OK, You Have A Backup Drive - Now Make Sure You Have Backups
Posted by Art Misita on Tue, Dec 22, 2009
Every IT consultant can keep a crowd entertained with customer "war stories" accumulated over a lifetime in this business. But there is one such story that I will never forget, and that is still every bit as relevant today as it was when it happened thirty-five years ago.
I owned a software company that developed and sold car rental software. One of my first customers was a used car rental business in New Jersey. They had installed one of the very first IBM PC's ($5,000 for a computer with a 10 MB hard drive and two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives running the original Microsoft DOS operating system).
One day I got a phone call from their office manager. Their hard drive had failed and IBM replaced it. The IBM support person also reinstalled the DOS operating system but we had to reinstall our software and recover their database form their backup diskettes. In those days their database backup required three diskettes to fit the full backup. I asked the office manager for the backup disks to restore the database and she handed me one diskette. I told her that there should be three diskettes and she smiled and proudly told me that they had found a way to save money and time on diskettes by just leaving the same diskette in the drive every time the backup program asked for the next diskette. So, every day their backup used only one diskette - over and over again. I had the unpleasant task of telling her boss, the owner of the business, that he had just lost two years worth of data due to his staff's ingenuity. He started advertising for a new office manager the very next day. And the following week the replacement person started re-entering two years worth of rental contracts and payments from paper copies in their files.
Another story will bring home the point of this article very succinctly. One of our customers in the travel industry faithfully ran their backups every night, changing the backup tape before leaving for the day. They had a hard drive head crash and the drive was replaced by a local hardware consultant. They asked us for our assistance in restoring the database for their reservation system which we wrote and maintained for them. We asked them to mount the backup tape in the tape drive and the tape was blank. So were the tapes for the past five days (they maintained a set of five tapes and recycled them each week). We checked the backup logs and found that the backup had been failing every day for almost three months. We had instructed the client in the proper backup procedures and at the top of the list was "check the backup log for last night to be sure the backup ran successfully - if not, call Tech 2 Go". Needless to say we never heard of any backup failures and the one day they needed the backup the most it was blank. And they lost more than three months worth of business transactions.
The backup drive - whether it is a USB memory stick or an external hard drive, or any other sort of backup device is an insurance policy for your business. It is meant to keep you from losing data. It is meant to get you back up and running when your drives fail. But you need to run the backup software every night as a scheduled task, you need to verify that it is running properly, and you need to be sure that someone reliable is making certain every day that your insurance policy is "paid up".
You need a backup plan that provides for keeping backup files off premises so that you can recover your data in case of a fire or theft of your computer hardware.
First you need to purchase an external backup device that wilk hold your daily backups. We recommend a USB external hard drive such as the Western Digital My Book Essential. It is reasonably priced and will easily store a full week's backups on a single drive.
Next you need reliable baclup software that is capable of managing multiple backup files on your external hard drive. For that we recommend Acronis True Image Home 2010. This is the product that we use to backup our own systems. We set it up to backup the full C: drive once per week, and then to create incremental backups on the remaining six days per week. Incremental backups save only those files that have been changed since the last full backup. With True Image Home, our weekly full backup runs for about 2 hours at 2:00 AM and saves 180 GB of disk files. The daily backups on other days runs for about 10 minutes at the same time early in the morning when nobody is using the system.
We have set True Image Home to produce a daily backup log, WHICH WE CHECK EVERY MORNING, and we have the software set to send an email to my email address in case of a backup failure.
Scheduling daily backups is a critical task. Checking every day to be sure those backups are running successully is just plain smart business practice.
It might not sound like a capital offense was committed when someone says that they skipped the backup because they had to get to the theater last night to meet a friend. But we can guarantee you that the one morning that you will need the backup volume the most is on the morning following the night when it was not run.
Your business probably supports you and your family and your employees' families. Protecting your business data ought to rank fairly high on your list of priorities.