PC MAX Backups and Options
Backups are a hot topic with some people, others could care less. If you have a business and you value your data, you must have a backup and disaster recovery plan. See "options" below. Here is a link from PC Magazine that echoes what I've been saying for years about backups. The first 2 lines tell it all.
Ask anyone who has lost an important file, over wrote a file by accident, lost a hard disk or suffered data loss from an Internet worm and you will likely be talking to someone who backs up. You will really appreciate the value of a good backup the most after a failure. Don't wait for the failure to have a solution in place. Reference this article from PC Magazine regarding the need for backups.
A good backup is nothing more than an insurance policy. You don't purchase health insurance because you plan on getting sick any more than you would backup your files thinking you will need it, but bad things happen. I hate to say this is amusing but every time I hear from a customer that they need help, restoring a file from a backup, they tell me "this is not a good time for this to happen". There is never a good time. For those who use a backup because they had a problem in the past, they're in panic mode if it isn't working correctly. Backups are one of the necessities of computing that many people could care less about.
A disaster recovery plan in the form of a good backup routine is a must whether you are a one person company or have 1,000 employees and a good tape rotation is the best solution. There are dozens of good reasons for using tape, see the PC Magazine link above that talks about tape being the only good way..
A tape backup is going to be the easiest and quickest way to get your system back up and running, the way it was, if you experienced a hard drive failure or operating system corruption. If you have a central location, such as a file server, where ALL the data is being stored, that's the drive that needs consistent backups. If all you are backing up is data you invariably will miss something important and we have seen situations where backing up "data only" was mistakenly backing up the wrong files causing several man years of data input to be lost that could not be recovered. (Of course the customer wants to blame the support people thinking they should have been able to do something, some of us are good, but we can't work miracles.).
The prime difference between a data backup, (assuming you have ALL the data actually being backed up), and a full backup is the time required to recover from a disaster. (That's more important then the time required to do the backup since it's usually done after hours). Maybe 2 hours to get you back where you were using a tape, 5 to 6 hours or more to get you back in business, but not back where you were, without the full backup. The data backups don't typically take into account where some of the configuration information and data are stored. Some software, like Quicken products, don't store the data in the "My Documents" folder by default but that's only one example. Remember that an additional 2 or 4 hours to get back in business could cost you real money in lost business and productivity. There are few things worse than having your employees sitting on their hands waiting for the computers to come back to life. One worse thing is to tell your customers you can't check on something because the computers are down.
If you can afford the cost of backing up your entire system, (the only really good backup is a full system backup), using the Internet, do it, but make certain you have several copies of the backups to fall back on. That is the most expensive method though some people feel it is the easiest. Even a high capacity DVD, (8+ gigabytes), is not likely to be able to backup an entire system without quickly running out of space. Current generation tapes start at 40 gigabytes.
I have seen people attempt to backup with CDs or DVDs that require you sit in front of the system swapping out the media until the backup is finished. You will quickly tire of that to the extent that you won't continue with the backups on a regular basis. In this case the old adage what can go wrong will go wrong will come into play. Invariably, as soon as you stop the regular backups something WILL go wrong.
We are asked how frequently someone should backup. The answer is fairly simple. In any given day you have input enough information that you wouldn't want to attempt recreating it from scratch, that's the day you should backup. For most businesses that means every day.
Options (Top)
CD backups. Only good for occasional data copy and archive If there is enough data to fill a CD up it will only be done when you have time, which isn't going to be often enough. If you are using CD writing software not specifically designed and labeled as backup software there are other traps you won't find until you need the data.
DVD backups may be able to do a system backups for a while but then you run into the same problems of running out of space and consuming your valuable time.
External hard disks are becoming popular, either attached to the network or by USB port to a local computer. This may be OK for home use but it doesn't give you the multiple backup copies, (on multiple media), or an easy way to keep a copy off site that a tape would. In the case of a disaster, (fire or theft), you could have the data drive and backup drive taken out of commission at the same time. Not a great solution for a business.
I remember a new customer showing me around their business and bragging about their systems and backup routines. Then they informed me that someone broke into their business the previous week and stole the computers and the backups. Back to square one. They now keep 2 copies of their tape backups off-site
95% of our customers use tapes for backups and easily half of them have experienced a problem that required restoring one or more files from the tape. It was a wise investment.
There are several other types of external backup devices but they share some of the same problems of the CDs and DVDs or the external hard drives.
For optimal protection you should also consider archiving complete images of the system. Our software of choice for performance, flexibility and cost is Trueimage by Acronis.
© 2002-2008 PC MAX All Rights Reserved
