Backup? We Don't Need No Stinking Backup!

By Brad M. Pransky

You've heard it a million times before, but periodically archiving your data, performing a simple back-up, is a critical business and personal PC procedure. This isn't just a server issue. It affects desktops as well. In today's business environment of home offices, remote workgroups and VPN's, critical data is all too often being stored on desktop hard drives. The problem is, desktops are often ignored.

You Only Have to Back Up Once

It's an old joke but ironically true. You do only have to back-up your system once…..the day before your system crashes. Given that most of us haven't been informed in advance of just which day our system will crash, (and it will), the safer bet is to archive on a regular basis. This schedule can vary from once (or more) a day, to once a week or longer. The key is to assure that critical data is archived at whatever interval will prevent a problematic or catastrophic loss.

A Computer On Every Desk (and a chicken in every pot)

With prices dropping precipitously, computers have proliferated at a phenomenal rate. Virtually 100% of businesses, large and small, utilize desktop PC's. Home and home office PC's have increased dramatically in the last few years. In conjunction with this, more and more critical data is being saved to these hard drives. Data such as that spreadsheet or Power Point presentation that you've been working on but haven't saved to a server or shared drive yet. Or how about that Quicken or accounting data that you need for taxes? Simultaneously, system thefts, especially laptops, have risen dramatically as have incidences of computer viruses. Couple this with standard failure rates of hard drives and, like it or not, the system will crash. Convinced yet? OK, so what tools are available to assure the survival of this data?

Disk Drives & Tape Drives & Zip Drives…oh my!

Tape has long been the traditional media for archiving data. Tape drives range from small IDE based Travan drives (4-20GB capacity) to automated tape libraries capable of storing Terabytes of data. The software that operates these drives can be as simple as the backup utility that Microsoft bundles with its operating systems, or as sophisticated as products such as BrightStor ARCserve backup from Computer Associates or storage solutions from Veritas. All of these serve the same basic purpose, to copy your data, from either desktop or server on to a tape medium for archive and retrieval.

Another simple and somewhat effective method is to periodically have the hard drive replicate important files to another fixed or removable drive. This can be done on a system by mirroring drives; a process that simultaneously duplicates the primary drives transactions onto a second disk.

Another newer solution for the desktop is external or removable media used to copy or backup files. This can be as simple as a zip disk or recordable CD (CD-R CD-RW) or one of the recently released external USB drive enclosures. Several companies including Maxtor, Belkin and Iomega offer variations of this concept and we will be reviewing some of them in our next installment

The Bottom Line

Statistics show that of businesses that lose their critical business data for 10 days or more, 93% filed for bankruptcy within one year, 50% with this problem were forced to file immediately (Source: National Archives & Records Administration in Washington). No business can afford those statistics.

One nagging thought as we close. What do you do when there is no back-up and the drive has failed? We'll look at that issue in the third installment.