* Backups via Microsoft Active Directory
Recently my colleague John Orlando reminded everyone in our group at the Online Graduate Programs of Norwich University about the limitations of the automated back-up system provided by Microsoft Active Directory.
John wrote:
“Active Directory is a big advance over the former back-up system used by the vast majority of the University – nothing – but it might be a step back for us. If your documents get corrupted without your knowing it, the corrupted version will just overwrite the backup, and both the original and backup will be corrupted. Plus, the backups are saved on a server with 500 other users, which exposes them to any nasty creatures that other people download. To avoid finding yourself having to retype a stack of documents thicker than the pile of Oprah magazines in [a colleague’s] living room, you should also continue to make periodic disk backups of your documents and e-mail.”
Alan Freedman succinctly summarizes key features of Active Directory as follows: “Active Directory: An advanced, hierarchical directory service that comes with Windows 2000 servers. It is LDAP [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol] compliant and built on the Internet’s Domain Naming System (DNS). Workgroups are given domain names, just like Web sites, and any LDAP-compliant client (Windows, Mac, Unix, etc.) can gain access to it. Active Directory can function in a heterogeneous, enterprise network and encompass other directories including NDS [Novell Directory Services, now eDirectory] and NIS+ [Network Information Services from SunSoft]. Cisco is supporting it in its IOS router operating system.” (From the “Computer Desktop Encyclopedia” v 18.3 ; see also Wikipedia’s entry.)
John is right about the danger of relying solely on Active Directory for backups of critically important files. Even though there may be system-wide backups of the Active Directory, it is often tedious to locate old backups and comb through them trying to determine which one has a non-corrupted version of the bad file. His helpful note prompts me to supplement his suggestion with a reminder about version numbers on important files.
If your file has the same name day after day and version after version, then there is no way to avoid overwriting the backup on the Active Server or any other type of backup, and you will lose the valid version in an accident of the type John was describing.
It is for these reasons (to avoid overwriting backups containing older files with the same name as the currently used file and to keep track of separate versions) that information security specialists recommend that everyone get into the habit of using versions on important documents. That way, the file you change today has a different name from the same file that you changed yesterday.
You can do this manually if you get into the habit of including something like “Vnn” as the last part of your document name – for example, “OGP policy list v12.doc” or “Enormous narrated lecture on backups v03.ppt”. Then when you open the file on another day, you can immediately Save As – v13.doc or whatever’s appropriate.
There is a tool on the File menu of Microsoft Word (but not those of PowerPoint or Excel) called Versions that brings up a dialog where you can add notes about what’s different in your new version. However, you must still assign your own version number or other distinguishing tag (for example, a date – and be sure to use the YYYY-MM-DD format to support file-name sorting) to the file you are saving. Word does not change the filename automatically.
A note about TinyURL:
Gary MacIsaac of Cetacea Networks very kindly took the time to let me know of a recent improvement in the TinyURL service: It now offers the opportunity to see where you will be redirected. Turning on the “Preview” feature (it requires cookies) displays the full URL to which you can then choose to go (or not). Thanks also to several other readers who pointed this out.
