Backups
There is a 3-2-1 rule for data that you deem to be important. There should be at least 3 copies of the data, on at least 2 different formats/mediums kept locally, and with at least 1 copy offsite. We architect our Backup solutions with that in mind.
Remember that a backup isn’t ‘real’ unless you’ve tested it to make sure you can recover our data from it.
Onsite
For smaller environments, a pair of rotated USB hard drives may be all you need to feel safe and secure about your data. In this scenario, we configure your server (or primary computer if you don’t have a server) to backup to the external drives. We then train you on how to safely rotate them. Every Monday you swap the current hard drive with the off-site one, and then take it home (or to your Safe Deposit Box). This now becomes your off-site backup.
In medium sized environments where Hyper-V is being used to host virtual servers, we like to recommend Altaro Backup which can backup to local storage (such as a NAS) as well as to off-site storage. Altaro Backup is free for up to two virtual machines being backed up.
For larger or more complicated environments we may suggest a product such as Veritas’ Backup Exec. Backup Exec runs on a server and utilizes agents to communicate with and backup other servers. Backups can be performed to Disk, to Tape, or to a Cloud service (or any combination thereof).
Offsite
There are essentially three ways of getting your data off-site: Manually, Automatically to a location you control, or Automatically to a location someone else controls (such as The Cloud).
For manual methods, you could either use external hard drives (USB, eSata, Firewire etc.), or you could use tapes. Tapes are falling a little out of favor because the per Gigabyte cost of hard drives has come down significantly. Tapes do have one significant advantage in that some of them have shelf lives of 30 years, and some of them can be configured as Write Once (meaning you can be comfortable that any data read back from the tape hasn’t been tampered with since it was written). Services such as Iron Mountain offer scheduled pickup and delivery of tapes (and hard drives) if you wish to have your backups stored in a more controlled environment than your home (or worse yet, the Office Manager’s car).
For the automatic methods, you’ll need to have an Internet connection that is capable of handling your data in a timely fashion. A 5 Mbit upload speed will let you transfer roughly 2 Gigabytes an hour, so a 100GB data set will take a little over two days to backup (and possibly recover).
Disaster Recovery
Every business should have a Disaster Recovery plan, and we can assist with the technology portion of that plan. At a high level this involves:
- Determining what systems and data are critical to the business.
- Identifying the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
- Designing a solution to meet those needs.
- Implement and testing that solution.
At a simple level, the RTO is the amount of time the business can tolerate being “down” and the RPO is how much data the business can afford to lose. To give some simple examples;
Business A determines that for their day to day operations, they can rely on pen and paper for a period of a week, but that they will really need to have access to their payroll provider before pay-day. Further, they determine that although it will be difficult, they can re-create the last weeks worth of work from alternate sources. In this situation, their RTO will likely be one week and their RPO will also be one week. One possible solution for the company would be to implement a simple backup of their data to a portable hard drive which is then taken off site every week. For resumption of the business following a disaster, they make the decision that any computer equipment can be purchased from a local retailer, or from a mail order retailer if they can arrange three day shipping. And access to the payroll provider… the owner has an iPad with cellular service and can pay her employees that way.
Business B is much more dependent on technology and determines that for every hour that their Line of Business application is unavailable they lose $10,000 . Due to the nature of this particular business, every hour of data they lose will have a similar cost. A solution with an RTO of one hour and an RPO of zero will be cost ineffective if it costs more than $10,000.