TECH TALK
WITH THE EVER-CONNECTED NATURE OF TODAY’S ALWAYS-CONNECTED WORLD, SUFFERING A LOSS OF FILES, ADDRESS BOOKS, LOG DATA AND MANUALS BECOMES NOT ONLY MORE SEVERE, BUT ALSO MORE LIKELY.
operations which interact with aircraft in fl ight or maintenance (be this test equipment, maintenance laptops, document repositories, etc.), the more we need to enact measures to continuously backup such information in the event of a catastrophe. This means not only your desktop and notebook computers and servers, but all of your devices that contain any type of data, such as smartphones and tablets. Many of these devices serve double or even triple duty nowadays, supporting business use, personal use and in some cases, use on an aircraft in the cockpit. Some of these devices are used on a network, and you might have network backups performed on a periodic basis, others may not at all (shame on you). With the ever-connected nature of today’s always- connected world, suff ering a loss of fi les, address books, log data and manuals becomes not only more severe, but also more likely. It is worth defi ning the two main types of stored data —
active data (also referred to as data in use in the IT world), and inactive data (data at rest). Each is important for diff erent reasons. Active data generally refers to documents and data being referenced frequently or recently. Inactive data is often important whenever you need to reference information (for tax purposes, aircraft records retrieval, or simply to fi nd embarrassing pics of a buddy from that spring break trip back in college). Data at rest often ends up in an offl ine data archive in corporate/government environments, but these archives are essentially compressed databases of information. With the ever-expanding capabilities of portable computing devices, such data may be carried around more often than in the past, since it is easier to do so. According to Bill Blanchette, senior InfoSec engineer, “Depending on the nature of the loss, such as leaving your notebook on the TSA counter at the airport, this could produce a breach of personally identifi able information (PII) or worse, protected heath information (PHI). The damage could have civil and/or criminal legal ramifi cations in addition to loss of trust, business reputation, etc. Having backups of such information is paramount, but so is
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protecting it.” This is why mobile/portable devices must also be backed up on a regular basis (and have adequate security for the data they contain.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF BACKUPS Nearly everyone is familiar with the various types of local backups, either to a USB drive, CD-ROM (which is rather rare nowadays due to the data size limitations), or if you are on a network, to a network-attached storage drive. Many of the solutions for home or small business users perform a scheduled backup nightly or weekly. Many of the lower-end software applications that drive such backups are not always reliable, and leave you at risk. I have experienced this fi rst hand at home and on the job. While I worked for an unnamed defense contractor
many years ago as a software engineer tasked with leading a project, we had a lightning strike on our building one weekend, and it caused havoc. I received a phone call from the facilities personnel on a Sunday morning to inform me that the DEC VAX computer system in our secured lab had been impacted. (I am dating myself here, but this was one of the largely-used systems in the days before PCs and LANs). I stopped in that day to inspect the system, and surely enough, it was down and would need to be restored from our daily/weekly backup tapes that a system operator had confi gured for us. On Monday morning, when the system operator informed us that the backups had failed for the past week or so, you can imagine the reaction –mayhem, profanity and panic. We had to painstakingly back track all of the recent software changes our project had done, and missed our project milestones for many weeks until we caught up. Quite simply, a canned software application for backups had failed and no one had noticed, even though we had someone assigned to monitor this, and a once-in-a- blue-moon event happened and triggered a crisis. More recently, I had used one of the large cloud-based backup services to archive several computers on my home network. This worked fi ne for many years and I was able to restore accidently-deleted fi les many times without incident.
DOMmagazine
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