Data risk and how to reduce it

Backup protects you from two types of risk. One risk is data loss – the problem you get when you or your client accidentally hit ‘delete’, or a virus gets at your data, or the disk and the building get burnt to a smouldering ruin. Here, the risk is that someone gets left without 10 years of MYOB files and company records, wondering whether their business can survive.

The other risk is that you will need information from an earlier time that has since been changed – say, the records of cash flow before a series of fraudulent transactions were entered three months ago. Here, the risk is that you won’t be able to call up records that tell you what was changed or identify who changed it.

For many years, a lack of affordable backup options left the SME community exposed. Specialist IT staff had to swap out backup tapes or hard drives and store them offsite, in a bank deposit box or even a bookshelf at home. Many firms did without.

Today, data is growing ever more vital to business success – and the good news is that backup options are getting cheaper and easier to access. De-duplication is minimising the volume of data stored, while storage and internet bandwidth are both dropping in price. As a result, it’s feasible and affordable to back up large volumes of data in a facility on the other side of the world, continuously updating it over the internet. For instance, we are seeing a software package called Shadow Protect emerge to be a great technology for the small to medium-sized business market.

But are your IT people on top of all the new options that are appearing?

These new online options don’t remove the need for discipline in making backups. You or your IT staff need to:

• replicate your whole system to removable media or external storage;

• take regular point-in-time snapshots – both full images and incremental backups;

• ensure there are multiple versions of your backup off-site;

• know how fast you can recover your data; and

• test and review your backup regularly to ensure you have what you need and it comes back as expected.

This takes more than a plan and a policy; it takes execution and administration. Consideration must be given to the data requirements for offline storage – both the size of the storage facility and bandwidth requirements. Consider a cheaper connection dedicated to backup so it is not interfering with your high-cost, high-quality communications bandwidth.

Also consider the quality of the offsite storage facility. A budget facility may be all that is required, as your backup may not need to be instantly available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you want your system back in action quickly after a failure, you’ll need a higher-grade facility. These are now available to the smallest of businesses for a price.

You must be realistic about your recovery requirements. There are two factors: the time from disaster to recovery and the gap between image taken and failure. If you run a bank, you have a backup of the transactions in memory so you only lose parts of a second. If you back up once a day, you can lose 24 hours of communication and transactions. If it goes, will it be up again in parts of a second or a month?

The solution here is a plan matched to the level of transactions and the budget for the backup project.

The concept of backup is a simple one. Getting the execution right across a range of technologies is more complex than ever.

[breakoutbox][breakoutbox_title]On the home front[/breakoutbox_title][breakoutbox_excerpt]Today, we all keep documents, emails, financial records, digital photos, videos and more on our home PCs. There are now affordable and intelligent backup tools that allow you to keep an external hard drive plugged into your PC and replicate the PC hard drive to the external drive and then up to the internet as well.[/breakoutbox_excerpt][breakoutbox_content]

Today, we all keep documents, emails, financial records, digital photos, videos and more on our home PCs. There are now affordable and intelligent backup tools that allow you to keep an external hard drive plugged into your PC and replicate the PC hard drive to the external drive and then up to the internet as well.

This gives you the ability to make a quick recovery from the local hard drive if something goes wrong with your PC (the drive mechanism breaks, for instance) or to make a full recovery over a few days of downloads if you lose the whole kit in a theft, electrical spike, fire or flood.

But be warned: the day you plug in a system like this, you need to manage your data uploads. If you have 500 GB of data on your system and a 50 GB data plan, you could cop a very big bill from your internet provider.

To avoid that bill, step up your internet plan to an unlimited plan before you start, then observe your data usage for a month or two once the backup has stabilised and bring the plan back down to a suitable level. The extra few dollars over three months will save you thousands in penalty fees.

Options include:

• CrashPlan

• Backblaze

• Mozy

• Google Drive

• Microsoft SkyDrive

• Dropbox

(Note that Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, Dropbox, Mozy and Backblaze keep files for no more than 30 days after you delete them from your computer. CrashPlan keeps deleted files permanently unless you tell it not to – a much stronger backup solution.)

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