Windows Update may have borked my scheduled backups

StewartR

StewartR

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Interesting discovery this week. I have a backup regime whereby the NAS and PCs in the office are backed up to an external drive every night. Or at least, I thought I had. It turned out that the backups hadn't been running for several weeks. The backup software confirmed that they were supposedly scheduled for daily operation, but for the last few weeks they just hadn't been happening.

It seems possible that a Windows Update may have caused this. I've seen reports that there have been undocumented changes to Windows Task Scheduler, introduced via Windows Updates, which have not always preserved the integrity of the existing task schedules. Tasks scheduled by Microsoft programs have not been affected, but some tasks scheduled by third-party programs (such as my backup software) have been disrupted.

Anyway, I deleted and re-created the schedule and it's all fine. And I've upgraded the backup software to a 'pro' version which emails me the backup log every night after it's run, so if it dies again then at least I'll be alerted to the fact.

When was the last time you checked whether your daily backups have been running every day? If you haven't done it for a while, and have just assumed it's all OK, then it might be a good idea to check.
 
I cannot check my backups as my iMac had just died on me. I don't know what is wrong with it yet but suspect I might need those backups.
 
john.margetts said:
I cannot check my backups as my iMac had just died on me. I don't know what is wrong with it yet but suspect I might need those backups.
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Well, at least they won't have been borked by Windows Task Scheduler!
 
neil_g said:
What backup software?
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SyncBack.

Though the stuff I read about Windows Task Scheduler (sorry, can't find the link now) wasn't related to this backup software, or indeed to any backup software.

neil_g said:
But yes, regularly check your backup and do test restore jobs. Turn on notifications etc.
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Indeed. This is a good lesson. I had of course tested it when I set up the daily backup regime, and I assumed that if it was working then it would continue to work. In these days of frequent OS updates, that's not a safe assumption.
 
Personally from an IT point of view you should firstly minimise the amount of data held on the pcs/laptops themselves as they are a weak point for theft/damage/loss etc.
Centralise all Data on a secured Server or NAS in your environment.
Preferably in a secure locked area with hard to get to access.

If you need local data I would suggest setting up a home standard drive on each user machine and use a decent piece of backup software to do a standard backup on each pc/laptop, the key here is STANDARD.

Use the NAS/Storage server to host as much data as possible, use security groups to control access to sensitive data.

On the NAS/Storage Server use a decent piece of backup software to backup to a fresh device every evening and have it email a success/fail report to a monitored mailbox with a report.

in the AM when you walk in check the email report and if happy replace the backup media with the fresh one and prepare it to be removed from site.

All of this should be setup and checked with a local trusted IT solutions company which I see you have now engaged.
 
neil_g said:
What backup software?

But yes, regularly check your backup and do test restore jobs. Turn on notifications etc.
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As Neil said notifications are an absolute must, usually an SMTP to a mailbox after the backup has finished with a decent report attached.
 
Mr Bump said:
Preferably in a secure locked area with hard to get to access.
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I had to smile at that. If you think about what else I've got in the office here, nobody's going to nick a desktop computer or a NAS box.

But it's good advice for people whose office environments are less .... asset-rich.
 
StewartR said:
I had to smile at that. If you think about what else I've got in the office here, nobody's going to nick a desktop computer or a NAS box.

But it's good advice for people whose office environments are less .... asset-rich.
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you would be surprised at what people will grab on a run through and I imagine its going to be a realy awkward thing to replace and re-setup.

one of the biggest ways data loss/leaks happens now is device theft.
 
Never heard of syncback to be honest.

Take a look at veeam agent for windows. Free and much better imo.

And for those businesses needing to start looking at gdpr, remember to get those backups encrypted.
 
neil_g said:
Never heard of syncback to be honest.

Take a look at veeam agent for windows. Free and much better imo.
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If you've never heard of it, how do you know it's much worse? (How do you define better or worse in this context?) What will Veeam do for me that Syncback won't?
 
neil_g said:
And for those businesses needing to start looking at gdpr, remember to get those backups encrypted.
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Not absolutely necessary .. it's absolutely situation dependent. Assuming we are talking about encryption of the backups at rest, rather than during transmission, organisational measures may mean that backups are stored in a secured/restricted access/audited environment, then there's no need to encrypt the backups as well.

Additionally, unencrypted backups are arguably easier to test for integrity. GDPR is as much about preventing loss/corruption of data as it is accidental disclosure. The key thing about GDPR is to show that you, as an organisation, have made the considerations and arrived at an appropriate policy which is in some way enforced.



Mr Bump said:
As Neil said notifications are an absolute must, usually an SMTP to a mailbox after the backup has finished with a decent report attached.
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Active monitoring that checks the status of the backup target is much better - that way an alert means that something has failed, rather than something just worked. Human nature with regular alerts is just to get into habit of ignoring them, and reading a report to see how the backup went is wasting time. When you only get alerts for failure, you know each and every alert needs attending to.



Stewart,
If you need to have the data on the office PCs due to bandwidth restrictions/latency that comes with accessing the files over a network, then I would look at an on-line sync solution rather than a backup solution.

You could (for example) run owncloud/nextcloud on your NAS/file server and the respective clients on your workstations and sync the files in near real time rather than waiting for a nightly backup job to run. You could probably then implement some checks to ensure that the desktop/server filesystems were not too far out of sync and get instant feedback when something goes wrong rather than finding out weeks later*.

Additionally, on the NAS/file server you use a file system that supports snapshots to allow point-in-time recovery. Even better if it allows transmission of those snapshots to a remote backup target.
I'm curious about Syncback .. is it as the name suggests a sync tool or is it doing backups in it's own proprietary format? If that latter, I'd ditch it right away. Especially if it's doing incremental backups. I've been nastily stung by this (...Acronis, here's looking at you!)




*Batching anything up and elongating feedback cycles is bad as it's harder to isolate the cause and of course, by the time you find out it's often too late.
 
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john.margetts said:
I cannot check my backups as my iMac had just died on me. I don't know what is wrong with it yet but suspect I might need those backups.
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My computer had an operating system hiccup and the service engineers did a reinstall of the operating system which involved wiping all my files so I have had to restore my backup. Not as obvious to do as the makers think it is but I have got there. What the restore does not do is all the little tweaks and such that make the computer easy to use - and I still cannot get my film scanner to work (yet).
 
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