By Greg Michetti

IF YOUR COMPANY IS RELYING ON LUCK WHEN IT COMES TO ITS CORPORATE DATA, HERE ARE 3 BACKUP RULES THAT CAN SAVE YOU.

The company president has just walked into your office with the eyebrow-raising news that the sole hard drive in the Microsoft Exchange e-mail server has crashed and the only way to retrieve critical corporate data is from your tape backup.

Suddenly, you think about the scene in which Dirty Harry finally catches Scorpio. Harry, 44 Magnum in hand, looks at the bad guy, and asks:

“Do you feel lucky today?”

It’s normal to feel under the gun when it comes to data backups, especially if you know a Gartner Group study found nearly 50 per cent of backups saved to tape fail - meaning there is no backup data stored.

After all, tape backup is complicated, tricky, far more expensive than everybody claims and, even when it seems to work okay, few are really sure it is done right because no one ever checks.

But backup processes are changing. There are new hardware and software offerings, and offsite “e-backup” over the Web is quickly maturing. If anything, backup is becoming more important as new legislation like the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act means companies must retain e-mail for set periods of time.

Readiness range

Big Fortune 1000 companies generally have at least one person who looks after different levels of backup and system recovery. They have a formal disaster plan in place, keep backup tapes offsite in a secure fireproof location and even have backups of their backups. At the other end of the spectrum are personal users, small companies or home-based businesses.

Most companies are somewhere in between. They may have one or two servers, a double-digit number of workstations and, with luck, a one-person IT department.

Offsite tape backup rotation is handled by Holly in accounting - she keeps the tapes in the glove box of her car, except when she goes on holidays and Lindsay takes over. Naturally, the backup plan is not documented and exists only in the head of the company controller.

Translation: Sure you’ve been doing backups but it may be time to dust off your response plan and give the process the respect it deserves.

Three rules

Begin by remembering three important corporate data rules.

One: The backup plan you establish today will not be valid six months from now. In other words, things change: new servers, PCs and data locations are constantly added, upgraded or removed.

Two: There is no such thing as a single, failsafe, all-encompassing backup method - at least not yet. You must use a “layered” approach to back up, and that means more than one backup routine and more than one backup medium.

Three: Test your backups. The key to a good backup is not how fast it goes or how many gigabytes it can store, it’s all about data integrity and how quickly you can retrieve information. We’ve all heard horror stories about the company that goes to restore its data from tape only to discover it was never really backing up anything at all.

Tech options

There is mounting evidence to suggest that traditional tape doesn’t have quite the cost/benefit edge in backup it once had, and offsite and backup-to-disk schemes are becoming more reliable and cheaper.

“The capacity of tape these days isn’t very good,” said Bill Margeson, CEO of CBL Data Recovery Technologies. In other words, high-capacity tapes and large tape libraries are expensive. Meanwhile, the plummeting cost and increasing capacity of hard disk drives and inexpensive online backups is starting to attract interest.

“Typically, I have seen savings of 20 to 30 per cent over tape, with all the factors included such as per-seat software licensing and offsite storage of the tapes,” said Rowland Perkins, president and CEO of Calgary-based ebackup, a firm that specializes in offsite backup over the Internet.

“First and foremost it is fully automated, scheduled and secure. You are notified of success or failure and it will even tell you which file was not backed up and why.”

Perkins also said that with an online system there is no complicated backup program to learn, no hardware to maintain and no tapes to manage or store. You can also back up more often to minimize data loss between runs. And then there is peace of mind: somebody else is handling the system.

“With our Rapid Recovery Client software you can recover single files in 30 seconds. Installation is fast and easy and you pay for what you use,” Perkins said.

Cost for this service isn’t cheap, but neither is it out of line. Prices range from $24.95 a month for a SOHO with a laptop to a few thousand a month, depending on how many branches there are and how much data is covered.

So while you may not want to back up an entire 300GB of programs and data across a network, online systems could be used to cover really important files.

Or here’s another option, one which can run alone or in concert with another backup method: spend about $185 for a 250GB hard drive down at any superstore. Then, spend another $150 for the ADS Technologies Network Attached Storage (NAS) Drive Kit. The kit is a 5.25-inch drive enclosure that converts a 250GB hard drive into a networked storage device for instantly sharing data across a home or office network. All you do is slip the hard drive into the container, tighten the screws, connect it to your network and power it on. Run the supplied setup software and it becomes a shared device on your network with its own IP address.

No other user configuration or knowledge of IP addresses is required. An auto-discovery feature automatically adds the NAS device to all attached clients upon connection to the network. It also sports easy-to-read LED display status lights like Power, Network Activity and Drive Activity.

For less than $350 you have a backup unit that is much faster than a spare PC. And it fits easily on a desktop.

Option number three is to go with optical drives - such as backup to CDs or DVDs. An optical drive can be used with inexpensive burners and imaging software like Norton Ghost or Norton GoBack.

Personnel factor

Don’t forget that end users should be part of your backup strategy, too. Your company may want to implement a policy that any corporate data must be kept in its proper folder on a shared server, while personal data should be kept on users’ desktops or laptop PCs. But you need to convince employees that this is important; if they don’t follow the guidelines, the system fails.

End-user e-mail is becoming the leading item to be backed up, even ahead of corporate data or accounting information. If you use Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange Server, chances are you have Veritas or other third-party software that provides an add-in application to back this up.

However, if your company uses Microsoft’s Outlook 2000 or higher and POP3 e-mail that is housed somewhere else, download the Microsoft Outlook Backup tool (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads). It regularly prompts users to back up e-mail, calendar and contacts. It creates an Outlook backup file which, in turn, should be saved to a server where the nightly backup routine makes a second copy. In other words, users should be part of the backup process.

And there are even more options for backup. There are third-party offerings like Veritas or arrays of hard drives that act as a primary backup. Plus, expect future backup options from industry leaders. For example, the takeover of Veritas by Symantec could mean we will soon get backup and antivirus software in the same suite.

Finally, Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager 2006 is a product aimed at backing up server data.

The crucial thing to remember is backing up data is one thing, but the real question is how quickly can you pull the data off your backup media of choice.

So, let me ask you once again: Do you feel lucky today? Well, do ya?