An interactive eGuide: Backup Solutions

 An interactive eGuide: Backup Solutions. Computerworld. June 2012. [PDF]

Disaster recovery is the ability to continue your mission-critical operations after an interruption of some kind. An organization must be able to restore applications and processes to the point where they were before the outage occurred. Organizations “with a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan have the ability to get back to a semblance of normalcy in a much shorter span of time than those without.”

Instead of focusing on technology,  put disaster recovery processes in place; prepare for the most likely causes of downtime. Decide what is most important. Store your data away from your physical site in the event of a natural disaster.  Develop strategies to address operational continuity,  IT recovery, and communication needs.   Understand all parts of the backup procedures.

• Test your backup/recovery (including cloud backup) at least one a year and make sure it actually works the way you want it to.
• Keep install files for your software, including security keys.

“Backup is really the insurance policy that you hope you never have to cash.

Digital Preservation Matters.

WARCreate Google Chrome Extension. “Create WARC files from any webpage”.

WARCreate Google Chrome Extension. “Create WARC files from any webpage”. Mat Kelly. Web page. June 2012.
WARCreate is a Google Chrome extension that allows a user to create a Web ARChive (WARC) file from any browseable webpage. The resulting files can then be used with other tools like the Internet Archive's open source Wayback Machine. The tool is an evolving product with the end result pushing toward being a personal web archiving solution for those that wish to securely archive their metadata in a standardize way. This tools is still under development.

Digital Preservation Matters.

New cloud service safeguards organisations’ digital assets.

New cloud service safeguards organisations’ digital assets. Press Release. 27 June 2012. Tessella has announced Preservica, a new cloud-based service that provides organisations with a secure and affordable solution to safeguard their digital assets. Preservica runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is built on Tessella’s SDB technology and provides tools required to build a long-term digital preservation solution including:

•     Ingest – upload digital content and metadata from a variety of content sources
•     Content storage – encrypt and store multiple copies in a safe, backed-up location
•     Flexible metadata and security – choose how is arranged, described, and protected
•     Access – full search, browse, and download facilities via browser interface
•     Preservation tools – ensure that content is protected against future obsolescence.

Digital Preservation Matters.

 

The Seven Deadly Sins of Records Retention

The Seven Deadly Sins of Records Retention.  Sarah D. Scalet. CSO Security and Risk.  July 01, 2006.

 Legal actions in the past few years have made document retention programs important. One wrong step can cost an organization money.  Some have concluded that they should archive, forever, anything and everything to be on the safe side. But keeping too much information is a risk too, as you can expose yourself to litigation risks, and possibly violating privacy rights. 

1.       Not keeping your records straight from your backup.

• The first step to a good records management program is simply identifying what a record is. E-mail servers and network drives get backed up to keep the business running. But a record is "something that you need to keep around for a set period of time, either for regulatory, legal or business reasons. Records encompass both structured information, like financial transactions ... and unstructured information, like financial spreadsheets." 
• "while backup media may be in a continual state of being written and overwritten, records that must legally be retained often need to be stored on immutable, nonrewritable storage, and should be either very well-organized, very easily searched or both.

2.       Expecting the legal department to produce a rule of thumb for how long to store records.

3.       Assuming that document retention is someone else's job.

4.       Not being able to respond quickly to a request.

5.       Having a policy you can't follow.

6.       Failing to offer guidance on how to destroy old records.

7.       Telling people to delete information at the wrong time.

Start with an accurate survey of the information that's in the organization, a data map.
"At the end of the day, you have to have some sort of written policy around it."

Digital Preservation Matters.