_8: Importance of Backup and Restoration

From the very computer or phone you're using to read this blog to the virtual machines in your industrial data center, you should be making routine backups of your system/s for quick and easy restoration.  There will always be a time when you need to restore files or restore the entire machine.  Think of your Backup and Restoration solution as an insurance policy.  You'd be surprised as to how many end users DO NOT have a backup solution other than going around the plant floor making backups of their files via USB.  Here are some reasons you may need a backup solution.

• Restore backup files for comparison or restoration purposes.

• Restore machines (bare metals or virtual machines) when operating system or software gets corrupted.

• Restore systems in case of a malware or ransomware even if you're "air gapped" or connected to the IT Enterprise network.

• Automating backups to make the job easier and reduce error.

• Reduce time to restore machines.  Cut down time from hours to minutes when using a backup solution.

Now that you understand some of the reasons why a backup solution is needed, here are some requirements to actually implement a backup and restoration solution.

• The obvious is a network.

  • I recommend having a separate backup network or vlan for the backup traffic so you don't have to worry about network bandwidth during production hours.  Imagine eating up all the network bandwidth on the production network when you run backup jobs.

• Physical Computers or Virtual Machines to backup.

  • If you're using a virtual platform like VMware vSphere/vCenter, even better as there are integrations with industry leading backup solutions.  With these integrations, you won't need to install agents on the Windows/Linux machines.

  • If you're still have all bare metal servers, don't worry.  You can still utilize a backup solution by installing backup agents on your bare metal computers.

• Network Attached Storage (NAS) device with enough capacity for backups.

  • Here are some resources to help you calculate how much storage space you need:

    • https://calculator.veeam.com/vbr/

  • The Backup NAS should never be mounted on the same rack or stored in the same room as your servers.  Always store the Backup NAS in a different building in case of a fire.

• A Backup Windows Machine with the Backup and Restoration Solution software installed.

  • Backup Windows Machines should have at least two NICs.  One dedicated management NIC and a NIC for backup traffic.

• Offsite Backup Solution.  This could be Offsite NAS device or Cloud Backups.

  • If you own a Synology, you can install the Hyper Backup Application on DSM and backup your NAS to either another offsite NAS or the Cloud.

Once you have the requirements, here are some considerations when creating your backup jobs.

• Create backup jobs for the different machine functions i.e. Infrastructure, HMI Servers, Historians, etc.

• Schedule the backup jobs so they don't overlap.

• Have a least one month of backups for all your SCADA servers.  Domain Controllers or other infrastructure related systems could be less as there shouldn't be frequent changes to those compared to SCADA Servers.

I hope this information adds value to manufacturers or end users and kickstart your infrastructure backup journey.  If you currently don't have a backup solution, try out Veeam Community Edition (CE), which is FREE.  You will be able to run up to 10 backup workloads but there are definitely limitations.  This is a great start to get your critical systems backed up.  Here is the link to the CE version.  I am no way affiliated with Veeam nor is the blog post sponsored by Veeam.  I have used Veeam personally, and it is straight forward process to deploy and managed Veeam so I just wanted to share with the community.

https://www.veeam.com/products/free/backup-recovery.html?ad=menu-products-portfolio-free