“Pirate” Backup Is Not for MP3 Downloads: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-05-08

Before he went home to redesign the world’s most famous home office, the Ur-Guru and I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. In addition to watching a demonstration of Babbage’s Difference Engine #2 and sitting down to rest on a Cray supercomputer (and of course pointing out which of the early personal computers each of us had owned), we saw one of the first ever hard drives. It was bigger in diameter than the tires on my car. There’s actually a project to restore the IBM RAMAC, the computer that used it, over at the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center. (Before disk drives, computers used something called core memory. I was pleased to discover that the Ur-Guru didn’t know what that was, either.)

But while all that history is fascinating, and I recommend a trip to the museum if you get the chance to go, it won’t help you preserve your data today. So I’m introducing today’s guest blogger, Network World columnist James Gaskin, who offered me this article about “Pirate Backup” (originally published in 2007, but still relevant).

---

In honor of the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean movie, let me introduce the Pirate Backup System (ARR). ARR, besides a bit of pirate talk, stands for Automatic, Redundant, and Restorable. Meeting those three goals makes a good backup system. Meeting only two will lead to disappointment. Meeting only one describes about two thirds of small businesses today.

I'm working on a “How To Fix IT Manual” called Data Safety Using the Pirate Backup System (ARR). But focusing on backup sends the wrong message, because backing up files does nothing. Users only get value when they restore files. Backup is just the necessary pain to reach the gain of restoring important data files when they are lost, stolen, or mangled. Think of backup as the insurance premiums, and restoration as the replacement payment after a loss.

The first A in ARR, Automatic, forces businesses to take into account the point made in the previous paragraph: users get no value from backup. Hence, users don't back up. One may consider this short-sighted, but users will complain that participating in any backup procedures means they're doing the administrator’s job, not their own. Since data safety is our goal here, let's not argue with the users about this today, let's just work around those issues.

To be automatic your backup system must work without any user intervention. You can't even trust users to leave their computer turned on for a backup job to run at 3:00 a.m. You certainly can't trust them to click an icon to run a backup.

These restrictions leave two options: data must be saved somewhere besides PCs, or you must place software on each computer that works without user intervention.

The first option, the neatest, stores all user data files on some type of centralized file server or even a shared online workspace. That would be great, but realistically you will need to install software on each computer to back up data files on a schedule or immediately upon every file change. Almost every backup software application will schedule backups on at least an hourly basis. To grab file changes immediately you will need special software from the Continuous Data Protection (CDP) range of products.

Second, redundancy protects data files, and makes disaster recovery possible. Companies learn the hard way that backup tapes sitting beside the server burn up when the server burns up. They also learn backup network-attached storage devices get stolen when thieves steal their servers. You must keep copies of data files somewhere outside your business to recover from a wide variety of disasters small and large.

Back when tape cartridges led the backup media world, people developed offsite tape rotation schedules using a Tower of Hanoi algorithm to try and keep the right data on the right tapes at the right places. Those never worked, because people dropped the ball quickly.

Today you can send data offsite much more easily than before. Many service companies offer excellent prices to accept data files across the Internet at their remote data storage center. You can send data from one office to another office, or send data files to a hidden directory on your company Web server. You have multiple options, but you need to pick one or two and get started. If you try to carry USB hard drives back and forth from your servers, however, you will soon get tired and quit.

Finally, files must restore properly or you've wasted all your time. Good backup software makes it easy to restore files to their original location or other locations. Offsite services with file redirection make it easy to share files between remote locations, but be careful that file versions don't get changed by one user without the other users knowing. But a good restoration test is to pick a data file folder at random, restore it to another location, and check those files.

If you want “bare metal restore” capabilities to quickly rebuild a personal computer or server, you'll need special boot CD-ROM disks tied to the backup files. Each backup vendor offers different methods of bare metal restore, but you can keep those boot disks close at hand even if the data stays safe in an offsite location across the country. But this example points out the need for several options in your backup system, and why I call it a system with multiple parts rather than a backup method or backup process.

Remember, you can't trust users to help you perform any backup chores. You can trust the Pirate Backup System, however, especially if you put a parrot on your shoulder before you say ARR.

Copyright © 1994-2008 Network World, Inc. All rights reserved.

---

Although I’m now minus one major source of distraction, I have a lot of client work to catch up on, and I got so many responses to my call for volunteers to write guest posts that I could go on for at least another month without contributing anything original. I promise to write at least one post per month for myself, however!

Technorati Tags: Computer History Museum,RAMAC,Difference Engine,Pirate Backup,James Gaskin

Saved by SuperDuper: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-22-08

This week’s (very late) backup reminder is one for the Mac users. It comes from Dave, the founder of EAR/Rational Music. Dave also writes his own Music Blog.

---

I’m a SOHO owner and Mac user and I was saved by SuperDuper!, disk cloning software made by Shirt Pocket Software. (Not affiliated with them other than being a satisfied customer.) I have a separate building on my property from which I run the business. I use a small space heater in winter and a portable swamp cooler in the summer. As you might imagine, the barn, as I call it, isn’t exactly “climate controlled.” At the time of this story, I was using an eMac, an all-in-one computer which served me well. One Sunday afternoon in April, I went out there and found the computer off. I assumed we’d lost power, which happens occasionally, but to my chagrin I found that I was unable to boot the computer at all. The screen showed a flashing question-mark icon, which means the computer could not find a disk to boot from.

I have a 300GB external hard drive that I use for backups, and I keep it in the house, rather than in the barn, for two reasons. First off, the house is climate controlled, so the drive won’t be affected by extreme temperatures. Second, if there is a fire or other damage to the barn, the external drive will likely be protected in the house. Of course a hard drive isn’t a perfect backup solution, since it could fail, but it’s unlikely that both drives will fail at the same time, especially if the backup drive is unplugged when not in use.

After retrieving the drive from the house, I plugged it into the FireWire port of the eMac, and rebooted. Since this drive contained a clone of the internal hard drive of the eMac, I was up and running in 5 minutes. As it turned out, the clone had been made about a month prior to this incident, so not all files were up to date, but the one file I really needed, the data file for my invoicing/accounting program, had actually been copied to my wife’s laptop earlier in the day. At the time I did not have a laptop, and I would copy this file to my wife’s laptop when I wanted to work in the house instead of in the barn.

So the bottom line is that I was lucky. SuperDuper! got me most of the way there (and indeed, would have gotten my farther had I run it more often), and dumb luck got me the rest of the way. It turns out the hard drive in the eMac was completely fried, and not even visible to any recovery software. With a bit of work, I was able to install a new hard drive about a month later (as I said, it’s an all-in-one machine, and as such, it isn’t made to be upgraded), but prior to doing that, I was able to run just fine from the external drive.

---

Thanks to Dave for reminding us that the hard drive on a Mac is just as likely to fail as the hard drive on a Windows machine—and to his wife for letting him copy his financial data to her laptop.

Technorati Tags: Super Duper,eMac,EAR/Rational Music

Data Disasters: Did You Forget Your Mobile Workforce? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-15-08

The Ur-Guru and I have just returned from a week of Extreme Tourism in Chicago. He took 28 GB of photos. Each night he copied them all from his camera’s 8 GB Compact Flash card onto the two portable hard drives he’d brought along. (One serves as the original, one as the backup, and then he clears off card so he can take more pictures.)

We also fixed my father’s wireless router, so there’s wi-fi in his 45th-floor apartment again, but I had to use webmail for outgoing messages because RCN (Dad’s cable Internet provider) appears to block any outgoing traffic from non-RCN senders.

Anyway, I’m back home with another guest post for you, this one from Ken Colburn of Data Doctors.

---

Data Disasters: did you forget your mobile workforce?

A hard drive crashes every 15 seconds…

2,000 laptops are stolen or lost every day…

1 in 5 computers suffers a fatal hard drive crash during their lifetime…
31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control…

60% of companies that lose all their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster…

The overall average failure rate of disk drives is 100% - all drives eventually fail…

And another hard drive just crashed while you were reading this.

Will one of yours be next? Are you prepared?

If you ask your IT department, they will assure you that the primary servers are being backed up every day and that an off-site data storage component is in place, so no matter what happens, the company is covered.

What most IT departments fail to recognize is that as much as 60% of a company’s mission critical data resides on hard drives that are not being backed up.

Your mobiles sales team, your CEO’s laptop, remote users or offices; the list can go on.

The assumption by the IT staff that all the users are following the company policy for backing up critical data is generally flawed.

In reality, getting 100% compliance from all users is virtually impossible because of a single hurdle; human nature. Everyone knows that a hard drive could fail at any moment, but no one thinks it’s going to happen to them, so they will do it tomorrow.

In providing data recovery services for over a decade, a pattern has emerged as more companies rely on computers; critical data is being lost on a regular basis.

The proliferation of the laptop computer as well as the increase in remote workers and even the digital camera (of all things) are primary drivers.

I regularly run into mobile salespeople throughout the country and in every discussion I hear the same thing: “I would be totally screwed if my laptop crashed or got stolen” and it’s usually followed by “my IT guys just don’t understand”.

Digital cameras have also increased the need for data recovery because digital images are not thought of as “data”… until they are gone! We routinely see a drive in for data recovery that has thousands of mission critical images on it that no one thought to backup or were so large that they did not fit into traditional backup procedures.

Even with the realization that their future is in jeopardy, statistically only 1 in 4 users will regularly back up their files. Why? It’s generally too technical or time consuming.

Another common mistake that some IT departments make is assume that if the critical data is being backed up and we can replace a laptop with an image of the corporate software, we have everything covered.

We routinely see customers pleading for help because they installed a special program that only they needed and no one took this into consideration during their disaster planning.

In a perfect IT world, everyone is using the exact same software on every remote or mobile system, but the reality for most is that no two computers are exactly the same.

Some of the biggest offenders of not following the IT department standards are upper management and they often times have some of the most mission critical data on their systems.

100% of all Data Loss is PREVENTABLE!

There are a number of personal backup solutions that IT departments should consider implementing as an additional layer for their mobile workforce.

We have been working with folks on backup procedures for long enough to understand some of the biggest roadblocks…users don’t know how to backup and even if they do, they don’t have any idea where on the hard drive this data resides, much less taking the time to actually do it.

The best chances for success and a huge time saver for the IT department for when (not if) a hard drive crashes is an automatic whole drive imaging system. (The expense of one data recovery will usually pay for 4 or 5 personal backup systems.)

If you can reduce the point of failure down to “can I get my users to plug this device in” your chances of success are much higher.

By eliminating all of the technical aspects of the backup process you can expect non-technical mobile and remote users to be much more successful in protecting themselves.

One solution is to install an automated imaging program that automatically fires whenever the external backup device is plugged in and/or setting a scheduler to automatically backup (and pester the user when it has not been done) to an external device.

Another great option for field personnel is an automated Internet based backup service. Once the client software is installed, it can automatically push copies of critical data up to a secured Internet server and be setup to pester users whenever it does not occur.

The bottom line on covering your bases is to really cover all your bases, so don’t forget your mobile and remote users!

External backup solution:
http://www.datadoctors.com/products/datavault

Online backup solution for businesses (Free 30-day trial): http://www.rdbup.com/partner/?id=datadrs

Cheers for Carbonite (and Some Vacation Musings): FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-08-08

This week’s guest contributor is Confident Marketer Sue Painter, but first a brief update from Yours Truly.

The Ur-Guru and I have been traveling a lot over the past few weeks. As an incurable geek, I haul my laptop with me on all these trips, and I’ve been bringing Vesta (the Buffalo MiniStation DataVault) with me to make backups on. In fact, Vesta lives in my laptop case, since I don’t really use her when I’m at home.

While we were driving back from the Russian River Valley, the Ur-Guru noticed that his MP3 player was acting up. It insisted that every song was a bad track and wouldn’t play anything. (I considered connecting mine and forcing him to listen to podcasts, but I restrained myself.)

“You could try reformatting it,” I suggested, “but you’d lose all the music.”

He gave me his best “Do I look like an idiot?” stare and said “Who is it I’m marrying again? Did you think I wouldn’t have backups?”

So when we got home, he reformatted the player, copied the music back onto it, and all was well.

Now, on to Sue’s story about Carbonite.

---

I use and LOVE Carbonite for backup. No horror stories here, just really hated constantly backing up to CD’s which got disorganized and half the time didn’t work. Plus, I never got around to it in any scheduled fashion. Somehow I ran across an e-ad for Carbonite, checked it out, did a 30 day trial, then bought it. It’s a big, whopping $45 per YEAR and you can back up a second computer for $20 (or at least, that was the deal I was offered). It constantly runs in the background of your computer and gives you 24/7 backup.

Slight downside: it makes my computer run a bit slower, but I solve this by a quick click to put Carbonite on 24 hour pause, do my work, then “unpause” it before I go off to bed. Overnight, it backs anything up I’ve changed that day.

I have had to use it—my Palm Pilot died a horrible death, with all my appointments for the rest of the year, and the backup file on my computer got corrupted, too. Total panic (I am booked nearly a year out with client appointments so my Palm is my lifeblood) but I just clicked on the little icon and got everything restored to my new Palm, no problem.

I clicked on my Carbonite icon and it brought up my entire Palm calendar on the computer screen, same as I would do from my computer files. What I like is that Carbonite is for total non-techies like me—it brings up a screen that looks EXACTLY like your desktop, you click on what you want to restore, and boom, it’s done. Could not be simpler.

Once my calendar was there on my screen (stop, my heart!) I simply hot synced it back to my Palm. I could scarcely believe it was so easy! And yes, give me back floppies—I really hate CDs and can never make them work. (ARG...)

---

There you have it—another satisfied Carbonite customer. (David Jackson wrote about Carbonite in February 2008.) A backup is useless if you can’t restore your data, so it’s good to hear that it’s easy to get things back, and few professionals can afford to lose their business appointments.

Next week we’ll hear from the Data Doctors.

Technorati Tags: Carbonite,Sue Painter,David Jackson,Data Doctors,online backup,DataVault

In Praise of Tape Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-01-08

This is a guest column by Jeff Mordkowitz, The Profit Coach. Jeff is the first person I’ve talked to who not only uses tape backup in a SOHO setting, but likes it. Most of what we hear about tape these days is unflattering, so I thought it was important to include the other side of the story.

None of the manufacturers listed below is paying me a commission for including them, and I don’t believe they’re paying Jeff, either.

---

I love the tape backup system I put together for my home office. I guess I learned about the necessity and convenience of a tape-based disaster recovery/business continuity system from my old days in the NYC world of finance (banking). It’s not hard to do and addresses the needs I have for professional protection for my small business.

I use a four week (daily, weekly and monthly) “progressive” tape backup system (only files that have changed since the last backup are copied). The tapes are labeled A, B, C and D (one for each week). Each Sunday I clean the drive and swap in the next tape. The software tells me if I’ve put in the wrong tape. Tapes B, C and D are completely overwritten with each usage. Tape A is pulled out of rotation every four weeks for approximately three months (to have a quarterly backup) and once a year (to have an annual backup).

The system is set up to read after write (compare what was written to the tape to what was on the disk, and as mentioned, it also backs up open files). When the backup is finished, it sends me a nightly email with the previous evening’s backup status.

I back up my DATA folder, a few small folders in Program Files that have key setup options, and Documents and Settings. FYI, don’t forget to run Office 2003 Save Settings Wizard every couple of weeks if you use Microsoft Office. You will lose almost all custom settings if you don’t .(Office 2007 doesn’t have this option yet.)

I also restore a few files weekly to test the system. The old cliché, “You don’t have a backup system until you’ve verified a restore,” rings true here too.

I keep my daily tapes in another room in a fire-proof, water-proof box and my “A” tapes go to a safe deposit box in a local bank periodically. Fires, floods, water main breaks, hurricanes, brush fires, gas leaks (and of course disk crashes) occur regularly in different parts of the country. How long will you have a business (or a happy spouse and family) without any or all of your data? And, without doing a rotation, you can’t retrieve multiple earlier versions of your files. (Oops!)

Equipment (Don’t let the list prices scare you off.)

Software:	I use EMC’s Retrospect for Windows Single Server Edition (v7.5) with the Open File Backup add-on (a necessary add-on IMHO)
Hardware:	Three Dell computers (one laptop and two desktops cabled (100MB CAT 5 wire) to a Linksys WRT300N Router)
Tape Drive:	Seagate STT3401A 20/40GB TRAVAN Internal Tape Drive
Storage Media:	Imation TRAVAN 40GB TR7 20/40GB Data Tape Cartridge
Drive Cleaning Media:	Imation TRAVAN NS Dry Process Head Cleaning Cartridge, 30 Cleanings.
Protective Storage:	Sentry Safe 1 hour Fire-Safe and Waterproof Chest, 0.36 Cubic Feet

If you have any questions, I work as a Business Coach and you can call me at 917-579-7652, email me at Jeff@TheProfitCoach.net or visit my website at www.TheProfitCoach.net. Here’s to protecting our data!

---

The one caveat I would add is that to make this work, you need to manage the tape rotation manually. For some people, that’s not a problem. I have a friend who’s never used backup software because she’s scrupulous about copying her data into backup folders and then transferring it into archive folders. (And she has a Mac, so creating a system image is fairly easy for her.)

Combined with the safe and the safe-deposit box, and the regular verification of backups, there’s no reason tape can’t be a workable solution. (And notice that it only takes one tape drive to back up three computers.)

Thanks again to Peter Shankman and Help A Reporter Out.

P.S. Be sure you bolt the safe to the wall or bury it in the ground if it’s small enough to be carried off by thieves.

Technorati Tags: HARO,TRAVAN,tape backup,Jeff Mordkowitz,Profit Coach,Imation

Wait a Minute! Back Up! FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-18-08

Our first guest columnist of the summer is Elizabeth Rodgers from Ben’s Ranch. (The original Ben did have a ranch and was really a cowboy, but the Ben’s Ranch that Elizabeth co-founded with Ben’s grandson is a tech support company based in Los Angeles.)

Elizabeth, as you’ll see is a big fan of Mozy’s online backup service. I’ve written about Mozy before, but it’s always nice to get a new perspective on a subject.

---

You know you should, and yet, you don't. No, I'm not talking about essential fatty acids, I'm talking about backing up your data.

Imagine this scenario:

Your hard drive fails. You haven’t backed up your data because

1. You were too lazy
2. You were too lazy
3. You have been meaning to do it

All of your financials, all of your emails, all of your contacts, all of your digital music and photos are lost forever. Oh, wait! You could pay a company $750 to get that data back. Oh. They say that it actually can’t be done. It’s gone. Now you have to buy a new hard drive and totally reconfigure your computer and…

It’s a nightmare. And it’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when. You can easily avoid this. There are many ways back up your data:

• You can get an extra hard drive, put it in your computer, and transfer the data.
• You can have the extra hard drive external to your computer, or
• You could backup online.

The simplest solution for the external hard drive is SimpleTech SimpleDrive. The software (StorageSync Backup) leads you through the setup, and once you’ve backed up the first time, the following backups will go much faster as it will be backing up only what is new or changed since the last time you did it. Some people love SimpleTech; some hate it.

Let’s get to the good stuff…

My backup of choice is online backup. No more external hard drives, no more CDs and no more fiddling with backup software. If you have a .mac account, you can get 1 gig of storage for $50 or 3 gigs for $100 for the year.

Another company that backs up online elegantly and less expensively is Mozy. Mozy is an exciting (because it’s) FREE new service that lets you effortlessly, automatically and securely back up your data OFFSITE. The first 2 gigs are free, if you want unlimited gigs (um, that’s a lot of space!), it’s $5/month.

Good story: I told an acquaintance of mine about Mozy and she spent the five bucks a month for the big backup. TWO DAYS later, her hard drive failed! Kaput. Totally dead. No biggie, because she bought a new hard drive (for $80) and downloaded her backed up data from Mozy onto her new drive. This woman LOVES me. And I barely know her.

Here’s how Mozy works:

Go to Mozy.com and click on “Get Mozy free.” You will give them your email and create a password. In moments, you will receive an email from Mozy with a link to click. Once you’ve clicked on the link, you will be walked through a series of easy instructions to get backed up. That's it! If you choose, it can be a continuous backup, so when the software sees that you’re not active on the computer, it will backup your data securely because it’s encrypted. Aaaah, the magic and mystery of online backup!

---

One caveat: “unlimited” storage is like “unlimited” bandwidth. There are limits somewhere. One is the amount of time it would take to upload the contents of, say, my 1 TB network drive. Another is that the $5/month unlimited home user account really is supposed to be for personal use. If you have a home office, you’re supposed to get Mozy Pro, which costs $3.95/month plus fifty cents per gigabyte per month. So that 1 TB of data, even if I could upload it, would cost $503.95 per month. Not very practical for a sole proprietor.

But as a painless way to get your most critical documents backed up off site, it’s pretty good.

You’ll be hearing about some other online backup, storage, and archiving solutions as soon as I can finish testing them.

Technorati Tags: Mozy,SimpleTech,StorageSync,SimpleDrive,Ben's Ranch