Back up or die! - Page 3
So, now that we've looked at what can go wrong and what we can to survive an IT outage, what are the next steps?
Not all of what I detail on these pages will be relevant to everyone. What I shall attempt to do is to look at some of the ways that we can protect ourselves against what I am going to call... Business Loss. Why Business Loss? Well, we should be looking at IT failure as just that; a loss of trading ability, an opportunity for our competitors to beat us to new business or a chance to embarrass ourselves in front of current or potential clients.
Putting things into perspective.
If you are a Gardener and your lawnmower breaks down, gets stolen, bursts into flames or gets abducted by aliens - YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE BE TO CUT LAWNS!
Unless, or course, you have a spare lawnmower.
It's the same if your IT fails.
This is where we build a spare lawnmower.
How do we protect against business loss?
Identify your data
Well, the first thing is to decide what data is important to you and where it lives. I don't like to think of the people I've visited in order to help them recover from PC problems only to find that their backups weren't happening, or worse, the data they were backing up wasn't the data they needed to back up.
1). Email.
If your mail comes via Gmail or Hotmail, it is on a server on the internet (in fact it is on a number of servers on the internet), and you don't need to back it up - right?
Sure...
• If you can trust your mail supplier never to have a glitch (they all do, even the mighty Gmail!)
• If you can trust yourself not to accidently delete that mail that you realise you actually need - the next day (we've all done it - we're human and humans make errors!)
• If you can be sure that your internet connection is always going to work (God bless France Telecom!)
Better be safe - better make sure - hey?
This diagram shows what basically happens for me.
• POP3 (webmail) gets downloaded every 10 minutes from my accounts at Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo etc. to the Thunderbird mail client on my PC. Thunderbird is a free, Open Source mail client that handles multiple accounts without any problem and is easy to backup and manage - it's easy to use, as well!
• At 2am every day, my PC (all of my PCs get backed up in the same manner), gets backed up to my server. My server is just an old PC that runs a simplified version of the Linux software that I use on my main machine. It has a screen and keyboard but it doesn't really need one.
• At 3am every day, the Server itself gets backed up to the USB drive and also to A-Drive (an online free backup facility.)
• What the diagram doesn't show are the weekly backups to DVD.
• What also isn't shwon is the actual mechanics of the backup process. I have written a script that maintains the last 10 days copies of my mail on my hard disk (and, of course, backed up toi the server), so that if I realise I now need a copy of a mail I deleted 3 days ago, I can easily get to it by looking at the relevant backup. I take more about how to do this on my Keeping IT Simple site... kmeckstein.com
2). Web.
I don't know about you but, my installation of Firefox is very personal to me. I have bookmarks set up just so and the right (for me), mixture of extensions and addons. I'd hate to lose it all. Thus, my Firefox configuration gets backed up every night, in exactly the same way as my email.
3). Financials.
My static financial data mainly consists of a number of spreadsheets on my main PC (the live data lives on a LAMP server which is backed up to my data server every night.)
This gets backed up in the same way as my mail, with one major difference.... It also gets zipped up and automatically emailed to a Gmail account (the address is a secret but think of something like financial.keckstein@gmail.com)
4). Business.
In exactly the same way as my financial data, my business data is backed up to the server (just as my email is) and also zipped and emailed to a Gmail account.
5). Personal.
My personal stuff gets backed up but, to be honest, if I lost it all I could still continue to work - so, is it that important?
I'm talking of things like photos, music, videos. If I lose them, they can always be replaced. They don't get backed up to the A-Drove offsite server. Instead I rely on the weekly backup DVDs to do the trick. For personal photos, you can always use the services of Photobucket (or similar) to put a copy online.
Putting it into practise
1). Backup your data to another machine on a daily basis.
Use that old PC as a backup server. Make sure that it can also operate as a workstation so that when your PC dies, you can move to the server and carry on working.
If you haven't got an old PC lying around, buy a second hand one - decent kit can be had for pennies these days.
2). Now backup your server to a USB drive on a daily basis.
If you need to get to yesterday's data, better make sure that data is backed up as well. A decent sized USB hard drive costs about 100€ now - how much would a lost job/contract cost?
3). Backup the core data to an offline server on a daily basis.
You can use A-Drive (or similar) for this, or you can create an account at Gmail and use them. Why not do what I do and use both?
4). Ensure that you have installation CDs for your software.
Don't rely on being able to download the software you need from the internet - if you can't re-install your operating system following a crash, how are you going to get on the internet?
5). Backup everything to DVD once a week.
Ensure that you don't lose your personal data by backing it up to DVD once a week and keeping those DVDs somewhere safe.
Make sure that your photos are stored online on a service like Photobucket.
OK, I'm convinced - what do I do?
If you would like to discuss how to put any of this into action, please feel free to get in touch with me. Although I earn a living by doing this computer stuff, there's no charge for a chat (phone or email.)
If you want me to take a look at how I can help you implement a complete Disaster Recover and Business Continuity Plan, by all means, give me a call. I bet it'll cost less that the real cost of losing your IT.
Still interested? If so, contact me....
Back a page... | Keith@KeithEckstein.com | Bookmark this page