Ten lame excuses for not backing up your server

There are lots of excuses given for not backing up a server, below, in not particular order are ten of my favorites with some comments:

OS only

Which you will never need to patch, upgrade or alter in any way. Obviously there are many variations on this theme, but the argument given is along the lines that the server has an Operating System image installed with, perhaps, a defined set of applications, all of which could easily be re-installed / re-imaged on to the server. In real life servers tend to be "living" things that change and grow over time; administrators spend their lives implementing changes and tweaks and checking logs and configurations all of which become very precious once lost.

Data never changes

So it can be stored on read-only media and a few copies can be kept in safe places - there is your backup solution.

Cache / transient data only

In which case do the job properly and keep the data in RAM. An example of this I once encountered was an FTP server that was only to be used for transient data and would not need to be backed up. Following the crash of the server, a long time was spent re-creating the accounts information and then it was discovered that people had been using the service as a collaboration facility and had lost important information.

Data is not important

Then remove it from your system. It is amazing how childish some people can be, often without realizing it. The data is important so it needs to be backed up, but someone does not want to pay for the backup devices and / or media so they claim the data is not worth backing up. And when you suggest removing the data the same people protest. Their message is "the data is important, but you can not make me admit that". Any data worth keeping is worth backing up.

High cost of backup media

The high cost of down time and the cost of re-entering or re-creating data, assuming this is even possible, can be extremely high.

Systems are highly reliable and have high redundancy

And when disaster strikes? A version of this excuse is that the data is distributed accross multiple systems located in multiple geographic locations and the chances of loosing all of the copies of the data are negligably small; which if fine until your synchronisation process copies a corrupted version of the data to all the repositories.

Staff won't / can't change media

Buy a robot or get management to do their job.

The server is about to be decommissioned.

So if the data is no longer needed, switch the server off now, otherwise keep backing it up.

The server is new / experimental / in development.

Which means that it is probably in a state of rapid change with people doing a lot of configuration work which they will not want to loose. This is similar to the above situation.

It is too difficult

No it is not.

I have worked as a system administrator at various times for a number of years and have encountered all the above excuses in one form or another at various times. The person or people advocating that a server is not backed up is almost never the person or people who will have to recover data if it is lost. If a system is not backed up you can be sure that a failure or problem of some kind will occur and despite any previous promises to the contrary someone will want the data back.