|
 |
|
BUSINESS BASICS CHANNELS 
|
Back Up or Out! It was a beautiful summer day in 1998, when the storm clouds started to gather. That was nothing new -- in Colorado, along the "Front Range", afternoon thunderstorms are expected in the summer. By evening, however, this particular storm ended up concentrating on the western end of Fort Collins, swelling Spring Creek from what was normally a mild three foot wide, one foot deep trickle to a raging torrent 16 feet deep and hundreds of feet wide. Homes were destroyed and businesses flooded. A driver loses control of his car and crashes into a local power pole, tipping it over. Unfortunately, the local power lines cross over a set of high-tension lines next to it. The result: homes that used to receive 220 volts now receive 13,000 volts. Computers directly attached to the power lines are vaporized (along with a few TVs, VCRs, refrigerators and who knows what else). No matter how safe you may think your business is, there is always a potential disaster waiting for you. How will you cope? Do you have business insurance? Most people at least think of that. Have you thought about what would happen if your building were totally destroyed? Could you continue business, even if insurance pays for the damage? How about your financial books? Do you keep an extra copy off-site somewhere? While most people think of the obvious, I would like to make a pitch for the most mundane act to save your business: the lowly backup. In organizations I have worked for, there have been people whose sole job was to perform and maintain backups of various critical systems. Granted, these were usually computer systems, but they don't have to be limited to that. Most people are familiar with the idea of backing up data on their computers, even if they rarely do it. The act of deleting a needed file is so common that most computer systems now offer a method for bringing back deleted files (for example, the Recycle Bin on Windows). But what if you didn't delete a file, but instead a needed paragraph? Where would you go for that? What kind of back ups are there? In computer parlance, there are two kinds of back ups: Complete and partial (or incremental). A complete back up is just that - a complete copy of every file that you have deemed “important”. A complete back up of your computer files may take a long time and require a lot of storage, but it is essential that you perform at least one of these. If your records are paper, this would be a complete copy (probably using a photocopier) of every piece of paper. A complete (or “full”) back up tries to create a complete image or “snapshot” of every file at that moment in time. Using this back up, you should be able to recreate what you knew at the moment the back up was taken. While this is fairly simple with computer records, it may be more difficult for paper records. For instance, should you copy past years’ financial records? If so, how far back? In fact, I will argue that financial records for previous years (and unused paper records in general) probably do not need to be copied, but merely relocated to someplace “safe” - a fireproof vault or perhaps stored with a professional archiving service. (In Fort Collins, our local archiving service has purchased and re-outfitted an abandoned missile silo. That’s probably safe enough!) The other kind of back up, the incremental back up, stores only things that have changed since the last back up. This is often a much smaller and faster procedure and provides the added benefit of allowing you to keep a history of how files have changed over time. This is usually most useful on small time scales (days) on files that are changing heavily. I have gone back through back ups of just two or three days back to pull up crucial paragraphs in reports that were deleted, either accidentally or in the mistaken belief that I was “improving” something. Incremental back ups may be based on either the last complete or the last incremental back up, but I recommend that you always base your incremental back up on the last complete back up. While that may take more storage, you will only need two backups (the last complete back up and the last incremental back up) to completely recreate your system as of the last incremental. What should I back up? What you need to back up depends on your business, but there are some simple rules. At a bare minimum, you need to back up any data that is critical to your business: financial records, inventory records, sales records, vendor contracts and so on. In my business (software design), I regularly back up the source I have written for my programs. I can imagine that a lawyer would want to keep an extra set of casebooks, or a doctor would want to keep an extra set of patient histories. You may have data should be backed up on a “project” basis instead of on a “daily business” basis. This is common in engineering, where all of the design information is backed up (or archived) once the project is complete. This could mean that all of the lab notebooks, design artwork, simulation results, meeting notes, testing results, and so on are boxed up and sent to an archive site. This is important, but don’t do back ups solely on a project basis - keep the daily results in some form of back up as well. Once you know that your critical information is safe, start looking at other information that may be difficult to replace in a timely manner. While catalogs from your vendors probably aren't that hard to replace, you probably should at least keep your contact information safe. You might want to purchase a CD writer and copy important application CDs, keeping the copies at a different location (this will not violate the "no copy" rule on CDs so long as you use the duplicates strictly for your own back up use). Keep in mind that non-critical information may fall under a "too expensive to duplicate" category. For instance, a lawyer may have a very specific law library at his office, but duplicating that library (either by using a photocopier or by purchasing a duplicate set of books) might be hideously expensive. In that case, the lawyer should at least find if someone else local to him also has the books, and set up an agreement to use the books in an emergency (with reciprocal access to his own library as well, of course - that other person may lose their books!). By the way, you should strongly consider protecting your critical computers or other electronic equipment with a back-up power supply (also called an Uninterruptible Power Supply, or UPS). These devices are rated for the number of computers, monitors, and so on that may be attached to them, and cost anywhere from less than a hundred dollars to more than a thousand dollars. The particular unit we use cost around $170 and should keep our home "base" computer running for 15 minutes or so in the event of a power outage -- plenty enough to save off any work we may be doing at the time. More important than that, though, is that the UPS protects our computer from severe over-voltage situations like the power pole accident above. If you have purchased a phone system for your business, you should consider a UPS for that. You’ll probably want to make phone calls when the power goes out, and your customers may not know you have a power outage. How often should I back up? This again depends on the business, the type of data being backed up, and the media the data is stored on. My rule of thumb is “How painful would it be to recreate everything I’ve done since the last back up?” Once it becomes too painful to contemplate recreating the work, a back up should be performed. For paper documents, one complete backup may be all you will ever need; from that point on, all you will do is move copies of changes to your safe location. For information that rarely changes, again a single complete back up may be all that you need. Saving your application CDs only needs to be done when you receive them. For more ephemeral data, weekly or daily back ups are called for. Get in the habit of performing at least an incremental back up on a weekly basis as a bare minimum. I have seen incremental back ups performed nightly and complete back ups performed weekly. That kind of schedule called for a lot of back up media, but the back up was of the computers for several hundred engineers - losing a week’s work for that many engineers would have been a big problem! You should plan for “cycles” in your back ups. If you cycle your complete back up media, there should be at least two, and perhaps more, complete back ups that are valid at any given time. If you do a complete back up every weekend, this rule means that there are always three complete back ups - the one you will be writing and two others. Incremental back ups should never be overwritten until a new complete back up is done. Another thing you need to do is integrate your back up procedures with your normal day-to-day work. For computers, get the computer to automatically run the back up at night after you’ve gone home. Be sure to leave the proper disk or tape in the proper. Label all of your back up media, for instance with “Complete Backup A” and “Incremental Back Up 1”. Keep in mind that a back up may take more than one piece of media, be it tape or disk or CD, so make sure you don’t confuse the back up label with the media label. When I used tapes for back ups, I would always use Alpha labels for the back designation (like Complete Backup A, B, etc.), and then explicitly labeled the tape with a number (Tape 1, 2, etc.). Thus, I never accidentally put the wrong tape in or rewrote a backup cycle I hadn’t intended to write. Where should I keep my back ups? Where you keep your back up is almost as important as performing it in the first place. With computer systems, there is a strong tendency to keep the back up media in the same room with the back up drive. Resist this temptation! If there’s a fire in that room, you will lose not only your computers, but also all of the back ups! If you have no other place to keep them, invest in a fireproof vault and be sure to lock it every night. Check the ratings on the vault and be sure that it can keep temperatures inside reasonable (less than 100 degrees F or 33 degrees C) for at least 3 hours. A better choice is to keep your complete back ups off site, either in a separate building or, if necessary, at your home (or at a friend’s home, if your business is at home). Sure, that site may burn down, but at least you still have your systems, which you can immediately start backing up again. Your incremental back ups should be closer to where they might be used. While off-site is again safest, it probably makes sense to have these closer. The most likely use of an incremental back up is to retrieve something that was deleted. Here it might make more sense to use a fire-safe vault, but one isn’t available be sure to take your incremental back ups off site as well. Are there tools to help me perform back ups? There are quite a few tools to help with back ups! I’ll list just a few, but these should be good jumping-off points for a more complete search: For computer systems, consider tape drives or CD writers for back up. Tape drives today can store sagans of bytes (1 Sagan = “billyuns and billyuns”) for an extremely attractive price. I found tape drives that can store 8 gigabytes (8 billion bytes) for as little as $200 to ones that can store 50 gigabytes for $700. Quite often, I was able to trade cost of the drive for transfer speed (slower speed meant lower cost). All of these tape drives usually come with a backup application, but check your vendor to be sure. The only real drawback to tape is true “long term” storage. Tape stores data magnetically, and unfortunately these magnetic images can degrade over time. Granted, it’s a fairly long time for most purposes (a decade or so is the common timeframe given) and would be more than enough for practically all of the back up purposes we’ve described. For true long-term storage, though, you might want to consider optical storage. Another minor problem is that the tape drive is essentially a “serial” device - scanning a tape for a desired file may be tedious if the backup program did not store the data in a fashion that makes “skipping” to data easy to do. For tape drive manufacturers, consider the following (listed alphabetically):
CD writing drives have made a big splash, especially in the last couple of years. Prices on these drives have come down and performance had drastically improved over that time frame. Currently, drives that can write at 600 to 900 Kbytes (thousand bytes) per are available. CDs can store up to 650 megabytes (million bytes), which is small compared to tape drives, but is sufficient for many small businesses. Again, most CD drives come with a back up application, but check the vendor to be sure. The first writing CD drives used media that could be written only once. Since the media was recordable, these drives were often called CD Recordable drives, or CD-R drifves for short. While this was okay for permanent storage, back up use of this kind of media meant that you would go through a lot of media. Within the last year or so, drives that can use “rewritable” media, that is media that can be erased and reused (although the media is limited to roughly 1000 rewrite cycles). These drives are often called CD Rewritable drives, or CD-RW drives for short. The CD-RW drive can use either the CD-R or CD-RW media. It is getting harder to find new CD-R drives, since manufacturers see no advantage to it over a CD-RW drive. The CD-RW drive will stay on top until DVD writing drives become pervasive. There are two major advantages to the CD drives. First, the media (if properly protected) can store data for literally centuries. On that time scale, we’re more concerned about keeping hardware around that can read the media! Second, the CDs can be written so that almost any system can read them. Just about every computer sold today has a drive that can read CDs. CD-RW drives cost anywhere from $200 to $400 these days, with the price dropping heavily every 6 months or so. For CD manufacturers, consider the following (listed alphabetically):
Of course, DVD writing drives are starting to appear, but I would avoid them for back ups for the moment (this is being written at the start of 2000). There have been arguments over standards in the DVD industry that may mean that you are stuck with an incompatible format in the long run. If you really need the space, consider a tape drive. There are forms of removable magnetic media, like the ioMega Jaz drive (which stores up to 2 Gbytes), that combine a hard drive with the ease-of-use of a floppy. The advantages are that you get a reasonable amount of storage and your system treats the media like any other disk. Plus, the drives are not expensive - usually around $200 to $400. The disadvantage is media cost - a 2 Gbyte Jaz disk costs around $100 apiece. Also showing up are “super-floppies” like the Imation SuperDisk, the ioMega Zip drive, and the Caleb it Drive. These floppies store from 100 Mbytes to 250 Mbytes and the media cost is reasonable (around $10 apiece). If you need to store paper or other documents, be sure to check into an archive service in your area. These folks can store your valuable documents in places that are really safe, and save you money. Finally, there is the ultimate in “off-site” storage: Internet storage! There are now a couple of sites that will take your data and store it for you (at a cost, of course). The advantage is that it is extremely unlikely that the same problem will befall you and the Internet archiver at the same time. The disadvantage is that you are restricted by your Internet access speed as to how much data you can send at any given time. If you need to send 600 Mbytes, you’d better not send it via a 22 Kbaud modem - unless you have 3½ days to wait for it to upload! So what do I do now? First off, if you haven’t done a back up in recent memory, start one now! Even if you write it to multiple floppies, it’s better to have a clumsy back up than no back up at all. Next, decide what needs to be backed up and how it should be done. Paper documents may or may not need to be duplicated. Computer files should be judged based on their importance and volatility. Keep in mind what is vital to your organization - what might make everything grind to a halt if that particular piece of data suddenly went missing. Build a plan for your back ups, and build institutional procedures around them. The procedures may be as simple as setting up a back up to run every night at 11 PM and making sure the right tape is in the drive before you go home, but make sure you follow them! Label your tapes and be consistent in their use. I once physically rotated the tapes, so that the one I wanted to use next was always in the leftmost slot of my tape rack. Do what is simple and do what works for you! Decide where you are going to keep your back ups, and be sure you know how you can get to them, day or night, vacations or not. If the tapes are stored at the company president’s home, be sure you know how to get them even if the president and his family are in Tahiti at a (ahem) business conference. Finally, publish your procedures so that everyone concerned knows how the back ups will work and how to get information back from them. With a little forethought, planning, and diligence, you don’t have to fold the company just because a tornado blew through town, taking your shop with it. -Stuart A. Bell |
|