Making Backups

All About Backing Up

Overview

As we become more and more computerized, we increase our risk of data loss. The current trend toward increased networking, which centralizes more data onto fewer computers, often aggravates this trend. Finally, the computers themselves, are increasingly sold as commodity items on the mass market. Though many electronic components like hard drives are becoming increasingly reliable, other components like power supplies, and cooling fans tend to be of lower quality and reliability. As systems integrate more and more circuits into smaller and smaller spaces, they are increasingly susceptible to fluctuations in power which can destroy your data.

The Theory

Computers are physical devices that will break down. Hard drives rotate over 5,000 times per minute and will crash, it's just a matter of time. Software can also screw-up causing systems to crash, losing important data. Finally, Windows tends to simply blow up on occasion out of spite. If you had the only computer in the world that didn't fail because of either hardware problems, or bad software, then expect a fire or theft. Thus, it is essential to make copies of your important data and store those copies outside your system. Preferably, off site to thwart theft. Remember, backups made onto your own hard drive offer protection equivalent to the fire extinguisher you've been meaning to purchase.

You need two kinds of backups:

Short Term backups: The less you've done since the backup you use to recover your data, the more data you will recover. For this reason, you want to backup frequently.
Medium Term Backups: Sometimes database and accounting programs screw up their own data, but continue to operate. The problems aren't seen until a particular report is run, or you want to send out bills. Restoring from a backup won't help if the backup itself was a backup of messed up data. Therefore, it is important to have both current data backed up and also to have older backups in case you are backing up messed data. I recommend having at least 5 backups which go back over 5 weeks.

Automatic Tape drive backups

If you work for a company with a network, you are probably being told that a backup is being run every night when no one is looking. Someone then pulls a tape each morning and sticks in another one. This is often a good system, but the problems with it are:

About one third of the time, nothing is happening at all! No backup is really being made.
When you need to restore, the person who knows how to run the tape is NEVER around. This is an absolute physical law, like cat's always falling on their feet, or buttered toast always falling butter side down. (What happens if you tie buttered toast on a cat's back and drop it, perpetual motion?)
Often the wrong stuff gets backed up.
Tape drives often fail. You really need to spend over $1,000 to get a truly reliable one.

To resolve these problems, I recommend:

If you don't need the backup to be automatic, do it manually. Start it before lunch and see that it's working. Sometimes this is not a viable option.
Check the report produced by the backup program recording all the errors that occurred when it checked the accuracy of it's own backup. If a report isn't being produced, find another backup program or computer consultant.
Backup your accounting program data, database or billing program separately, using the procedures available from the program itself. This will give you an easy way to restore and add another level of protection in addition to the system wide backup.
At least once, test the restore procedure on a few files to make sure that it works. You can copy them to another directory, select a few files to restore, and compare the files restored with your copy.

It is absolutely necessary to have firm backup procedures. If there are more than two people in an office the procedures should be written. You will need your backups. The question is not if but when. It is a good idea to use off site storage for some of your backups.

I strongly recommend zip drives or CD/RW drives for quick local station backups to be used in addition to the system wide tape backups.

I also recommend separating your data from your program and storing it separately. By moving all or most of your data to subdirectories of a data directory, you will be able to complete a data backup quickly and easily.

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