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Old 15th November 2013, 03:17 PM   #1
Rat
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Backups

The whole Cryptolocker thing (which probably deserves a thread for discussion itself, but I haven't been affected) got us thinking about the way we back up our servers, and worst-case scenarios. I know there are other IT bods here, so it must be something that others have dealt with.

My question is this: at home, or at the place where you work, if something like* Cryptolocker struck, and in this case essentially destroyed all the data on a main file server, what's the most data you would lose considering your backup strategy?

In our case, if something like that was run by someone quite high up, who therefore has access to pretty much all of the important data, we could lose up to 8 hours' worth of stuff, which multiplied by the number of users obviously adds up to a significant financial loss, which is why I can understand why some people pay up. Due to other changes that were coming anyway, that's all going to change for us next year, and we'll be in a much safer position. But on the Cryptolocker thread on bleepingcomputer, there are stories of business, sometimes large law firms, who haven't got backups at all, or from this year, or from the last six months. There's one chap there who seems to have lost every picture taken of his children from the first eight years of their lives (and all his other photos, of course, but that's what he cares about). I don't understand how people work like this.

Our work backup strategy is ridiculously arcane, but it generally only takes me about ten minutes a day to keep it running, and we can always restore last night's full server data (or the previous two nights'), and can restore any individual file, as long as it existed overnight at least once, since about 1997 or so. Our ability to rescue things when people mess up means that some people even overestimate it, so we had one chap just last week who wanted us to restore something from the previous day; it turned out he had created it in the morning, worked on it all day, then voluntarily closed it and answered 'no' to whether he wanted to save it. Poker faces till he left the room.


*By 'something like' I mean something that destroys the files on the affected machine, plus the files on any share to which the user has write access. It's irrelevant for the purposes of the question whether you have some sort of Unix, since the question is about a theoretical threat. For the purposes of the question, the something like could be a malicious user, rather than malware, for example.
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Old 15th November 2013, 05:41 PM   #2
Pulvinar
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Originally Posted by Rat View Post
My question is this: at home, or at the place where you work, if something like* Cryptolocker struck, and in this case essentially destroyed all the data on a main file server, what's the most data you would lose considering your backup strategy?
I'd loose the last 15 minutes of work (assuming I couldn't remember what I'd just typed…)

The problem is that backups are like seat belts-- there are many who just don't see the need, usually because they haven't been bitten yet. Backups really need to be built into every OS.

If enforcing backups is considered too "nanny-state", then the OS could at least, if it detects no backups being done, give the user a "preview of events": pick a random time to stage a disk failure for an hour, and then return it to a working state, along with a message suggesting to go buy a backup disk.
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Old 20th November 2013, 05:05 AM   #3
Soapy Sam
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Pretty much all my data files and photos exist as multiple copies on several hard drives, on a desktop, a laptop and a couple of portable USB 3 terabyte drives.*

I doubt I'd lose much.

Not something I want to put to the test though.



* I'm a strong advocate of airgap firewalls.

Last edited by Soapy Sam; 20th November 2013 at 05:07 AM.
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Old 20th November 2013, 02:25 PM   #4
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Did have an unfortunate occurrence a few months back.

Customer had failing hard disk. Managed to recover data from it to a workshop PC. Installed new hard disk into customer's machine.

Went to copy over previously recovered data. Got some of it but after it failed to restore fully, then discovered workshop hard disk had developed a large section of bad blocks - not funny.

Fortunately, the important stuff was still intact.
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Old 24th November 2013, 08:43 AM   #5
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Can't say work-wise, but personally it would depend when you ask me. Right now about zero as I just did a backup of stuff I care about. Probably lose lots of music, but I should be able to replace most.
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