Backup monitoring: Ransomware and other malware mean monitoring is a necessity, not a luxury.
Why backup monitoring is fundamental.
A backup, for those whose IT knowledge is a little rusty, is a copy of certain files stored in a safe place for reasons of security. This practice usually covers you in case of incidents or problems on your principal network, as the data is generally stored on an unassociated network, or, more usually, completely offline. It should be a regular practice for any systems administrator, as well as complementary backup monitoring. Let’s look at some example situations.
Reason number one: security. This is one of the subjects that interests us in the present article, and its relation to backup monitoring. If we can’t avoid these frequent attacks against our infrastructure, at least we can take steps to mitigate the negative effects.
Fundamental security recommendations are to maintain all your software and systems up to date, use a corporate antivirus, and obviously, not to trust any unsolicited URLs or suspicious emails.
Add to this the use of backups. These should be stored offline, on hard discs out of the reach of infectable hardware, so, in the case of attack, your data can be recovered and your business, organization or infrastructure affected as little as possible.
Despite backups being used ever more frequently, particularly at corporate and business level, it is still complicated to know if your data is being stored correctly, if there is enough space on the drives where the data is saved, if there has been a problem inside the anonymous black box, or if any one of a number of backup fundamentals has been omitted. Hence, backup monitoring.
Backups
Backups are created in diverse ways, depending on various factors; available technology, systems, capacity, requisites, company policy, etc. That’s why, far from being a trivial issue, every back up is a unique case, with its own complexities and inherent problems. Let’s take a look at some sample backup cases plus how to monitor them for maximum guarantees, ensuring that our precious data is available in times of virus crisis.
There are three basic types of backup:
Complete backup: a complete copy of all your files.
Differential backup: makes a copy of all new or modified files created since the last complete backup.
Incremental backup: a copy of all new or modified files created since the last complete or differential backup. The optimal choice in terms of performance and disc space as well as being the most widely used.
Due to the particularities of each generation of backups a generic monitoring system applicable to all cases is currently unavailable. Despite this, Pandora FMS is flexible and customizable and gives you options for covering most cases of backup monitoring, whatever the specifics of your case.
Search patterns in backup monitoring
Whatever kind of backup you use, or the methods of its creation, it will be stored under certain directory patterns and files that can be used as references: name, date, time, version, etc
