about recovery practices within organisations. (The report from that survey can be downloaded here.) It’s been a few years and it seems...
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NetWorker 9: The future of backup
Introduction When NetWorker 8 was released I said at the time it represented the biggest consolidated set of changes to NetWorker in the all the years I’d been working with it. It represented a radical...
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2015 – that’s a wrap!
As we approach the end of 2015 I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on some of the data protection enhancements we’ve seen over the year. There’s certainly been a lot! NetWorker 9 NetWorker 9 of...
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Who should handle your database backups?
I’ve been working with backups for 20 years, and if there’s been one constant in 20 years I’d say that application owners (i.e., DBAs) have traditionally been reluctant to have other people (i.e.,...
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Basics: Recovering Data Backed up over NFS
Backing up data from an NFS mount-point is not ideal, but sometimes we don’t have a choice. There’s a few reasons you might end up in this situation – you might need to backup data on a particularly...
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Basics – Linux File Level Recovery from VMware Image Level Backups
NetWorker 9 introduced a new, pure HTML5 web interface for the File Level Recovery interface for VBA, which works much the same way as the v8.x FLR, just without Flash. However, it also introduced...
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Backing up to Recover: PSS, BBB and VBA
I’ve recently been doing some testing around Block Based Backups, and specifically recoveries from them. This has acted as an excellent reminder of two things for me: Microsoft killing Technet is a...
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Backing up Oracle with NMDA
In previous posts I’ve talked about options around database backups – specifically whether you’d use a NetWorker module or say, DDBoost for Enterprise Applications. There’s a lot of architectural...
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GitLab’s RCA Misses Key Failures
On January 31, GitLab suffered a significant issue resulting in a data loss situation. In their own words, the replica of their production database was deleted, the production database was then...
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What to do on world backup day
World backup day is approaching. (A few years ago now, someone came up with the idea of designating one day of the year to recognise backups.) Funnily enough, I’m not a fan of world backup day, simply...
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