7 Critical Steps to a Bullet-Proof Backup System
Imagine this - you arrive one morning to find that a faulty
read-write head has crashed your server's hard disk overnight,
rendering it useless. Or a small electrical fire has destroyed
part of your office, including your server. This server was used
to store customer lists, payroll details, accounting details,
purchase orders, inventories and other data vital to the running
of your business, built up after years of operation and growth.
You find that you were seriously ill-prepared to deal with such
a disaster. Virtually all of your business' data had resided in
this one location. No copies were made. You are faced with the
fact that many years' worth of data has been lost forever.
Insurance will replace materials, equipment and office space,
but will that be enough to get your business up and running
again? Your vital business data can't be claimed on insurance,
it can't be replaced with money alone. Would your business
survive after significant data loss? Unless you have a good
backup system already in place, the statistics are grim...
- 43% of companies that experience a severe data loss disaster,
and that have no recovery plan in place, never re-open.
- 70% of companies that suffer serious data loss go out of
business within 12 months.
- It takes 19 days and costs US$17,000 (AUD$22,000) to manually
retype 20 megabytes of sales data. The same volume of accounting
data takes 21 days and costs US$19,000 (AUD$25,000).
- Loss of data cost US businesses in excess of 22 billion
dollars in 2004.
Just as the costs of fire damage can't be covered by insurance
bought after the event, the costs of data loss can't be avoided
by acting after the loss has occurred. It is vitally important
that data is backed up before encountering hard disk failure,
viruses, malicious software, mistakes by employees or other
causes of lost data.
Listed below are the 7 steps that we consider essential for the
protection of important data. 1. Central storage of data on the
network The first step in setting up a backup system is deciding
what needs to be backed up. Ask yourself, what can I afford to
lose? For example, the latest Windows Service pack can be
downloaded again, so there is little need to protect it; your
customer database cannot so easily be replaced. Once you have
identified the information you need to back up, you need to know
where it is stored. Although it might seem counter-intuitive at
first, as much of your critical data as possible should reside
in one place on the network. It is far simpler and easier to
backup, restore and protect one machine than several. As a side
benefit, physical and network access to that machine (and
therefore to critical and perhaps sensitive data) can more
easily be restricted, improving security.
2. Multiple backups You don't want to have all your eggs in one
basket. There are many reasons why your company should have
access to several full system backups. - A single backup could
fail. Tapes, CDs and hard drives all wear out eventually, so you
shouldn't rely 100% on a single backup to store your data. The
more copies you have, the less likely you are to lose all of
your data to wear, fire damage, water damage, etc. - In the case
of accidental deletion, data loss is often noticed days after it
occured, which means that if your only backup is from last
night, you have no way of retrieving the data. - Restoring files
that were deliberately deleted months or even years ago, when
you thought you would never need them again, can often be of
great benefit.
3. Off-site backups If your office burns down, you don't want
all your backups to burn with it, so it's important to
physically move some of your backups off-site. We recommend that
any weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly backups are stored
off-site at a secure location.
4. On-site backups While it is important to have some backups
off-site, you don't want to have to travel back and forth
whenever you need to retrieve a file. For this reason it's
useful to have recent daily backups available on-site to allow
for quick recovery of files. These backups are still important,
and for reasons of security and reliability it is best to store
them in a secure place such as a fireproof safe, rather than
next to the server or on the System Administrators desk.
5. Monitoring If you need to restore a file or a whole system,
you want to be sure that all backups completely successfully. It
would be disastrous to learn that your backups had failed only
when you attempt to perform a restoration. One way to ensure
that each backup has been performed successfully is to check the
backup logs each day. An easier method is to acquire backup
software that notifies you daily of the backup status and can
alert you to any problems.
6. Follow the plan If you are using tapes, disks or removable
hard drives for backing up, you will need to remember to change
these regularly depending on the backup scheme you are using.
Neglecting to do this could cause the backup to fail or could
result in an important previous backup being overwritten. It is
also important that you insert the right device, as having the
4th-of-June backup data on the 1st-of-January tape would make
the right data very difficult to find.
7. Regular file list updating As you install new programs, add
hard drives and create new files, it is important to know that
all new data is also protected. Of course, if you are backing up
the whole C: drive, for example, any new files or programs on
that drive will also be backed up automatically. However, if you
are only backing up specific, important files, it is vital that
you keep this list up to date, or you risk losing valuable data.
Keep in mind that the average failure rate of a hard disk is
100%, as every drive will fail eventually. Make sure you stay in
business by following the seven points listed above. How do you
do that? Well, that's where a backup software package
can help. Data protection need not require a full time IT
professional; it can be done by almost anyone with a bare
minimum of time to spare - all you need is the right tool.
Backup software can automate much of the process, covering the
seven steps above and providing comprehensive data protection
for your business.