Backups

When businesses started going digital back in the 80's, 90's and this century, one of the greatest advantages was the ability to make multiple copies of their data and spread it around. In the old days, companies would literally have had to make 2 physical copies of their accounting records, inventory records, etc. Who could actually spend the time to do this? Now with all records being in digital format, we can easily make a copy to hard drive, a copy to DVD or USB stick and a copy offsite, preferably using GotData?

Right?

You are backing up your data on a daily basis? Weekly Basis? Archiving data on a monthly basis as well, correct?

Why?

Because every company should keep archives of their data, for at least a year - preferably more. The reasons are simple. Here is a graphic example.

Full Backups are NOT Enough

You do full backups of your server to a USB hard drive. You have created daily backups on your server to backup to that USB drive, 5 backups each called Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. You have a lot to backup, and only so much room on that USB drive, so you decide that the backups will simply overwrite the previous week's backups. Therefore, at the most, you have backups stretching back 1 week.

You hire a clerk on the 1st of January. He works for you for 4 months. 2 months into his job on March 1st, he accidentally DELETES an entire directory on your server called OLD-ACCOUNTING-RECORDS. No one notices, most likely because no one uses those files, except perhaps the accountant on a yearly basis. Two months later on May 1st, the clerk decides to move on and leaves your company.

You've been doing backups religiously every night. Never miss a night. On June 1st, the accountant, who comes to your offices on a regular basis, wants to compare your current data to last year's. He goes to look at some of the spreadsheets he left in OLD-ACCOUNTING-RECORDS but they're NOT there.

Your heart leaps into your throat. You hate when files go missing. You go to restore the directory from Monday's backup, but its not THERE! You go to the previous Friday's backup. Nope. Not there either. You even try every other backup you've got (which is only about 1 week old). Nada. Nothing. Because you have been overwriting the backups. Because you've been recycling the tapes every 2 business weeks. So you couldn't POSSIBLY have those files anywhere else, since that clerk erased them over 5 months ago.

Seerx Recommends

So what would we have recommended the client in the above situation do BEFORE data started disappearing?

Make sure that you have at least 3 different backups of your data occurring on a nightly basis (2 to hard drive and 1 offsite) all backing up using GFS (Grandfather, Father , Son) backup methodology.

 

1. A daily full, differential or incremental backup to hard drive if possible, utilizing Symantec's Backup Exec or CA's Arcserve D2D. We've been using Backup Exec for almost a decade. Arcserve is new to us, but has this amazing technology called "Infinite Incremental Backups" that compresses older incrementals into the original full backup saving an amazing amount of storage space.

One of our favorite devices for backing up to hard drive is the D-Link NAS 323. NAS stands for Network Attached storage. It can hold 2 hard drives, which we always "mirror" to each other, in case one of the drives were to die, the other one would retain all the backups. Keep at least 12 monthly, 4 weekly and 31 daily backups. The monthly and weekly would be full backups. The daily backups would be all incrementals.

2. Also, a daily full, differential or incremental copy of all the data to a designated USB RAID backup device (the RAID being "mirrored" drives). The data on this device is typically an exact copy of what we have on the NAS box.

3. An offsite backup of your most crucial and sensitive data via the Internet. We recommend GotData?, a product that we brought to the market almost a year ago. GotData? has many benefits:

• It can backup your files as SOON as you save them to your local or network drive.
• It can keep up to 28 versions of a file
• It can be scheduled to work after hours
• You can share individual files OR entire folders to people allowing them to get LARGE files that would otherwise require an FTP service to transmit
• You can access the archived files from any computer on the Internet