 | |
|
Practical Backup Strategies for Office Networks and Home Computers
By Mark Dahmke What would happen to your business if you suddenly lost all of your customer records, accounting system data and email? What would you do if your home computer’s hard drive crashed and you lost all of your media files, family photos and email? Perhaps one of these events has already happened and you learned first-hand how painful it can be to reconstruct your files, perhaps from incomplete backups. Worse yet is the complete loss of weeks or months worth of work. What is the cost in lost time and productivity, or the permanent loss of your irreplaceable family photos or movies? Unfortunately for most computer users, they only start thinking about formulating a robust backup strategy after the loss of a hard disk. Given the exponential growth rate in storage size and our ever expanding library of stored images and video, the time to start thinking about your backup strategy is now. Backup Media There are now a bewildering array of applications designed to backup PCs and servers. Windows comes with a backup utility, and most external USB drives also include some form of backup application that automates and schedules backups. Depending on your level of technical expertise, there are also several free command line backup tools. Online backups are growing in popularity and are easy to configure. Many come with an installable component that makes the online service appear as a drive letter (for example the X: drive) on your PC, so you can drag and drop files to the remote server. They also provide a way to schedule nightly backups. Network-enabled backup drives are now priced to compete with external USB drives. A network drive or Network Attached Storage (NAS) is basically a hard drive with a network connection, which makes it appear as a shared drive on your network. DVD backups are another choice, although they must be created manually. DVDs are a good secondary backup because of their durability. Hard drives offer large amounts of storage, but they are more easily erased or corrupted, and if the electronic components in the drive fail, your data becomes inaccessible ( Backup Methods The simplest form of backup is a “mirror” or duplicate of all your files and folders on the backup drive. This can be done manually or through almost any of the automated backup packages discussed earlier. However this approach won’t backup Windows system files, the Windows registry, your bookmarks and other system preferences. Some of the backup applications will take care of this for you, but not all, so make sure you read the instructions and know what is being backed up. A more rigorous form of backup creates a complete copy of your Windows installation, allowing you to restore absolutely everything to its former state, if your PC crashes. One popular application is Symantec “Ghost” and another is Genie-soft. These packages come with a utility that will create a bootable disaster recovery CD or DVD. After booting from the DVD, you will be able to select a backup source from which to restore your system configuration. Backup Strategies Applying these concepts, a simple backup strategy for a home PC would be to utilize one external USB drives and the backup software that comes with the external drive. Assuming that you periodically test your backup drive to verify that files are readable, and that the nightly backups are performing correctly, this approach will protect you from hard drive crashes.
Since hard drives are cheap, we strongly recommend extending this method to a second backup drive. If you rotate your external drives every week, storing one of the drives in a safe, or an off-site secure location, you will reduce the chances of data loss significantly. For example, if you backup drive is sitting next to your PC and always plugged in, a virus could wipe it as easily as it could wipe out your PC’s hard drive, or a fire or tornado could leave you with no backups. Storing one of the drives at your office, or with a friend helps to lower the chances of a total loss of your data. As mentioned before, online backups solve several problems: your data is safely stored off-site in a geographically remote location, and all new or changed files are automatically backed up every night. However, if you need to backup large quantities of data, or you want to make a full system backup, the file sizes can quickly grow to over a gigabyte, and your home DSL or cable modem connection won’t be able to keep up. For example, if your DSL upload speed is 768 kilobits per second, it will take three hours to upload a 1GB file. At this rate, if your nightly backup hits 8GB, your Internet connection will be saturated 24 hours a day, just doing backups. If your initial backup is 100GB, it will take 300 hours or 12.5 days to upload all your files. Also, the storage costs for 100GB could range anywhere from $45 to $300 per month. For this reason, we recommend a two tier backup scheme. After the initial backup, most files don’t change very often. In most cases, only a small number of folders are used for files on a daily basis. If you can identify the critical folders that require daily backups, you can configure your online backup to only upload changes in those folders. Your “bulk” backup would go to a local USB external drive, and would run as a separate daily backup job. Then you can also rotate the external drives off-site, as described earlier.
This method saves money, but requires more manual intervention, to swap drives and store them at another location. An even more robust backup strategy includes weekly or monthly DVD backups of the files that have changed since the last DVD backup. In a small business environment, if you have a server or possibly a server running Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL, you’ll want to back up both of those data repositories using special software designed to create “snapshots” of all your mail, calendars and task lists, Windows user accounts, and SQL databases. Since these applications are always running, you can’t just mirror all the data files, because Windows is actively using those files to store and read email, write to a database, etc.
Additionally, you’ll want to configure workstation backups that copy all PC configuration information and files to the server, so the server can then back them up to the external USB drive. Test, Test, Test Many backup packages advertise as “set it and forget it” backups. The problem is that most people never bother to test their backups and when a failure occurs, discover that the backups stopped working days or weeks earlier. The importance of testing cannot be overstated – make sure that you check at least once a week to make sure that your backup program is running as expected. A List of Recommended Backup Applications and Services
Genie-soft Backup Manager Mark Dahmke is Vice President and co-owner of Information Analytics, a full-service web design and hosting company that also provides custom software development and IT support services. Information Analytics can help you develop a backup strategy that meets the needs of your business. |
