Back-ups

Back-ups are your most important security blanked. If done right, you don't even have to fear a total failure of your hard-drive. You are back up and running in about half a day without having to re-install every software you need and without loosing data.

Back-ups are easy
Back-ups are easy! You don't think so? Why not? Because you have to think about doing it, you don;t have a medium which matches the capacity of your hard-drive and anyways, there is nothing important stored on your computer anyways! No good reasons at all!

There are reasonably priced back-up systems out there, which handle 30 Giga-bytes and more per medium (e.g. tape). This is well enough for a single computer. The software that comes with these devices can be scheduled to run automatically at predefined times.

For businesses backup drives can be pooled to offer the required capacity. For big networks, roboter systems are available with Terabytes capacity.

In other words:

You can make your back-up fully automatic and almost hands-free

A stand-alone computer system
For my computer at home I use a back-up tape drive produced by the company OnStream. I consider the drive and the media as very good. You can get capacities of 30 GBytes and more per medium. The software (echo) which comes with the drives is quite mature. It offers the functionality you want for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.

With the Onstream system you can use one tape to make a full back-up of your system including the system state and run consecutive incremental backups. Once the tape is full, you switch to a second tape and start with a full backup again. In this way you can have a data history of about half a year or more.

When running incremental backups older versions of files are not overwritten. Whenever a file changes, it is saved as a new item on the tape. This way you even have access to older versions of a file, if you happen to need it.

Mind your system state
I mentioned that the system state (and the system files) are included in the back-up. This is very important. If this wouldn't be the case, you could easily retrieve the contents of your hard-drive to the moment of your last back-up. But your system would not behave the way it did at this point. Backing up your system files and your system state asures that, after a full retrival of your backup your computer behaves exactly the way it did when the last back-up was done.

The hard-drive crash scenario
Should your hard-drive crash fatally this is what you have to do:

• Get yourself a new harddrive and install it
• Install a basic version of your operating system
• Install the back-up software
• Retrieve your most recent full and incremental back-up

That's it!

It will probably take you half a day to get back to where you were at the time of your last back-up. Without it, tough luck. You have to install your operating system, all programs you need or want, get all updates for the operating system and application software through the internet, download all those utilities you had from the internet and install them and so one. It'll take you a long time and in the end, you are still missing all the files you created or receieved: Letters, Memos, Pictures, e-mails, etc.

E-mails, if you didn't print them can be a fatal loss. You might have lost a complete paper-trail, i.e. evidence.

The time wasted, the stress and the losses outweigh by far the $530 (CDN) investment for a backup system.

Have a look at the Onstream products here.

CDs are not enough
CDs are usually not enough, since they don't have the capacity to completely back-up your system. If you happen to have a CD-RW (read-write) drive, use it to back-up your own data if you do not have any other back-up in place. This way you will not lose your work if something happens. But you will not be able to retrieve your system to its last state with ease.

Also use it to back-up your system files (like the registry). This can be of great help, if for any reason these files become corrupt.

Computer networks
If you are operating a computer network, you have to plan your back-up media capacity in relation to the total hard-drive capacity installed.

The one thing you don't want is to have somebody be responsible for media change during back-up. Since back-ups run at night and not during business hours, this would be quite an expensive affair anyways.

A thing you want to have is a centralized backup for everything that's important. Its a question of administration and reliability.

You can deploy one or more back-up drives or an automatic media changer to reach your capacity requirement. Typically DAT (Digital Audio Tape) drives or also the Onstream drives are used.

Network back-up Software
In network environment, I find the products of Veritas very impressive.

I have installed Veritas Backup Exec on a mixed Windows NT/Windows 2000 network and like the functionality, scalability and reliability of the product. The back-up devices are installed on a central server. The Veritas Back-up Exec server is installed on the same server. On each workstation in the network, a back-up agent is installed (through the network). The system is scheduled to run differential back-ups every day during night time and full back-ups on the weekend.

As with every decent back-up software, you can define which drives and folders on the workstations should be backed up. The system state of each workstation is stored as well.

The desaster recover scenario is quite similar to the case of a single workstation above. If a station fails, get a replacement, install the operating system, push the back-up agent and restore the workstation to the state of its last back-up. Up-time lost: May be half a day.

Have a look on what Veritas has to offer here.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please contact me.