Backups and Disaster Recovery

In addition, you also need to consider disaster scenarios. While these may be far less likely to happen, their effects can be devastating for your business. How long could your business survive if you lost all record of who owed you money or no longer had the information you need to satisfy the tax or VAT men? Disasters could be anything from theft or an electrical surge that takes out your server to fire, flood or famine (OK, maybe not famine) that takes out the computer room or your entire office.

You pay large insurance premiums to ensure your business survives such eventualities, but if you lose all your business information they may still prove terminal, no matter how well insured you are. So don't just insure your business, insure you business data too by implementing good, practical backup procedures.

When considering backup procedures, a good rule of thumb is to ask your self "How much can I afford to lose". A one-man business from home with very limited transactions may feel that a weekly backup, even a monthly backup is good enough. However, in the case of most businesses, backups should be scheduled to run automatically at least once a day, normally overnight.

Good user policies and procedures are a key first step to creating a reliable backup strategy. For example, making sure that everyone saves their data on to the central server from where it can be backed-up automatically is much more reliable that letting users save their data on their own PCs and expecting them to make backup copies themselves.

There are a number of methods of creating backups. The traditional method of using tapes is still one of the simplest and most reliable. However, tape drives can be relatively expensive compared to the cost of PCs and so may not be suitable in all cases. An alternative can be to have two disk drives in the server. This can be cheaper but if the server is lost due to fire, flood or power surge then both disks are also lost.

A similar approach is to backup the server across the network to another PC. If the server is lost then the other PC should still be OK and vice-versa. For out of hours backups though, it does mean leaving both computers switched on. Also, in the case of a real disaster, such as fire or theft, both computers may still be lost at the same time.

The safest form of backup is one which allows you to take a copy of your valuable data and store it off-site somewhere. Maybe put it in you case as you leave at night and store it at home, or maybe form an arrangement with another company you know so that they store your backups and you store theirs. Tapes are great for this, but there are other forms of removable media (i.e. storage you can take with you). These include external disk drives and recordable (or re-writable) CDs or DVDs. Just bear in mind that a CD holds around 750 mb of data and a DVD a little over 4gb, which may not be enough to store the amount of data you need to secure.

The actual backup strategy you put in place should depend on you own specific requirements. You need a balanced approach that means that the most likely scenarios, such as recovering files deleted in error, can be address quickly and efficiently while still ensuring that, in a worst case disaster situation, your business still has the data it needs to survive. If you create a procedure that is very secure, but complex or time consuming there is a chance that it won't happen, alternatively a quick and easy procedure may be great in most cases but not prove sufficient in a disaster.

One common approach is to ensure that daily backups are made and held on-site for convenience, but that a secure copy is taken off-site on a weekly basis. This is clearly a compromise. If your off-site backup is taken (say) every Saturday morning and a disaster strikes on a Friday evening, then your backup is a week out of date. However, for a lot of small businesses this is a reasonable balance of risk over complexity. In the (hopefully unlikely) event of the sort of disaster that takes out two local copies of your data (the original and the on-site backup) you may feel that having a 6 day old backup is the least of your worries. However, if this is not the case and you do not think an out of date backup is acceptable in any circumstances, then you need to make sure that your backups are secured off-site every day.

Finally a few tips:

Test your backups. Its all well and good designing and implementing a backup strategy, but if it fails when you need it because you never tested it, then its all in vein. You need to be sure that you can restore from your backups and that you know how to. This may add a little extra time initially, but its well worth it for the added security and peace of mind it gives.

Fireproof safes may give you a false feeling of security. Many are designed to protect paperwork, which may get hot inside the safe but not burn. Your backup media may not survive at the same temperature. Slightly brown and crisp paperwork can still be used, a heat damaged tape can not. Also, in the case of a fire, your safe may well protect your backup media, but if the building is down on top of it and the firemen have it roped off, it may be a while until you can get at it. So if you are looking to get up and running again, you may be able to get new PCs and new premises but you need to be sure you backup isn't under a pile of rubble where you can't get it. A safe on-site is better than no safe on-site, but an off-site copy is still the best option.

Rotate your backups. This means you should make sure that your daily backup doesn't just overwrite the backup you made yesterday. It could take a couple of days before you realise that file you need has been deleted. You need the option of going back more than one day. This can be done by using different backup media for each day of the week, which is then only reused on a weekly basis. Another approach is to use the same backup media for a whole week, making a full backup on the first day and then only backing up files that have changed for the rest of the week. The media can then be swapped each week, and ideally stored off-site. You can extend the security of this by occasionally taking a backup copy (e.g. a tape) out of the sequence and replacing it with a new blank one. You could do this monthly or just at year end and half year. You may never need them, but then again you may never need your insurance but it doesn't mean you don't pay the premium.

You need an approach that works for your business. Only you can decide on the balance of cost, complexity and security that is right for your business, but your decision could benefit from an understanding of the principles and from discussing your options with someone who understands. So why not contact us for sound, practical advice on how to set up a workable backup and disaster recovery strategy for your business.