The Risks

Disaster can strike at any time, and without a working backup system in place, your valuable business data is at risk of being permanently lost. Hard drives in compuers sometimes fail, but there are bigger disasters that are also possible. We're all aware of some of the major recent disasters that have affected businesses, and thankfully those are rare, but you must consider that you need to plan for events that may make it impossible to get into your facility to retrieve your important data. These can include:

• Seismic activity
• Hazardous or biological material spill
• Structural damage to building
• Local flooding
• Transportation disruption

The Problem

Small businesses frequently put off the setup of a backup system indefinitely. There are always more pressing issues that demand the time or resources that might otherwise go into getting a backup system up and running. Setting up a backup system requires:

• Time to research the options
• Choosing the best option for you
• Acquiring and installing the equipment needed
• Acquiring, installing, and configuring backup software
• Setting up and documenting a backup policy
• Training backup operators to properly handle backup media
• Monitoring the system for anamolies and failures
• Testing backup media to insure that restoration from backup media works as expected

Consider This

Some of the considerations when setting up a backup system are:

• How quickly must the system be back up running. This is called 'recovery time objective' (RTO) in IT circles.
• How much data can you tolerate losing, such as one week, day, hour, several minutes, or none at all. This is called 'recovery point objective' (RPO)
• How much effort to maintain backups can you afford. There are costs involved with having quick RTOs and recent RPOs. Most businesses find a compromise point for RTO and RPO so that their exposure is minimized and costs are reasonable.

Another Concern

In addition, it may be advisable to keep duplicate backup drives in case of catastrophe. If a new replacment drive takes a few days to arrive after ordering, or the drive is being discontinued and replaced by higher capacity models, a spare drive is recommended. It's best to keep it offsite but readily accessible, and should be accompanied by restoration instructions, copies of necessary software, and a complete disaster recovery plan.

 

What You Need To Plan

A major consideration when designing a disaster recovery plan is deciding what parts of the system must be running first. Some businesses may require the accounting system to be up and running first. Others may need customer service supported first, and others will need warehousing, manufacturing, inventory, or web services up first. It is important to consider your systems and staff and set priorities. It's best to have this all written out so that you can easily assign tasks and hand out written orders when time is crucial. It's also useful to have a diagram of the current network topology, and minimal needed network topology in a disaster.

While a disaster recovery plan for your computer network is crucial, some businesses go further and think through what is necessary to get their entire business up and running again. This is called a business continuity plan, which the disaster recovery plan is just a part. Business continuity plans can include alternate facilities, emergency phone lists and contact order, vendor lists for replacement office equipment, furnishings and supplies, Internet connectivitiy, etc.

 

Additional Safety

Will system snapshots be needed? It is sometimes worthwhile to take snapshots of the data and archive it so that you can retrieve a much needed file that was deleted long ago.

 

Legal Concerns

Are there any compliance issues to consider? Certain industries such as health care and financial services have mandated procedures with which they must comply. If you keep credit card information (and we recommend against it) you'll be required to encrypt your transaction records and keep inventory of your backup media along with records of media disposition when it is retired and destroyed.

 

What You Need To Do

Fortunately most small businesses have simple needs, and risks can be minimized with the following measures.

• Make an image of the server system disk and keep this on an external usb hard disk. Keep this in a safe place offsite. Put it into a locked safe is needed.
• Make an image of a desktop computer system if all desktop computers are the same, and of each individual system if they are different. Keep these on an external usb hard disk onsite. It may be advisable to have this locked away safely.
• If possible setup a file server where all important documents are stored. Setup document redirection if you are on a Microsoft domain. It is possible to setup document redirection if you are in a workgroup, and you should consider doing so.
• Have the file server using RAID. Be sure it is either level 1 or level 5 RAID
• If you have a small amount of important data ( a few gigabytes), and a fast Internet connection, setup an offsite backup service. These are well worth the reasonable fees that they charge. We recommend eSureIT from Intronis, and you can find out more here.
• For larger amounts of important data (tens of gigabytes), you'll need media with greater capacity. In most cases, DAT72 tape drives will work well, although it requires that a trusted employee must change the tapes in the drives on either a daily, semi weekly, or weekly basis. These tapes must be taken offsite.
• Keep a disaster recovery plan with copies of all necessary software. Keep one copy onsite and one copy offsite.

Backup Types

About backup types. Briefly, a full backup copies all files to the backup media and markes the files as backed up by resetting the archive bit. An incremental backup copies all files that don't have the archive bit set, and and marks them as backed up by resetting the archive bit. The archive bit gets unset if the file is changed. Differential backups copy all changed files to the backup media, but do not mark them as backed up. A differential backup leaves the archive bit unset. When copying files to the backup media, the backup software can rewind the media and overwrite, or start writing at the first unwritten spot as an append.

 

Example Backup Policy

A typical tape backup policy is to rotate 2 (or 4) tapes as alternate weekly sets. One set goes offsite. The tapes get changed on Thursday (or Wednesday and Thursday). A full backup is performed Thursday night and overwrites the media. A differential backup is performed Friday, Monday, and Tuesday night, and appends to the media. Wednesday night, a differential backup appends to the media and ejects the tape.

If this amount of data exceeds the capacity of the tape, The full backup is moved to Wednesday, which overwrites the Wednesday tape and ejects at finish. The operator must take that tape offsite, having replaced it with the differential tape on Thursday. Thursdays differential backup overwrites the tape. The Friday through Tuesday backups append to media, and the Tuesday backup ejects at finish, to be take offsite Wednesday when the alternate full backup tape is swapped in.

 

Let Us Help You

If your business would suffer from the loss of data on your computer, it is time to get that backup system going.

Digifix can set up you backup system. We can also set up a comprehensive disaster recovery plan. We'll tailor it to fit your needs and be sure that it is convenient and affordable.

If you have questions, please don't hesitate to contact us by email of phone. No obligation!