Data Loss and your business (Part 1 of 2)

Running your business without a backup is a like driving without a seatbelt. There’s a chance that nothing will happen… but the odds are stacked against you, and if something does happen you had better hope you aren’t on the interstate. Now comes the horrible crash statistics for those risk takers:

• Companies that experience major outage for more than 10 days will never recover, and 50% of those will be out of business within 5 years.
• 70% of small business that experience data loss will close within a year.
• Even though 85% of computer users think they need to have their data backed up only 25% of them actually do.

That’s a pretty sad statistic considering the numbers above. It’s an easy problem to solve and one I can’t say enough… backup and verify. Backups are needed for two different categories of disaster. Natural disaster (hurricanes, lightning, fire, etc…) is the first and the one that we have no control over, yet pretty easy to solve. Human error or mechanical failures (accidental deletion, server crash, hard drive failure, etc…) are most common and the one we have complete control over.

To solve these issues you have 3 choices that are affordable for small business owners. As cool as it would be to have a tape library, SAN (not a NAS), or nested RAID array these usually aren’t very cost effective…but they are cool. Any solutions should at least eliminate the mechanical failure right off the bat. This is why I won’t recommend backing up to another hard drive as a viable solution. Hard drives fail, and will always fail, it’s just a matter of time till they do.

1) Tape Backup
2) Online Backup
3) Flash Drive Backup

Tape backup is arguably the most reliable (mostly because of human error), and should be used for large amounts of data that online solutions aren’t made for…yet. When I say large amounts of data I mean 100GB of data or more with a high rate of change. Flash drives don’t work well because drives this large are too expensive, and the online solutions need a special appliance to only backup the delta’s (changes). That much data with a high rate of change will require too much bandwidth and time to backup or restore.

Tapes are slow to backup, slow to restore, and are prone to human error (I forgot to switch the tape). They do offer one thing that a lot of people like, and that’s security. They like the idea of the data being on their server then being backed up to a tape that they take home, or anywhere out of the office. This physical thing gives them a comfort level that if they have to get out of dodge tomorrow all there life’s work is safe with them.

The initial cost for the drive, at least a week’s worth of tapes (preferably - two weeks + two month end + year end), and software can average around $2,500 per server. It also requires a yearly investment in new tapes, and at around $100 per tape this can be expensive. To understand why you need to replace tapes yearly think about your old cassette recorder (I won’t warrant that with a link). If you recorded music on the same tape every week for a full year you wouldn’t have the same quality music as you did at the beginning. The same goes for backup tapes, they are recording each time you use them and over time the quality of the data on the tapes degrade which results in corrupt unusable data. This can be easily mitigated by doing monthly test restores of your data to ensure integrity.

A lot of people think tapes are archaic, and will soon go the way of cassettes. While this may be true they are a great backup solution for large amounts of data, and will always be a great way to archive older data.