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 tape or cartridge media 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 tape. You have at your disposal 10 tapes which you rotate on a daily basis. Therefore, at the most, you have backups stretching back 2 weeks (assuming that you change the tapes every evening Mon - Fri).

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 going to tape to get files. Those things never give you the warm fuzzy feeling that a hard drive can - tapes are SO slow to retrieve data - even the fastest ones. You go to restore the directory from tape, but its not THERE! You go to the previous Friday's tape. Nope. Not there either. You even try the OLDEST tape you've got (which is only about 2 weeks back). Nada. Nothing. Because you have been overwriting the tapes. 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 (to removable media, to hard drive and offsite) all backing up using GFS (Grandfather, Father , Son) backup methodology.

1a. A Daily FULL backup to "Tape*" if possible, utilizing Symantec's Backup Exec. If not, then a DIFFERENTIAL backup to tape if possible. If not, then an INCREMENTAL backup to tape. A total of 4 media would be required. These would be labelled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. They would be used Monday - Thursday and reused every following week. Try to keep the backups to a single piece of media so that human intervention is NOT required. Of course, in bigger installations, robotic media changers could be used.

2a. Also, a daily DIFFERENTIAL copy of all the data to a designated BACKUP hard drive. We utilize the combination of Snapshot, an amazingly small backup program and USB drives sitting in Enermax Jazz drive enclosures. Believe me, we've tried dozens of drive enclosures. Most are just tin cans that once closed, fry the drive by not allowing for air circulation. The ENERMAX drive enclosures use mesh covers both bottom and top that contain literally hundereds of holes, allowing for superior drive cooling capabilities. We keep as many differentials and full backups of the data, as the drive will allow. The differential backup can be based on the monthly FULL backup to hard drive (to be discussed later).

1b. A Weekly FULL backup to "Tape*". A total of 4 media would be required. These would be labelled Friday1, Friday2, Friday3 and Friday4. They would be used on the 1st thru 4th Fridays of the month and then recycled the following month.

2b. A Weekly FULL backup to a designated BACKUP hard drive. Rotate as many of these backups as your backup hard drives will allow. We normally suggest to keep at least 4 Weekly Full backups to hard drive. If drive space does not allow you to do make FULL backups, then revert to DIFFERENTIALS, as long as you have a good RECENT FULL backup to reference.

1c. A Monthly FULL backup to "Tape*". Used on the last Friday of the month. 12 of these media would be required for up to a year's worth of backups.

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

* "Tape" can be replaced with Hard Drives, Hard Drive cartridges, DVDs, Blue Rays, etc. The key here, is that the device is "removable" and replaced with a similar device for the next backup cycle.