You’re Not Backing Up Properly Unless You Have Offsite Backups

You’re Not Backing Up Properly Unless You Have Offsite Backups

Your backups in your home or office could be prey to flood, fire, electrical surge, or theft. A belt-and-suspenders way to protect your files is to do backups on premises and also have offsite backups. The cost and trouble you should spend depends on the value of your files.

The Library of Congress http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/records.html recommends the following:

Make copies and manage them in different places

• Make at least two copies of your selected documents—more copies are better.
• One copy can stay on your computer or laptop; put other copies on separate media such as DVDs, CDs, portable hard drives, thumb drives or Internet storage.
• Store copies in different locations that are as physically far apart as practical. If disaster strikes one location, your important documents in the other place should be safe.
• Put a copy of the summary description with your important papers in a secure location.
• Check your document files at least once a year to make sure you can read them.
• Create new media copies every five years or when necessary to avoid data loss.

Yup, a failed external drive which would cost $3000 to ATTEMPT to retrieve the data with no guarantee taught me that. However, I found it extremely difficult to find a decent offsite provider that would also back up Network Attached Storage (NAS). Finally found and went with LiveDrive for peace of mind.

Tom_Reingold said:
You’re Not Backing Up Properly Unless You Have Offsite Backups
Your backups in your home or office could be prey to flood, fire, electrical surge, or theft. A belt-and-suspenders way to protect your files is to do backups on premises and also have offsite backups. The cost and trouble you should spend depends on the value of your files.

What do you do with installation disks? I've always backed up my stuff. But don't you have to make an actual disk for back-up in case you need to re-install on another machine?

And then you have to test everything to make sure it works. I know someone who has managed his own networks as well as others. He keeps at least 3 working backups as well as archives. Plus he would test the system by causing a simulating a failure to see if everything worked.

These steps are not easy for your average user or even a business owner like myself.

fabulouswalls said:
What do you do with installation disks? I've always backed up my stuff. But don't you have to make an actual disk for back-up in case you need to re-install on another machine?
And then you have to test everything to make sure it works. I know someone who has managed his own networks as well as others. He keeps at least 3 working backups as well as archives. Plus he would test the system by causing a simulating a failure to see if everything worked.
These steps are not easy for your average user or even a business owner like myself.

Software fortunately doesn't really come on disks anymore. Most software that you'd have is downloaded these days and you'd keep a copy on your server which should be backed up. Even stuff that you need on disk like an operating system is easily backed up - and they tend to come on USB a lot now anyway.

You do need to know what your restore plan is. It will vary depending on exactly what you're backing up and how you're doing it. For the most part though, not having the disks/software you need will just slow you down. You'll lose some time, but that's entirely different from losing data. It's a pretty safe bet that you can find whatever version of Windows you'd need for a reinstall within a few hours with a little networking.

If time is truly of the essence (meaning it's worth money) then you'll have more invested in your IT procedures and systems to minimize downtime. For most small businesses time isn't truly of the essence, so they tend to not invest a lot in avoiding downtime and only go for the cheapest most basic level of redundancy.

I use Dashlane for offsite backup, but I have to admit I don't have the faintest idea how to restore. This is a good reminder to figure it out before an emergency.

qrysdonnell said:

If time is truly of the essence (meaning it's worth money) then you'll have more invested in your IT procedures and systems to minimize downtime. For most small businesses time isn't truly of the essence, so they tend to not invest a lot in avoiding downtime and only go for the cheapest most basic level of redundancy.

This is more like it. I am the IT department so if the system goes down I am spending the time to get it restored. And even with the proper backups it will take a day or so to do.

fabulouswalls said:

qrysdonnell said:

If time is truly of the essence (meaning it's worth money) then you'll have more invested in your IT procedures and systems to minimize downtime. For most small businesses time isn't truly of the essence, so they tend to not invest a lot in avoiding downtime and only go for the cheapest most basic level of redundancy.

This is more like it. I am the IT department so if the system goes down I am spending the time to get it restored. And even with the proper backups it will take a day or so to do.

A day or so really isn't that bad. While it doesn't 'feel' like it, most businesses can go a short time without operating with essentially no effect. A lot of 'real' failures can easily take about 48 hours to rectify as you may need to allow a day to get the hardware repaired before you can actually perform restores (this is why redundancy is the first step to resilience). And if we're looking at what I'd call a 'true disaster' where the place of business doesn't really exist anymore then it's obviously even longer, but in most cases you'll probably have something in existence within a week or so. Also, most IT standards practices are pretty uptight, so when something goes awry there's usually a lot of leeway for some temporary 'worst practices' to get things moving again.

All of this adds up to why many 'cloud services' are attractive. For instance, I have my office on Google Apps so we use Gmail for email. Running a simple mail server in house is easy. Running something resilient is much more difficult and much more expensive. Especially is you want to come anywhere close to approaching the resiliency of Gmail. Even with cloud services you still need to know what you're doing with regard to data protection (backup, versioning, resiliency, etc.) but I don't have to worry about anything hardware related with email, which simplifies a lot of things.

I back-up properly with my right hand on the back of the passenger seat as I look out the back window and to the left and right for potential hazards.

Schedule periodic "fire drills" for practice with restoring. Pick a random file that you have on your computer. Pretend you lost it. Retrieve it from your backups. I recommend doing this every three to six months. Maybe it should include an entire folder or collection or your entire hard drive. Put the fire drills on your calendar, and DO THEM!

Installation disks are not only becoming rarer, they are becoming uselesser (to coin a word) since they go out of date quickly. It may be a good idea to keep what you have, but when your system needs a reinstallation, try downloading before resorting to your installation disks. It will probably be less work and easier.