Data Backups: A Guide for the Business Owner

Written on the 1st of January 2007 by Scott Jones, General Manager, IT Leaders (Updated 18/1/08)

* The result is that hard drives are one of the most easily damaged and commonly faulty devices in a computer. That's a bugger when all your data is stored on hard drives. Sooner or later you WILL have a drive failure somewhere in your business. Sometimes a whole batch of drives will die at the same point in their life, due to a manufacturing fault.

* Data recovery is often possible on a failed drive, but is expensive; usually around $1000 but sometimes over $5000 if a full forensics lab is required. 

* Often, however, this direct expense pales to the cost of lost revenue while waiting for the data to be returned. Data recovery is very time consuming, taking at least days, and sometimes weeks to get a desirable result.

So it's obvious you want to avoid the problem of data loss. Most businesses make some sort of effort to have data redundancy.  Most businesses also have several flaws in their plan. 

Here are 10 steps to planning a backup system which will actually work: 

1. Your backup system must address the many ways that data can be destroyed: Hardware failure, software failure (eg database crash), software activity (eg virus), accidental or deliberate deletion, theft of equipment, fire or natural disaster.
   
2. Estimate the value of your data, and decide what amount of data loss is acceptable, then plan your backup system around that. Weekly backups are not enough if every day you create $20,000 worth data which would need to be recreated if lost.  Even the prospect of losing 1 day of data might be scarey.
   
3. Consider the exact data which needs to be protected. Obviously your business documents, and perhaps a database or other client control software such as HandiTax/TaxCat etc, but email is also usually high on the list of critical data these days, and there may be a lot more data than you think.
   
4. Figure out where exactly your critical data is stored. A backup system can only make a copy of what it is told to copy. If you have no idea where your emails are stored, then your backup system may well miss them. The default location for Outlook to store emails and documents is on the hard drive of your computer in a place which is difficult to find, not in a shared centralised place like a server. Configure your programs properly to store data where the backup is set to look.
   
5. A good backup system is one that relies on humans the least.  Accept that humans are lazy forgetful creatures; don't fight it!  Expecting a staff member to backup your data on to 10 floppy disks or 5 CDs every week is not wise. Make it as effortless as possible.
   
6. Check the backup regularly.  I can quote you many fantastic stories about businesses who just ASSUMED their backups were working properly.  You wouldn't gamble your house that your computer will not crash today. Don't gamble your business against computers either!
   
7. Store your media properly.  Heat, electro-magnetic fields and sun can all damage magnetic media like tapes or zip disks.  CDs and DVDs are not infallable storage media either; Disc Rot can turn them useless in less than a year. (See http://www.itleaders.com.au/pages/newsletter.php?id=1)
   
8. Plan to take a recent copy of the data offsite.  This is the only sure way to protect against fire, theft, and natural disasters at the office.
   
9. Choose the right device to suit your business.  Choose the right capacity and backup method according to your needs.
   
10. It is best to have multiple levels of redundancy. A small, common hardware fault like a failed hard drive should not bring your business to a standstill.   

Which Hardware is for You?

Multiple Levels of Protection:

Level 1 is called RAID  

As I mentioned, it is best to have multiple levels of redundancy. This is not simply the excessive paranoia of a crusty IT mechanic, but has sound business reasoning. 
 

A hard drive RAID is your best first line of defence, reducing the dangers of hard drive failures. A RAID  is just a number of cheap hard drives, functioning as a team to keep your data safe against a single drive failing.

For accounting & legal firms and other businesses with a lot of data, often a Tape Drive is the best choice.  Although it is an old technology, it is constantly being improved, and is what almost all larger businesses use.  With the right software they are simple to use and highly automated, only requiring you to change the tape each day.  It is also easy and convenient to store tapes offsite for disaster recovery purposes. 

 

Online backups are best done Incrementally; that is, after the initial backup of all your data is done, what is backed up (uploaded) each night is only the data that had CHANGED throughout the day. This means there might be only a few hundred megabyte of data to upload instead of many tens or hundreds of gigabytes. Uploading tens of gigabytes overnight is not feasibly on average Internet connections as they are not fast enough.

So you may find that some data is not suited to online backups. For example, Microsoft Exchange is the most common business email solution software. This will typically have an information store of 10GB to 50GB, and cannot be backed up incrementally.

 The software you choose for backup control is important.  Most versions of Microsoft Windows have a built-in backup utility called NTBackup, found in the Start Menu under Programs =>Accessories =>System Tools. In our experience it is functional but a bit buggy. It's not particularly easy to use, and if there are problems with the backups it's often hard to get proper information from the log file to figure out the issue. The most popular corporate-level software is called Backup Exec. It supports just about any device you can name, is highly customisable, and very reliable.  However, it costs around $1400 a copy.  Brightstor ARCServe is also brilliant, but costs over $5000. 

 IT Leaders researched a great number of backup softwares to find something that was reliable, had great functionality, and was great value for small to medium businesses. We decided upon Backup Assist. http://www.backupassist.com/BackupAssist/tour.html

It has many of the features of the more expensive software, but for around $350 it won't break the bank.  It supports writing to all the media listed in the table above, including CD and DVD, has an easy-to-use interface, and will email you reminders to change media, and notifications of backup failures. Importantly, it also properly supports a server environment, allowing backups of the System State , Microsoft Exchange (at a mail-box level), and SQL server databases.  

Another great product is Acronis True Image.  Although the current version has a clunky interface and some very significant and annoying limitations in terms of scheduling multiple backups to the one device, it has the ability to take a complete backup snapshot of a computer, and then restore that image to a different computer.  In the event of a server failing, this could potentially save many hours or days of downtime.   This software should only be used by experienced technicians/engineers.

Media Rotation 

Another important consideration for redundancy is how to organise your media.  We were once called onsite to help a small accountant on the Gold Coast who had a failed hard drive.  Replacing the hard drive was easy and fairly quick.  The hard drive was badly damaged and needed to be sent to a lab for attempted recovery.  It turned out that their CD backup every week was to a single rewritable disc that they would overwrite. The disc was faulty and contained no readable data, just filenames with empty files.  They lost 5 years worth of client data, and when we called them a month later, they had shut down. 

Here are two methods to use for media rotation.

Method 1: Simple.

5 different discs/tapes labelled Mon-Friday

1 Ad-hoc disc/tape for weekend or occasional use.

1 End of year disc/tape

Less thought required to use the correct media each day

Only 1 historical restore point per past year.

Method 2: Complete

12 discs/tapes labelled for end of each month

1 disc/tape for end of year

Keep all end of month media offsite for fire & theft protection.

Greater thought required to insert correct day's media, although when properly configured, the backup software will even tell you which tape to insert - simple enough for a trained monkey!

Summary of this article:  

1. Identify the value and location of the exact data which needs to be protected. This usually includes documents, databases, email, and specific client data.
2. Work out the most appropriate redundancy technology for your exact business needs. (RAID, CD/DVD, Tape, Hard Drive & Online are the most common.)
3. Ensure that your backup system has multiple fall back points in time, and has a recent offsite copy of the data.
4. Check the system regularly to ensure that you can restore data accurately.
5. Incorporate your redundancy strategy into a larger disaster recovery plan.
   
   This article originally written for National Accountant Magazine by IT Leaders General Manager, Scott Jones.

www.itleaders.com.au