Are You Changing Your Backup Tool Set? - WST

Backup and recovery software for Windows infrastructure has significantly evolved over the last number of years. Occasionally, you may have a need to change the tools you use for backup and recovery for myriad reasons. There are some things to consider as you make the migration to a new tool set.

Presumption: You have a backup policy, right? You have documented Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), right? You have a data retention policy, right?

If you change backup tools, you’ll have to consider how you will recover data from backups made with your previous tools should the need to recover arise. You may have to re-license your old backup software to facilitate recovery of the data, as most backup software writes data in a somewhat proprietary format that only that vendor’s tools can access. Optionally, you could continue to maintain licensure for your old backup tools until you’re past your documented backup retention and RPO. Or, you could recover the old data using the old tool set on to existing hardware and then back that “old” data up with your new backup tools, all the while maintaining documentation about the older data that was transitioned into the new backup environment.

For some organizations, the media upon which you write your backup data may become too old to be compatible with some data recovery tools and possibly, some operating systems or even hardware. The same processes as stated above may be options here as well. For example, if you are using Linear Tape Open (LTO Ultrium) devices to store air-gapped backup data, you must understand the backwards read/write compatibility for various generations of LTO.

Let’s hope you never have to do significant recovery of old data. However, if that should happen, it’s not the time to work through how to recover that old data when you no longer have the old backup tool set. The time to work through all that is before you turn off the old backup and recovery tools.

Authored by: Bill Wallen, Security+, CBISO