Accessibility of documentation & backups

When our main servers could not be reached due to a network outage, a colleague who tried to fix it asked me for a detail about the servers’ network configuration.¹ However, the 1st thing that came to my mind where I could look up what he asked for were files on these servers.

Later, this prompted me to question the availability of our servers’ network documentation which is maintained on one of these main servers. Consequently, the documentation is all backed up to several locations. One of them is a backup server which happened to be affected by the network outage, too. So, no luck in the particular case. But there are additional backups on a remote server, and there are offline backups, some of which are actually in my office. Of course, these are encrypted.

My conclusion is that all is fine. Important information is available at all times, it’s just not always as easily available as it is when the main documentation system is up and running.

In terms of backups, IMHO, this is perfectly fine: When your backups are easy to access they ain’t backups.

+backups