The Importance of Data Backup

 

In the high tech world we live in individuals with computers have stored massive amounts of data.  Digital photographs, email, video, MP3 and downloads have sent data storage through the roof.  Businesses are ever reliant on their growing data, customer management systems, account packages and reports for example.  Smaller companies such as design agencies, architects photographers are experiencing the largest percentage data growth.

It is almost possible to attach a price business data, the only fact is that a business can no longer sustained daily tasks without it, so the data must be worth as much as the business itself.  Although personal data held on home computers is deemed to be of very little value, but not to the owner.  Imagine losing the pictures of your Childs birthday, or those important never to be forgotten wedding pictures.  You can not put a price on your most important memories.

All computer data is held within the hard drive.  This drive can be internal or external directly connected to the computer via a USB connection.  Hard drive technology means the capacity is growing rapidly, a basic drive is now around 100GB and you can now buy 1000GB drives.  The law of nature states what ever capacity we have, we will use.  Most of the data is usually stored on computer hard disks that can accommodate a whole lot of information. Commonly available hard disks have the capacity of 160 GB, though if one really needs them, those having a staggering capacity of one terabytes are also available in the market.

 

Businesses usually have many SCSI hard drives in a RAID configuration connected to servers via SCSI or Fibre connections.

Hard drive manufacturers such as Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital now go to extreme lengths to make sure their drives are reliable over a long period of time, however as the complexity of a hard drive increases they can still fail.

Hard Drive Failures: As already stated, hard drives complicated, mechanical devices and do fail.  As the capacity grows and the physical size reduces the tolerances in they work are is becoming extreme.  Some components operate less than a tenth of a millimetre of each other.  On top of the potential mechanical failures there can be software errors (a more regular occurrence) like a deleted partition, corrupted system files/data files or virus infection.

 

Disasters outside of your Control: There are many types of natural disaster which can effect both businesses and home computers alike.  Unfortunately these disasters are becoming more regular and the most recent in the UK has been flood.  It has been estimated that over 200,000GB of unprotected data has been lost in the recent Yorkshire and Midlands floods.  For business this is catastrophic, total loss of data means total loss of business.  For home users all important household data was literally washed down the drain.  On top of flood there is also fire, theft and malicious attack which can cause data loss.

 

With all the potential causes of data loss it is important that a copy of important data is stored, always up to date and available for recovery (data backup).

 

On-site or Local Data Backup is the traditional way to ensure you have a copy of your data available, but as with the flood scenario, what ever disaster on this scale effects your computer or server will without doubt effect your backup.  We look at various method used for a local backup below.

 

CD and DVD media backup: CD is only capable of storing around 650MB to 700MB of data, which is less than one hundredth of an entry level hard drive.  The time required to copy this data every night makes this task difficult, so you will need a lot of CD's and a lot of time.  DVD's hold much more data, nearly 5GB which is almost practical but again the time required to backup on to DVD will still be too long.  The other thing to bear in mind is if your computer is effected by fire then so will your CD or DVD collection, so if you use this method please take them offsite.

 

Tape Backup: Nearly all businesses in the UK backup to a tape.  Tape has been around for a long time and technology advances means that tape capacity has grown from 20GB to over 400GB.  Speed is impressive, some tape drive can move over a GB of data every second.  As you can imagine, tape backup solutions have a relatively high initial cost.  Your shopping list will consist of the tape drive, media x 20, backup software and connectivity kit for the server.  This will be in the region of £2,500 for an entry level system.  Tape still has some legacy issues such as not totally reliable, labour intensive and the tapes still need to be removed to a secure offsite location.  Many businesses store tapes in a fire proof safe, this method became flawed when an oil refinery recent exploded near Milton Keynes destroying near by buildings.  Unfortunately the buildings fell on top of the safes and could not be accessed for many weeks after the explosion.

 

Direct Attached or Network Attached Hard Drives: A method used by smaller businesses in the UK who do not have the resource to implement a tape backup solution.  It is very quick and easy to attached this type of drive and backup software will copy data from a computer or server to the attached drive.  Performance is good, reliability is good and this process can be made reasonably automated.  The same problem applies, this external hard drive must be moved to a secure offsite location so your backup is not effected by the same disaster.

 

Online Backup: Also known as offsite backup or remote backup will automatically backup your data to an offsite data centre.  So if your building or home is flooded or effected by fire your data will be stored in a secure offsite location, probably in a different country.  Many internet based companies have started to offer the online backup solution and it is quickly becoming the largest method of backup for business and home users.  Whilst this method of backup offers total security and availability of your data the major draw back is that it is only as fast as your internet connection.  Whilst compression techniques help the speed of the backup process, it could still take up to a week to run your initial backup.

 

There we have it, the main options of how to backup, one thing you will notice is the trade off between performance and security, to backup via your existing internet connection is the slowest method, but it is certainly the most secure.

 

The concept of data backup is thought to be a pain, but on thing is for sure, it is a necessary pain. Recent advances in backup software technology mean the task is becoming easier and quicker with less human intervention required.  It is almost viewed in the same way a building, health and car insurance.  Basically you are paying for a service which you pray you will never need to use.

 

Statistically you will need to use a backup and recovery service, 40% of businesses have lost data for one reason or another within the last 3 years and 10% of home users have lost data over the same period.  The number of home users losing data is expected to increase to 25% by 2010.  Of the businesses that have lost data, they only have a 25% chance of making it to year two.

 

Please don't become a statistic, backup your data.