8 Top Tips for Business Backup

Top backup tips for the home
Top backup tips for the business

 

Tip 1 – Online backup
Online backup is now so cheap that every business should have it at least one form or another. www.carbonite.com is great for SOHO’s or coupled with a secondary form of backup. For more advanced backup such as databases and servers then drop us a line for what we can do, but with prices starting from just £1 per GB per month, it’s so cheap that even if you just backup your financial data it’s worth it.

Tip 2 – Segment your data
If you have less than 50GB of data then you can ignore this step, but most businesses have more. The first step to any decent backup regime is to work out what data you have and how often it needs to be backed up.
For example you could have the following data sets on our server

• Main data – this would be you main working set of data updated many times a day by many members of staff. It could contain financial data, HR, working projects and recent pitches.
• Recent Archive – this would be recent projects that are closed, but still accessed frequently. It would generally be read only.
• Old Archive – this would be projects closed that you no longer need access to. The files are read only and are not updated
• Scratch – these are generally freely available assets, they may include stock images, or installers from programs downloaded, or just a temporary place to store stuff. 

Each of these have a widely different backup need, if you segment your data based on its minimum need then you’ll start a foundation for a manageable backup set. We’ve seen the amount of businesses need to segment their data increase by over 4 fold in the last few years; the stuff that companies want to store in increasing quicker than the amount of space afforded by backup.

We have clients now with 5 different types of data, some the backup is handled by rolling archives and some by continuous data protection; just make sure you’re not paying to backup the latest FireFox installer.

Even if all your data will fit happily on one tape then it’s still worth segmenting it to make disaster recovery and business continuity easier to manage. Just separating your data into 2 will stop you getting a call from us when your new member of staff copies their iTunes music to the main company drive.

Tip 3 – Get more than one form of backup
If you’re backing up to anything other than hard drive invest in a desktop external hard drive. It’ll cost less than £100, and if generally the quickest form of data recovery.

At some stage all forms of backup will fail, with just one form of backup you’re just hoping that there isn’t a duel failure. It’s not just the times that backup fails you need to worry either, pretty much every single program can report a success when in fact the data isn’t recoverable. Media can fail on restore as well; there is nothing worse than the sound of a tape drive chewing up your recovery tape.

Whatever your system of how you work, there will be many different ways you can backup your data so don’t rely on just one.

Tip 4 – Do a test restore
Even with two forms of backup, you need to do a test restore of your data. Even 100 backup devices can’t get around user error of selecting the wrong files for backup or putting files in the wrong location. Make sure that the system you’re relying on is up to your reliance. Even with a secondary backup, this may not be as recent as you need, don’t have your week ruined by the ‘restore failed’ message.
 
Tip 5 – Don’t ignore errors
If you’re monitoring your backup yourself, don’t ignore error messages they are more than likely trying to tell you that there is an error :)

Tip 6 – Get redundancy
Technically not a backup, redundancy is essentially having additional components sitting in your server (or computer) just waiting for one to fail so it can seamlessly kick in. The most common form is hard drive redundancy RAID, and means that you have one or more drives creating additional copies of the data in the computer.

If one fails the server will alert you and all you have to do is swap the drive before another fails and users won’t even know there is a problem.

A word of warning we have seen duel failures this year, so don’t sit pretty thinking your RAID is enough. It’s a must have to ensure data is available to users should something fail, but cannot replace backup. It also won’t help at all with the most common form of data loss; user error.

Tip 7 – Get Windows Server
Very possibly the best feature of Windows Server is Volume Shadow Copy Service. This service sits on your server and checks for files changes (by default twice a day), and then makes a copy of the file changes or deletions. If the user then deletes a file or overwrites the file by mistake they can (by just right clicking on the folder) navigate back in time through the file location to see previous versions of the document thus recovering the lost work.

It is the single biggest technology we use for data recovery accounting for in excess of 90% of recovers and this doesn’t even include the users who recover the data themselves.

Tip 8 – Use the cloud
Increasingly businesses need more flexible access to their data; they want their contacts and calendars on their phones; they want access to their data while on holiday, and they want file version control.

‘The cloud’ is essentially the internet but with more functionality; online backup could be considered a basic use of ‘the cloud’. It is though, so much more than that, with new web apps emerging weekly, there is a whole host of functionality you can leverage and undertake backup at the same time.

Hosted services – Lucidica offer enterprise class hosted Exchange. Rather than worrying about running your email server internally you can outsource it all to us, we’ll take care of backup and all the support of the server platform. You still get the benefit of shared contacts, calendars and email, without the hassle of having a server in the corner of your office. We’ll even go beyond this though and if you need your server, then we can mirror your server onto ‘the cloud’. This way if your server dies you staff can carry on working, when your server comes back online all data just synchronises. We can even setup so remote offices pull data from our server rather than yours reducing the strain on your internet connection.

File Sync – Nearly every business in the world has remote workers or workers that want to work remotely occasionally. Giving them reliable access to the company data has always been difficult, in the small business space it’s often been beyond budget. Services like www.dropbox.com offer a great way to share data between a disparate team and at the same time offer backup. You can click save in London and your business partner can open the updated document a few seconds later in Australia. It’s nice, easy and creates 3 copies of data in the process plus creates versions as well.

Online Business Collaboration – There are many different platforms to store your data online, www.huddle.net, www.basecamphq.com, and SharePoint are amongst the best of the best. They allow sharing of data across teams (and clients), full collaboration through blogs, wiki’s, forums, and discussion boards. They have calendars, contact lists and Gant charts. Often they’ll sync data with your local machine so you don’t even have to go outside Microsoft Office. Best of all from a backup prospective, it’s someone else’s problem.       

Be careful though; ‘the cloud’ can be a double edged sword, you can never truly ‘not worry’ about backup. If you’re using something you can’t touch, feel and restore the raw data of then it would be unwise to rest the future of your business in it. Huddle, BaseCamp et al are great, but what would happen to your business if they just weren’t there tomorrow? Or if they doubled their price point? You can try and dismiss these thoughts as folly, but if giants like Lehman Brothers can fall, so can anyone. Just make sure they don’t take your business with them.