Backup Your Business

If you were struck by a disaster, a fire that left your desk and everything on it a pile of ashes, a lightning storm that scrambled all of your electronic devices, or thieves who made off with everything but your 8-track collection, could you recover? Hopefully your insurance would cover the cost of your computer hardware. (You do have insurance, don't you?) But what about your data? How long would it take to replace the library of documents on your computer - accounting records, customer contact information, product drawings - the very lifeblood of your business you've been building up over months and years? Would it even be possible?

If you've been making regular and reliable backups of your system, or at least of your critical data, events like this won't be disasters. With a little work, you should be up and running in short order.

Fortunately, backup has become a simple process and there are many tools on the market that make it quick and easy. What method you choose and how often you use it will depend on how much data you have and how frequently it changes.

First, let's look at our options in backup media.

On the low capacity end we can use the humble floppy disk, the ZIP disk, and CD's. For greater capacity we have tape: DAT, DLT, and LTO. While a floppy disk can hold 1.4 MB, a CD can hold 650 MB, and LTO tape up to 700 GB

So we understand the scale, 1 gigabyte (GB) is 1024 megabytes (MB). What does that mean? A 250-page document in Microsoft Word, consisting of simple text, is about 1 MB. A three-minute CD-quality song in the MP3 format is about 4.5 MB. Most new computer systems come with 20 GB or even 40 GB hard drives. Backing up a full 40 GB drive would take more than 28,000 floppy disks, or 630 CD ROMS. On the other hand, you could protect 20 or so workstations with a single LTO tape. But that greater capacity comes at a cost. An LTO tape costs about a hundred times as much as a CD, and a suitable tape drive correspondingly as much.

Besides capacity, an important consideration is speed. Some LTO tape drives will let you backup more than 100 GB an hour. Compare this to the fastest CD drives that write 24 GB an hour, assuming you can change disks fast enough.

Of course, all of these numbers are estimates. Much depends on the type of data being stored and the software you use to perform the backups. Some utilities provide better compression than others do.

Another option becoming common is using an external, and therefore portable, hard drive to backup all or part of an internal drive, usually over a fast connection like Firewire. Advantages? Fast, easy to use, easy to move data between machines. Disadvantages? No history; once you overwrite the data on the drive, it's gone, you can't go back to a previous backup.

How do you get your data onto these disks or tapes? You can probably just drag-and-drop from disk to disk, but if you're backing up to tape you'll need a backup utility. There are many good products available; most of them offer similar functionality. Dantz Retrospect is a popular option for small businesses, available for both Macintosh and Windows (www.dantz.com). One feature you should look for is the ability to perform both full and incremental backups. A full backup is just that, a backup of your entire computer: operating system, applications, and data. An incremental backup saves only those files that have changed since the last full. The full backup may take a long time but the incremental will be relatively quick. If you need to restore, you'll use the most recent full and the latest incremental.

Once you know what you want to backup and how to back it up, the next step is to determine how frequently to do so. The question is, how much work can you afford to lose?

If you back up once a week, say every Friday night, and your system crashes on a Monday afternoon, you may lose three days of work, less if you didn't work Saturday and Sunday. But what if your system crashed Friday afternoon? You could lose almost a full week of work! If you had backed up every night you'd only lose one day.

An essential part of a backup routine is keeping your backups safe. This may mean securing your nightly backups in a fireproof safe and moving weekly backups offsite. If your office is away from home, you may decide to bring your weekend backup home with you. If you work out of a home office, perhaps you could make an arrangement with a trusted friend to store your backups for you. Larger companies often contract with an offsite storage provider that guarantees secure and environmentally controlled facilities.

You've got a backup system in place, you're dutifully following the schedule you've chosen, and you keep your backups in a secure place.

But does it all work?

Don't rely only on the backup software's logs. They may report success even though some failure occurred. Periodically, at least every other month, select a random group of files and try recovering them from the backup. It will take a little time, but it's far easier than waiting until you've lost everything, try to recover, and find none of your backups worked.

Once you've put a backup system in place, the labor required is minimal: changing tapes, checking logs, periodic tests. You'll incur an ongoing expense for backup media, but it's a small price to pay compared to losing days of work due to a system crash or some other disaster.

However you choose to backup, keep in mind that your data is the lifeblood of your business. Keep it safe!