Why Backup? Examining the Basics of Backup and Planning a Basic Strategy Before Disaster Strikes

By Guest Blogger, Gary Parker
If someone asked you “Did you backup today?”, your reaction might
include:

Getting a little personal, aren’t you?
No problem – the reverse in my car’s transmission works fine.
I’m macho, dude – I don’t back up or down for nobody!
Do you mean my computer system?
Well, I’ve been meaning to get around to it, but I don’t really
want to think about it.

Let’s discuss why and how you should backup your computer systems.
Why? First, we tend to treat computers like the electric utility, our bank
or our car – we expect them to be there and available whenever we need
them. Our computers are the same and they resemble our bank because they maintain
very valuable or needed information. On a personal level they may have our tax
returns, our budgets and financial data and important letters plus files that
we like such as songs or movies. Our business computers are even more critical.
They will usually contain extremely important information like payrolls, general
ledgers, accounts receivable, contracts, customer lists, calendars that could
actually cause us to go out of business if we lost them.
So, what types of losses could occur? There are basically three types of losses
that we are concerned about.
First is the “O fiddlesticks!” event. This is when we do things
like making a serious mistake and then saving the file so that it is permanently
set with the incorrect information. This is so named because you end saying
“O Fiddlesticks” or maybe even words that are a bit more graphic.
The second is that something happens to your computer. The most common problem
is that the hard drive, which is where the information is actually stored, stops
working. You will hear that referred to as a disk crash. This means that the
computer cannot get to the disk drive to run its programs or access your information,
so it can’t do any work.
The third type of problem is that a major misfortune occurs such as your home
or office burns down or there is a regional disaster such as an earthquake or
flood that affects your area.
Each of these requires a different type of protection and planning.
In the first case in which you made a mistake, your information became corrupted,
so backups don’t actually do any good. They will simply be backups of
bad information. In order to be prepared for that, you will need software that
can remember several versions of your documents. If after hours of work, you
finished the only copy of notes from your meeting with your boss at 10:00 in
preparation for an 11:00 review and then made a mistake at 10:15 which ruined
everything, you normally would have a serious problem. However, this type of
software keeps copies of older versions, so you simply go back to recover the
10:15 version. You will hear the computer geeks call this CDP, which stands
for Continuous Data Protection.
In the second example, the hard drive on your local computer broke right after
your hours of work. The computer itself is dumb and does not know anything if
the disk drive is not feeling good. In order to retrieve valuable data such
as your Romanian Tossed Salad recipe, you will want software that keeps your
key information on a tape drive that is connected to your computer. Then, when
the problem occurs, you will need to repair your computer, buy a new one or
see if cousin Freddie still has that left over machine in his closet. You will
need to reinstall the software that allows the computer to do work you need
such as writing letters or balancing checks. When that software has been re-installed,
you load the data from the backup tape that had been attached to the original
machine. That is a bit of work, but is far less effort than having to re-create
every thing you lost. Your computer friends will call this direct attached storage
backup.
The third example is a bit like the first, but with one major difference. In
this case, the whole house or office was destroyed, which meant that you not
only lost your computer, but that little tape drive with all the backed up data
is now a piece of burnt or soggy toast. You now have bigger problems than just
the lost data, so you need a plan on how you will recover your business and
personal life. Once you use that preparation to work through the slight problem
of having no house or office, then you will need to replace your computer, reinstall
your software and recover your data. However, in this case you will need to
have stored the information remotely in a location that would not be affected.