Datasheet

Book IX
Chapter 1
Fundamentals
of Security
1059
Do Not Forget about Data Protection
during an incremental backup, because the backup process clears the
archive bit, the file will not be backed up during subsequent incremen-
tal backups unless the file changes again.
Be familiar with the difference between a full, incremental, and differential
backup. Also know which backup types clear the archive bit.
Tape rotation and offsite storage
Take the time to rotate tapes so that the same tape is not used all the time.
You also want to make sure that you store a backup offsite in case of a
disaster such as flood or fire. It is important that you are able to recover the
system no matter what happens.
Test restore operations
As a last point with backup strategy best practices, you want to test restora-
tions frequently to ensure that you can recover information from backup
without any problem. You do not want to find out that the backups are bad
when management is hanging over your shoulder waiting for the company
network to come back online! Be sure to perform regular test restorations.
Implementing RAID solutions
To help secure your data, not only do you want to have good backups, but
you also want to ensure that you are implementing some form of a RAID
solution. RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is covered in detail
in Book II, Chapter 5, so in this section I review the different types of RAID
volumes supported in Windows servers and ensure that you understand
that RAID solutions are a way of helping secure data.
RAID is a way of storing duplicated data on multiple disks; if one disk goes
down, the data is still available to the users because other disks in the RAID
array have a copy of the data. The benefit of using RAID instead of backups
is that with the RAID solution, the user never knows that a drive has failed
because the other drive is supplying all the data. Note: You still need the
backups, though, in case both drives fail, or some disaster happens, like a
flood or fire, destroying the system and all of its drives.
A number of different types of RAID solutions are available. The ones pro-
vided by the Windows Server OSes are as follows:
✦ RAID Level 0: Also known as a striped volume in Windows, RAID Level
0 writes different parts of the data to different disks at the same time.
The benefit of a striped volume is that you get a performance benefit
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