Backing tracks
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Do you back up your data? Many don’t, and find that vital information has gone missing — sometimes at significant cost. We look at the software, hardware and services that can keep your data and systems safe
Words: Toby Clark
There are many ways you can lose your computer-based data. From a failed hard drive to theft, fire, flood or human error, it’s possible to lose all your commercial information at once.
But the right backup strategy can protect your data and have you up and running again in minimal time. You need the right hardware, the right software and, crucially, the right policies to ensure that you never lose a byte of data.
And it is not difficult nor expensive to back up data properly: one small Cheshire brick-and-block haulier we spoke to outsources its IT to an external contractor that handles online backup services. However, a Surrey courier firm admitted that its two-PC set-up is backed up only irregularly to an external hard drive.
The basic rule is to back up information that you have to keep for legal or regulatory reasons, or you need in order to run your business. Backup expert Jennifer Walzer says: “Go through an exercise where you say ‘if I walked into my office tomorrow and nothing was there, what are the most critical applications [and data] I need?’” The first crucial area is file backup to protect your operational data. This can take the form of a full backup, differential backup or incremental backup or, most likely, a combination of all three.
Full backup is a copy of your entire set of data — easy to restore, but time-consuming to copy to another medium or site. This should be done occasionally, but is rarely suitable for regular daily backups. For that, a differential backup is better: this records all the changes since the last full backup, but even this process can take a while.
For more frequent (eg hourly) backups, an incremental backup is useful: this records only the changes since the last incremental backup, so it keeps backup times to a minimum.
Like data files, you can protect your computers by ‘imaging’ the operating system and software, so that a new PC can be brought to the same specification, particularly important if you use proprietary applications or custommade software.
Software
Operating systems have data backup features built in: Windows 7 Professional, for instance, can schedule regular backups from a PC to another drive on your network.
Free applications, such as Backup Maker or FBackup, have more flexible backup options and more sophisticated scheduling, but paid-for packages, such as the £40 Acronis True Image, offer system recovery and features, such as background backup, where files are backed up as you work on them.
Commercial products such as Acronis Backup and Recovery (around £500) offer fully flexible data and system backup for a small business network.
Hardware
The simplest option for backup is an external hard drive. This is cheap (a 2TB drive costs just £70), easy to install (it connects via a USB cable) and simple to remove.
A more sophisticated and rugged solution is networkattached storage (NAS). This is a box containing one or more hard drives connected to your local network via an ethernet cable. A typical NAS drive supports two or four hard drives in a RAID (redundant array of independent drives) which appears as a single ‘volume’ on your network. A four-drive NAS costs from £500.
NAS is useful for any operation with more than one PC because it can be placed anywhere on your premises, and allows files to be shared by any computer on the network.
Different RAID configurations give different combinations of speed and security; some retain all your data even if one hard drive fails totally. However, IT professionals agree that RAID is no substitute for proper backup, so NAS drives often include a USB or eSATA port to enable an external hard drive to be attached.
Optical disks (CD-ROM, DVD and Blu-Ray/BDROM) are popular for backup. They are cheap — a 25GB BD-ROM disk costs less than £1 — but you need a disciplined approach to creating and storing them. Disks resist electrical and magnetic interference, but are prone to mechanical damage and should be handled with care.
Tape-based storage might seem archaic, but many IT professionals swear by it for large amounts of data: even Amazon’s Glacier cloud storage service reportedly uses tapes for long-term backup. Tape cartridges are reasonably cheap and robust, but can be complex and slow to backup to and restore from. Whatever medium you use, backups should regularly be taken to a safe off-site location.
Online backup
The next step is online backup, where your data is backed up to a service provider’s remote servers. Your documents are regularly synchronised, and most services use incremental backup or ‘deduplication’ (eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data) to reduce the amount of data sent.
Online backup is different from ‘cloud computing’: data is still primarily stored on your local system and only copied to the online service at the scheduled time, meaning you do not need a constant internet connection.
Some backup services offer a limited service for free, but this is usually only useful for a single PC.
Most charge a fixed monthly or annual cost — a sophisticated service such as SecurStore costs from £49 a month for 10GB of data — but some charge extra for data transfer.
Data security is a concern: backup providers should comply with standards such as ISO/IEC 27002. The ultimate level of security is a ‘zero knowledge’ strong encryption system, where all your data is encrypted and only you have the key — the vendor itself cannot access your data. However, your own security policies must be sound, and you must keep your password safe.
Ensure the service works with your applications and that restoring data is easy. And check where data is stored: some organisations (local authorities, for instance) will not permit their data to be kept outside the EU.
Whichever solution you choose, test it – backup is no good without recovery, so check that you can genuinely restore your data or systems in a realistic length of time. The human factor is vital, so this is a good opportunity to ensure that staff have the training, permissions and passwords they need.
There are plenty of useful products out there, so successful data and system backup is mainly a question of common sense: try to avoid foreseeable disasters, and have a system in place for the unforeseeable ones. n
RAYBURN TRADING AND OPTRAK
Rayburn Trading is a toiletries, cosmetics and household goods wholesaler that has decided to use Optrak’s routeing and scheduling software with the Swords wholesale distribution software package from Sanderson Multi Channel Solutions.
Rayburn makes daily deliveries of branded and non-branded items across the UK, all planned from its Manchester depot.
Operations manager Martin Copeland says: “Rayburn’s delivery fleet covers a large geographic area and we wanted to make sure we were operating a lean and agile transport operation. It is vital that we deliver the highest standards of service for our customers while minimising transport costs.
“We saw a presentation from a Swords user at Sanderson’s wholesale customer forum earlier this year, and we were greatly impressed with how the two systems work together.”