Joshua Silvia

Backup & recovery

Backup migration: How to preserve older restore points

Moving to a new backup repository is mostly a decision about history. The new target is straightforward to configure and the first full ...

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Backup & recovery

Recovery runbooks: What the on-call admin needs

Recovery runbooks are usually written by the person who built the system, and that person is not the one who will be woken at three in the ...

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Backup & recovery

Backup storage maintenance: Keep jobs running safely

A backup target is the one system in the estate that is busiest when nobody is watching. Maintenance on it has to fit between the last job ...

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Backup & recovery

Mass VM recovery: How to plan for competing restores

A single virtual machine restores in twenty minutes during a test, so fifty should take somewhere between twenty minutes and a long ...

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Backup & recovery

Database recovery: When a VM backup is not enough

The database server is backed up every night with the rest of the estate. The job is application aware, it reports success, and the restore ...

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Backup & recovery

Backup copy jobs: How far behind can you afford to be?

Most backup estates keep a second copy somewhere: another site, a separate repository, an object target. The copy jobs report success, the ...

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Backup & recovery

File restores vs. VM restores: Why performance differs

A team that has just restored an entire virtual machine without difficulty is often surprised when a request for one deleted spreadsheet ...

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Backup & recovery

Restore testing: How to choose representative workloads

Restore testing usually fails at the first step, and the first step is not scheduling and not tooling. It is the choice of what to restore. ...

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Backup & recovery

Backup capacity alerts: When should you add storage?

Most backup repositories are monitored with a single threshold, an alert at eighty percent full and a louder one at ninety. That threshold ...

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Backup & recovery

Backup retention: Match recovery points to real needs

Retention is one of the few backup settings that is almost never decided. It arrives with the first job, copied from a previous product or ...

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