Autodesk® Vault is essential for managing engineering data, but without a strong backup strategy, your organization risks significant data loss. This article highlights common backup pitfalls and offers best practices to enhance your disaster recovery plan.
Here are some critical mistakes many companies—especially those without dedicated IT administrators—make when managing their Vault backups:
A company repurposed a desktop as their Vault server without an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). When a storm caused a power outage, the hard drive failed catastrophically. To make matters worse, their backup was stored on the same drive as the production Vault, leading to total data loss. While they managed to recover some files from user workspaces, all history and metadata were lost, resulting in days of lost productivity and additional costs to rebuild their Vault.
Lesson: Always use a UPS for your Vault server and store backups on a separate physical device to protect against data loss.
A company assumed their RAID 5 array was an adequate backup solution. However, they overlooked a degraded RAID state caused by a failed disk. Before they could replace it, a second drive failed, resulting in total data loss. Similar to the previous case, they recovered some files from user workspaces, but all history and metadata were lost.
Lesson: RAID is not a backup solution. Always maintain separate, verifiable backups stored offline to ensure complete protection.
A customer with a seemingly robust setup—RAID 10 and a secondary backup on a different machine—fell victim to a ransomware attack. Unfortunately, because the backup was stored online and not isolated, both the production Vault and backup were encrypted, leaving them with no usable data unless they paid a costly ransom.
Lesson: Always maintain an offline copy of your Vault backup to prevent ransomware from compromising all available data.
A customer used the popular backup tool Veeam to back up their Vault, but when disaster struck, they were unable to successfully recover the backup. Another customer faced a similar issue—not losing data, but experiencing four days of downtime because their Veeam environment wasn't properly managed. As a result, they are now implementing a full test environment to periodically validate their backups and provide a temporary production environment should their primary server go down again.
It’s increasingly common for customers to rely solely on tools like Veeam or VM snapshots for backups, but these are often not thoroughly tested. A more reliable approach is to use an ADMS Console backup alongside a test environment. This gives CAD administrators greater control over the disaster recovery process, assuming they have the necessary access to their servers. This is particularly critical for clients whose ADMS and SQL Servers are on separate systems, as both parts need to be backed up together to prevent data loss during restoration.
Lesson: Don’t assume backup software will work flawlessly when you need it most. Regularly test restores and maintains a dedicated test environment for validation.
A company following the 3-2-1 backup rule—three copies of data, two local copies on different media, and one offsite—discovered a critical flaw when attempting to restore. A faulty network interface card had been subtly corrupting their backups over time. When they finally needed to restore, they found many files were unusable due to data rot.
Lesson: Periodically test backup restores to ensure data integrity and confirm that all files are usable.
A company had been using Vault for a couple of years since their last migration. During the initial phase of an upgrade project, it was discovered that numerous files had been manually edited in the Vault’s File Store, which is a significant mistake. Typically, during a backup, the ‘Validate file stores’ option should be checked, but due to the size of their database and file stores, they had unchecked that option. Had they been performing test restores of their backups, they could have identified these unauthorized changes earlier, resulting in less data loss.
Lesson: Regularly testing restores helps identify any changes to files in the file store by comparing their checksum values against the known values in the Vault database.
To ensure the security and recoverability of your Autodesk Vault, follow these best practices:
By following these best practices, you can significantly reduce the risk of data loss and ensure that your Autodesk Vault is secure and recoverable when needed most.
Disasters happen, but data loss is preventable with the right preparation. By implementing a comprehensive backup strategy, regularly testing restores, and maintaining a test environment, you can safeguard your Autodesk Vault and ensure business continuity, even in the worst-case scenarios. Act now to secure your Vault before disaster strikes. Contact us today to get started.