Backups
Backups
With all the talk of crypto virus Ive looked into it and the traditional backup across the network would be useless as the drives would be shared and the virus would encrypt them. Is mysql folder connecting through a port or being shared and would the crypto virus get these? If not then the opendent images or the imaging programs files would persumably be encrypted on the server. The only thing that would work is either something like crashplan to the cloud, or the server running something like syncback pro and versioning the files to a connected usb or hard drive that are NOT shared so no other computer could see them. Not browsing the internet on the server would mean no infection on this would be possible.
Re: Backups
Luckily, we have not been infected by the crypto virus, but isn't the virus self-replicating in your network such that an infection in one of your workstations would cause all the drives, including yours server, to be infected at the same time?
I do not allow my staff to use any browsers under the windows environment for that reason (we use VMs through Fusion in OSX Apple computers), and to check eligibility through Chrome browsers in an OSX environment.
We do staggered backups to different drives every day (basically, there is an odd day backup and an even day backup) using Carbon Copy Cloner so it copies the whole Windows Sever 2012 machine on a daily basis. The theory is that we would notice the problem within 24 hours and if the backup was infected, we would go back to the previous day backup and lose at most 48 hours of data.
I have not found any reliable full system backup for Windows which would allow me to spin up a new computer within a few minutes of the failure of the old computer. That is why, despite perhaps a microsecond delay due to running a virtual machine (I actually never noticed any lag, but as it is not running on bare metal, who knows), we use Apple hardware as the server.
Try it, you will like it. We have been running this scheme for the last eight years -- we have had system drive failures, database corruption (due to electrical power outages), and pure stupidity in my part when upgrading certain hardware components in my system. But we have always had solid backups which as I have said, took all of about 5-10 minutes to spin up and have it operational with some loss of data (as I said, about 12 hours at the most because of our nightly backups)
I do not allow my staff to use any browsers under the windows environment for that reason (we use VMs through Fusion in OSX Apple computers), and to check eligibility through Chrome browsers in an OSX environment.
We do staggered backups to different drives every day (basically, there is an odd day backup and an even day backup) using Carbon Copy Cloner so it copies the whole Windows Sever 2012 machine on a daily basis. The theory is that we would notice the problem within 24 hours and if the backup was infected, we would go back to the previous day backup and lose at most 48 hours of data.
I have not found any reliable full system backup for Windows which would allow me to spin up a new computer within a few minutes of the failure of the old computer. That is why, despite perhaps a microsecond delay due to running a virtual machine (I actually never noticed any lag, but as it is not running on bare metal, who knows), we use Apple hardware as the server.
Try it, you will like it. We have been running this scheme for the last eight years -- we have had system drive failures, database corruption (due to electrical power outages), and pure stupidity in my part when upgrading certain hardware components in my system. But we have always had solid backups which as I have said, took all of about 5-10 minutes to spin up and have it operational with some loss of data (as I said, about 12 hours at the most because of our nightly backups)
Re: Backups
I'll second the virtual machine method. We make nightly clones of our virtual server which are stored in a Linux environment copied over a Linux network to a backup server. The Windows environment does not see or talk to the Linux backup machine so there is no chance of the crypto virus messing with our backups. As bad as the crypto virus is, we would hopefully only lose 1 day of data.