How to Avoid Backup Mistakes

You know, backing up your computers is a bit like home insurance. It’s easy to ignore it while everything is

going just fine, and even easier to get complacent. But when something goes WRONG, you find yourself

scrambling for your policy! And if you’re not covered in the “fine print”, you could lose the lot!

With your computer networks, the risks are just as great. You could lose the lot, jeopardise your business, and

find it almost impossible to recover from. But happily this needn’t be the case. This report is intended to alert

you to the main risks, and to give you some insights into how to protect your computers, your business… AND

yourself.

A comparison of backup devices and their approximate costs, is available via our website.

First, some sobering Statistics which will SHOCK you!

* 93% of companies that lost their data centre for ten days or more as a result of a disaster filed for

bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data

management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.

* 30% of companies report that they still do not have a disaster recovery program in place and two in three

companies feel that their data backup and disaster recovery plans have significant vulnerabilities.

Furthermore, only 59% of companies polled test their data backup and storage systems at least once a

quarter. Conducting a regular external audit of backup and restore systems is far from a common practice –

only 32% report conducting an external audit.

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* At what point is the survival of our company at risk? 40% said 72 hours, 21% said 48 hours, 15% said 24

hours, 8% said 8 hours, 9% said 4 hours, 3% said 1 hour, 4% said within the hour.

* 30% of all businesses that have a major fire go out of business within a year. 70% fail within five years. *

Gartner estimates that only 35 percent of (Small & Medium Businesses) SMBs have a comprehensive disaster

recovery plan in place.

* According to a recent NFIB National Small Business Poll (USA), man-made disasters affect 10% of small

businesses, whereas natural disasters have impacted more than 30% of all small businesses in the USA.

Hurricanes are by far the most destructive force causing power failure, flooding, customer loss, and the

closure of many businesses.

* According to a recent Touche Ross study, the survival rate for companies without a disaster recovery plan is

less than 10%!

Symantec® survey reveals:

Despite Warnings, SMBs Still Not Prepared

* 52 percent of SMBs do not have a disaster preparedness plan.

* 65 percent of SMBs were in regions prone to natural disasters.

* SMB’s went through an average of five outages last year. SMB’s Don’t Act Until After A Disaster

* 49 percent of SMBs implemented a disaster preparedness plan due to a previous outage or data loss.

* 54 percent implemented their plans in the last six months. Lack Of Preparedness Impacts The Business

* Since downtime equates to a median loss of US$14,500 a day, prolonged downtime could shut down an

SMB.

* SMB outages cost their customers US$45,000 a day with 24 percent saying they lost data due to disaster

affecting their vendors.

So now you can see why it is CRITICAL to your business to independently evaluate your current backup

solution. Potential consequences of getting it wrong, are that you lose Money, Customers, Your Job, or

even Your Business if a disaster happened and you couldn’t get the data back quickly. It could be

DEVASTATING! But it doesn’t need to be such a risk….

Mistake #1: Not backing up everything We recommend that your backup system be capable of, and

configured to backup everything. Too often, we hear of clients who need to restore a piece of information

from their backups, only to find that it is not contained on the backups. Some people only backup the data

from their main accounting system for example, and not their other important data such as Word and Excel

documents. Your backup device or service must be large enough to fit all of the data from your computer or

servers. This means that when you are upgrading the hard disk capacity of your system, you need to confirm

that your backup device or service is still appropriate! There are a range of solutions that can be used for this

purpose – an outline of these is included at the end of this article. It’s also best if you have backup software

that automatically runs the backups at a time when nobody is using your system so that all of the data is

available to be backed up. Many of these software packages include functions to provide confirmation that

the backup has completed in the form of an email which is also highly recommended. If you have a server

computer, then you may think that backing up the information on the server is enough. What you also need to

consider is that there may be data stored on individual computers too and also on smartphones and tablet

computers!

Mistake #2: Not backing up Email data With the greater reliance on email, we are receiving more requests to

restore emails. In our experience most people do not backup emails at all. These are often the only record of

communication where in the past there may have been a series of letters and or faxes. If you have your own

email server in-house, you may need to install an additional backup program or agent in order to properly

process the email information. Many clients use Microsoft Exchange, which often requires a backup agent for

your backup software so that it can properly backup the email data. Even if you have the right agent for your

mail server installed, there can also be limitations on how you can restore the mail data. This has to do with

the design of the email and backup software. It may be the case that the entire mail database must be

restored in order to get back a single email. Of course this can increase the time and inconvenience associated

with performing a restore. Similarly, if emails have been archived by the auto-archive feature in Outlook then

they are probably stored on your workstations hard disk instead of your server (and therefore are probably

not being backed up!) If you don’t have your own mail server, then your computer is probably storing the

emails on your local hard disk drive rather than the hard disk of your server. Files on local hard disk drives are

not usually backed up. Your email software should be configured to place these files on the server where they

will be automatically backed up. Another issue with email backups is that emails which are received and

deleted on the same day may not be able to be restored if your backups take place only in the evening,

meaning that the email must have existed in your mailbox for at least one night to have had an opportunity to

be backed up. This same limitation applies to all of the data on your system if you are only doing nightly

backups.

Mistake #3: Insufficient “depth” of backups Most people don’t have the resources to keep backups forever.

If backing up locally to disk or tape, then you will need to overwrite older backups unless you are happy to

keep buying more disks or tapes. If you are backing up to an online service, then there is usually a limit to the

amount of storage that you can use too. This means that there will be a limit to how far back you will be able

to restore. A common backup system is to keep 5 backups, one for each day of the week. This means that if a

file were accidentally deleted or corrupted, and you didn’t discover this for longer than a week, then you will

not be able to restore it from backup, because all the backups that contained a “good” version of the file

would have been overwritten. We suggest that you keep a number of weekly or monthly backups to provide

protection against this. Free and entry level online backup services are often worse and may only keep 1

version of files. If using a backup service it’s important to understand their depth of backups (often referred to

as retention policy) when you start out rather than finding out too late that their system is unsuitable for you.

Mistake #4: Not backing up frequently enough How often you backup (along with the depth of backups you

keep) determines the choices that you have when it comes time to restore and will vary depending on your

requirements and your budget. It is possible to backup as often as every 15 minutes, or as little as daily or

weekly. Why doesn’t everyone backup every 15 minutes then?

* Because the more often you backup, the more space your backups consume (therefore you need to buy

more disks, tapes, or offsite storage)

* Backing up can reduce the performance of your system while the backup is taking place

* Time taken to complete a backup. If your backups run for longer than 15 minutes (some can take several

hours to complete) then this too will limit how frequently you can backup

* Some systems are unable to be backed up while they are being used. Depending on your backup software, it

may not be able to backup data that you are working on or you may be “locked out” of some parts of your

system while the backups take place.

Mistake #5: Not keeping some backups offsite One of the reasons for doing backups is to protect against

disasters such as fire or theft. So it is important that some of the backups be kept offsite to ensure that all of

your backups are not destroyed or stolen along with your system. This is one of the reasons why using offsite

backups services is appealing as your data is kept offsite. Where this can be a problem is that the speed of

backups can be too slow to enable you to backup everything (see point #1 above!) and in the event that you

need to restore, it can take a long time to restore

Mistake #6: Files not backed up because they were open In general, your data can’t be backed up while it is

being used. For example if you have an important Microsoft Word document that you are working on and you

leave this document open overnight, some backup software will not be able to back it up. This is more serious

if someone remains inside your accounting system which can often mean that the entire accounting system is

not backed up. This is becoming less of an issue as many current generation backup programs now have the

ability to backup open files. You should check that yours is able to!

Mistake #7: Incorrect restores If you find yourself in a situation where you need to restore, proceed carefully!

We have seen occasions where a client has set out to restore a small amount of data for a two week old

backup but instead has restored their entire system. This can be disastrous. Usually your backup software will

provide the option to restore files to a different location. This option should almost always be selected. Once

restored, you then copy the files across to their original location. It’s also important when restoring from

physical media such as tape or disk to make sure that you write-protect the backup media (or to suspend

online backups if you are restoring an old backup and it is likely to soon be overwritten) before you start. This

is to protect against your system automatically doing a new backup over the top of the backup that you want

to restore!

Mistake #8: Backups are not checked Successful backups depend on the correct operation of your backup

software and hardware. Over time problems can develop that might stop your system from backing up.

Unless you check your backups regularly you might not be aware of that there is a problem. For example, tape

drives can develop a hardware fault which prevents them from backing up, but does not prevent them from

loading and unloading tapes correctly. Windows updates or installation of new software, that you would think

is unrelated to backups can also “break” your backup software as an unexpected side-effect. So it is important

to be looking deeper at what it going on with your backups to be sure that you will be able to restore should

you need to.

Mistake #9: Poor labelling/recording of backups When you find yourself in a situation where you need to

restore a file to how it was last Wednesday, you don’t want to waste a lot of time trying to figure out which

backup is required. Investing a small amount of time to appropriately understand your backups and how they

are rotated/overwritten can save a lot of time and anxiousness when you need to restore. Where media like

removable disks or tapes are used labelling them clearly and keeping a manual log of which media was

rotated on which day (and if the backup was successful) is recommended. For online backups, making sure

that you understand how to review backup logs and to select an individual file from a particular backup (you

will sometimes want to restore an older version of a file, not the most recent backup of it and this can be

difficult or in some cases impossible to restore an earlier version of it.)

And a Bonus: Mistake #10: Bad folder structure Keeping your data in a logical, tree-like folder or directory

structure will make it easier to find the information you are looking for. This is just as important when it comes

time to restore information. Most times people want to restore just a few files, and you need to be able to

locate these files in the backup software before you can select them for restore. Having a logical, and not

overly complex directory structure makes this easier. Many servers also allow you to set permissions on

folders and files. Without making this too complex, it is also be a good idea to set appropriate permissions at

the folder level so that the number of people that can access and modify your data is just those that need to.

Considering these Mistakes, you now need to fix the problems and implement a Backup Solution which

works best for your business. By selecting the right Backup Technology, you’re ALMOST done.

What are the most important features when choosing the best Backup Software?

Automatic Scheduling of backups Advanced backup software is capable of automatically scheduling the

backups. No doubt you have lots of other responsibilities and things to think about! So backups, a bit like

insurance, are not going to be at the front of your mind until there is a problem! Save yourself the worry and

make sure that you implement a solution that automatically launches the backups.

Full System backups If your full system is not being backed up then chance are some important information

is being missed. Modern computer systems create and use tens or hundreds of thousands of files and even to

IT experts it’s hard to be sure that you are selecting all of the important information. This is why we feel that

it’s important to backup all of the data on your system.

Backups of Open Files If you or somebody else is in your accounting system or editing a Word or Excel

document you don’t want it to not be backed up. Ironically this is probably what you most want to be backed

up so make sure that your software is smart enough to deal with open files!

Backups of Databases Again, not all backup software handles databases like Microsoft Exchange and SQL

Server correctly. Some software requires that you purchase additional modules and/or to configure backups

in a certain way to be able to successfully restore them. Other databases, such as Oracle for example, are not

supported at all by some of the major backup software packages and you may find that even a backup that

you software labels “successful” will not get you all of your data back!

Monitoring & Alerting Probably the most important feature, yet one that is very often neglected. Even if your

backup system is fully tested and working today something could change in the future such as a (and sadly we

have seen all of these!)

* Backup hardware failure

* Backup software failure due to compatibility issue with a Windows or other software update

* Backup software failure due to changing a user or administrator password or other permissions

* Backup software failure due to a bug in the software that is not immediately triggered! Most or all of these

problems will be detected early if you have the appropriate backup monitoring and alerts in place. You can

monitor backups yourself, locally, or you can enlist professionals to monitor your backups remotely.

Disaster Recovery When the unthinkable happens, your choice of backup software and the selections that

were made in setting up the software can have a huge impact on what happens in a disaster. Before disaster

strikes you should be thinking about:

* How long you can get by without access to your IT systems?

* How long will it take to restore your whole system in the best case?

* Which systems features are most urgent?

* What hardware/software you need to recover your systems?

* Do you need to restore to identical hardware? (for MOST software and/or configurations you do!) This means

you need to have spare, identical servers on standby.

Email Archiving Is really a separate topic, but one that is increasing in importance. Even if everything is setup

correctly to do full backups of your email, restoring them can be complex and costly and yet may not recover

all of the information that you need if the email was sent and deleted between backups, or was deleted some

time ago. With many backup scenarios you can’t see the individual emails contained in a backup until you

restore it and so you may have to complete multiple costly and time consuming “restore cycles” to retrieve

the emails you need. Or even worse you might not find them! A dedicated email archiving solution is the

answer here. And of course you will still need to backup your email archive as well!

HOWEVER, that’s not the end of the story. Great software TOOLS will only solve PART OF THE PROBLEM.

You also need the right ADVICE, PLANNING, TESTING and SUPPORT to get the best results with any

backup solution.

For many businesses, there is a real risk of a Disaster. An event which can be caused by Mother Nature (such as

flooding and Cyclones or Hurricanes), or a Power problem, a Fire, a Virus or Malware, or any other unforseen

potential problem which could render your computers inoperable.

Now I have shown you what the problems are and what to look for in a potential backup solution. The rest is

up to you.

To help you evaluate your current backup solution, start by Answering these Questions. This 12-point

checklist may help you to pinpoint problems with your backups!

Is everything on your system being backed up?

Who checks that the backups worked and how often do they check?

Do your backups run automatically?

Is there a WRITTEN backup log showing who checked the backups (and for backups to disk or tape also

showing which disk or tape was used?)

When did you last restore from a backup?

Have you ever done a full restore of your system?

How many copies of your backups do you have?

Are some of these backups kept offsite?

Are the offsite backups stored securely?

How is the security of the offsite backups protected?

How far back can you restore your accounting system?

Can you recover an email that was deleted last month?

How did you go with Questions? Are you confident your business will be safe if an unforeseen event

occurred?

If you couldn’t answer all the questions above, or if your answers left you realizing that you are unprepared, or

lack the required knowledge to protect your business data, don’t despair. You fit into the same category as

most businesses! Find yourself a professional partner with expertise in Backup and Disaster Recovery.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this report is general in nature and does not take into account your

particular situation and requirements.

Steven Bakker is a recognized expert in IT Backup Solutions in Australia, specializing in Disaster Recover,

Business Continuity Planning and Backup/Restore Software and solutions. For the full report,

visit http://nas.com.au (http://www.nas.com.au/index.php/news-a-events/78.html)

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Steven_Bakker/1010046

(http://ezinearticles.com/expert/Steven_Bakker/1010046)

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6128057

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