How safe is your method of backing up critical data?
It has been an interesting couple of years watching the development of online backup services in Australia and most importantly seeing the actual demand grow.Choosing the right solution is obviously important because swapping them isn’t as easy as installing a new piece of software on a few PCs.
Statistics (can’t remember exactly were I read this) suggest that if a business has a major data failure, it is 80 per cent more likely to fail within 3 years.
So what is online backup?
Some people see it as a replacement, I see it as a compliment to existing/traditional backup services such as tapes, drives, USB sticks and even CD/DCDs used for backing up critical business data.
Online backup providers use multiple, secure, replicating data servers that are sometimes located locally or in many cases overseas where your data is transferred and for you in real time over the internet. Most importantly its not just a once off transfer, its an initial backup of all files and then a regular backup what changes from day to day (or even hour to hour). The business benefits are huge.
There are many inherent problems with what were the only real alternatives for backup in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. The problems included failure of hardware and the human error. As we all know, as soon as humans are introduced into an equation, mistakes will be made which is why your disaster recovery strategies and systems should be as far removed as possible from humans. More human element equals more exposure to risk.
Also, the biggest risk faced (bigger than human failure) is that backup that is stored onsite is really not offering much protection should the building suffer a break in or fire or flooding. Backup needs to be kept offisite away from the premises. You can also add to the failure of many businesses to actually test their disaster recovery strategies.
The bottom line is: a business without backup is an accident waiting to happen.
Online saves on downtime
So why use online? One factor is the amount of downtime involved with using any of the old backup systems, even if you have a successful backup routine, is at least a minimum of several hours if not several days.
Online backup solutions, however, remove the human element, along with any concerns over hardware failure and they reduce the downtime you do have if things go wrong. Also, when all costs are taken into account, they can actually work out to be pretty cost effective for your business. Personally, I think online backup is a no-brainer for any small to medium sized Australian business.
What do you need to look out for? When you are running your initial upload, you need to keep a eye on your ISP data usage as it is easy to blow your monthly quota. The options you have are to update your broadband plan, wear the cost or simply split the upload over a few months doing the most important files first.
Some guidelines when looking for a provider:
• The location of the servers may be important for some. Providers with servers in the US will be much cheaper than those with servers in Australia. Its an issue of scale.
• Incremental updates. Some providers will take a snapshot of your drives every day and upload them. Others will simply do incremental updates. The more control you have over this the better.
• Multiple replications across tier 1 data centres.
• Sliding scale for data usage. This means that if you do go over your allowances, you either get notified immediately or shift plans immediately to ensure you are never in danger. Some companies simply cap the data and then do not upgrade you automatically. This means some of your data does not get backed up.
• Online ability to get your data when things do go wrong
• Clear ability to show which parts of your systems are and are not being backed up. If it fails and they fail, culpability has to sit with the provider 100 per cent. Conversely, if you fail to have key parts of your data backed up because you either stored it in the wrong place or did not inform the provider of its importance, the fault should lie squarely with you.
This is an outsourcing relationship, so the more clarity there is around responsibility, ownership and timings, the better the relationship will be.
I found this interesting article on Lifehacker the other day. Use the link to get to the original or just read below. What is interesting is that it clearly highlights how dangerous it can be if you are only relying upon external drives or some manual process to manage your backups.
Worst still is the fact that most people don’t even test their backup so in many cases they would continue to think that the backup was doing its thing, only to find that the CDs or external drives are empty.
Using an online backup service like Carbonite is a smart way of ensuring that your backups are up to date and working. We always recommend that you use a combination of external drives and online backup to secure your data, just make sure that you test it all out every few months.
External USB drives are a great way of creating a handy and portable backup. If your drives start giving you trouble, you might conclude that the hardware itself is to blame — but be sure to check the connecting USB cable as well.
While running a manual backup onto a USB hard drive recently, my drive kept connecting and reconnecting, losing the drive mapping in the process and rendering the backup software useless. At first, I suspected that the disk itself might be at fault, but then I decided to try connecting it using a different USB cable, and the whole backup ran without a hitch.
The offending cable (pictured) promptly got sent to the bin. While there were no obvious flaws in it, there’s no point hanging onto an item that’s clearly causing trouble, especially when it’s so cheap and easy to replace.
Naturally, no backup system should rely on a single technology. A combination of a networked backup drive, some cloud storage and some additional USB drives should protect you from most eventualities. If you do just want to use external drives, at least have a pair of them. Learn more with our in-depth backup guide.
I received a call from a customer last week who was using tapes to backup their small business. They only had a few PCs and a server to backup and were backing up weekly as well as taking the tapes offsite.
I was glad to hear that they actually had a strategy and that they were taking their backup offsite. Its most likely these tapes actually sat in the boot of the car which really isn’t recommended given its Summer in Australia and your car could get stolen. It seems many people do this with their hard drives too. The have 2 and swap them every few days or week taking one home or keeping it in the boot of the car. Given the high rate of hard drive failure keeping them in a warm boot isn’t really the most sensible thing to be doing.
The business or the person managing these tapes had become a little tired of the process and was looking for something easier and cheap (cost effective is the word we like to use). So during a brief conversation they asked several questions about how Carbonite worked and seemed to be comfortable with what Carbonite had to offer.
They mentioned stopping the use of tapes altogether and only using Carbonite as the sole backup method. I always get a little worried when I hear this. Not that Carbonite can’t handle the responsibility. Its more about that word “Backup Strategy” and swapping from one backup method to the next to save time and money isn’t really improving the strategy at all.
In a small business environment when your livelihood depends on having that system information always accessible, risking that data with one form of backup is NOT RECOMMENDED. I encouraged her to continue with the tapes or at least consider another form of local backup using hard drives or similar and then having Carbonite as a remote backup service.
They didn’t have a lot of data, 20GB in total I think and retrieving all of this using Carbonite would have been fine and potentially only taken a day or so. My concern was in relation to relying on one form of backup only. Having a layered approach is best, where you combine local and remote to give you real peace of mind.
Relying on any one form of backup is dangerous because sometimes software can fail, more often than not, user error can cause a process to go wrong, particularly when it isn’t tested regularly.
I always encourage users of Carbonite to check regularly enough that their backups are OK. Carbonite will error if it isn’t working and it will tell you if the internet connection has failed. The same principle applies with external drives. You need to check them regularly. Even if you are using an application to run your backups automatically. You should regularly check that its actually doing what you are expecting to. If you aren’t you might just be in for a rude surprise when you eventually do check.
