Local Backup for Your Organization

Editor’s note: This article was excerpted from TechSoup’s The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery where you can find more resources on developing backup systems, strategies, and tools for your organization. This is the second in a three-part series. View the first article on backup strategies.

Ensuring that your critical data is backed up regularly is essential for maintaining a sustainable office for your organization, no matter what happens. Part of that backup plan should involve a discussion about what local backup systems and processes you may want to employ. If you use local backups, remember that storing data off-site is crucial. Natural or manmade, any disaster that impacts your computers is likely to impact an external backup drive in the same office.

We recommend rotating a set of backups off-site once a week. Ideally, you should store your backups in a safe deposit box. Another method is to follow is the 2x2x2 rule: two sets of backups held by two people at two different locations. Although it may sound overly cautious, you will be glad to have a system like this in place should disaster strike.

Choosing Backup Hardware

Choosing appropriate backup hardware is key to an effective local backup strategy. As with any technology, there are probably several "right" solutions for your organization. Here are some guidelines for choosing backup hardware that will work for you.

• Determine how much data you need to back up. Take a look at the machines on your network — or at least a representative sample. How large is each user's documents folder? How large is the email file? How much data is in your organization's primary shared folder? Add up the totals for all your machines, or multiply the average by the number of machines in your organization. Be sure to leave room to add a few new staffers, and to plan for growth — it's not impossible to add 1 GB of data per person per year.
• Choose a backup device that uses media with a storage capacity of at least twice the total amount of data you need to back up. This will give you room for growth, and will also allow you to perform "incremental" backups on the same tape with a "full" backup. For many organizations, tape drives are a great choice, combining high reliability and reasonably fast speeds with large storage capacities. Tape drives have become the standard in backup media, and with the proper backup procedures in place they are a reliable alternative. For larger organizations with an IT infrastructure in place, tapes are a solid option for local backups.
• Consider your drive's speed and how it interfaces with your computer. When you have a large amount of data to back up, a big storage device isn't much good if you can't write data to it quickly.
  • Internal Drives: IDE and SCSI are common internal-drive interfaces. All PCs have built-in IDE connections, and devices using these interfaces are usually less expensive. Keep in mind that there are also different standards for IDE. Older IDE drives are now called PATA (Parallel ATA) and the newer standard is called SATA (Serial ATA). Be sure to verify compatibility with existing hardware when making a purchase.
  • External Devices: Although ultra-wide SCSI is the fastest, you will also encounter devices that use USB and IEEE 1394 (Apple FireWire). Most PCs don't include built-in SCSI adapters, so you may need to add an SCSI card to use an SCSI device. Higher-end server-class hardware comes with a built-in SCSI or the newest standard SAS (serial attached SCSI).
  • Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a type of device that offers disk-based storage like a dedicated file or backup server, but in a small and efficient chassis. While specific features such as scheduled backup or FTP access depend on the model, all NAS implement some form of hardware RAID which makes them a reliable form of backup hardware.

Choosing Backup Software

Having cost-effective and reliable backup hardware is only half of the equation. Many backup devices come with backup software that works for most data-storage needs. The Professional Editions of Windows 7, XP, and Vista (but not Home Edition) come with their own backup software under Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup, which are adequate for individual users. For an organization-wide backup strategy, however, a dedicated program such as Symantec's Backup Exec or EMC's Retrospect is preferable. Consult the software documentation for details to determine specific needs. Microsoft offers an in-depth description of the most common types of backup — full, incremental, and differential.

Locating Files for Backup

Once you have the hardware and software in place, you need to know the location of the data you wish to back up. While most Windows users store data in their documents folder, there is also a tendency to keep files and folders on the Desktop, which you'll need to back up as well. Special database- or financial-software packages may store files in their program directories, so be sure to make copies of these, too. Finally, be sure to understand how your email is set up and where your messages (sent and received), calendar (if your email application has one), and contact information are stored.

Check with your email service provider — which may offer backup services — on its backup and restore policies. Email messages may also contain copies of sent attachments. Locally, mail data files should be backed up, and their locations vary by program. In Microsoft Outlook, mail data files are commonly located in:

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\*.pst

Additional Backup Tools

What about CDs, DVDs, flash drives, and external hard drives?

As organizations' content and data needs grow exponentially, data storage costs are also decreasing. CDs, DVDs, USB flash memory devices, and external hard drives are becoming increasingly affordable. With that in mind, should you use these devices as your primary means of backing up? Here are a few considerations.

Pros

• Low cost aside, the main advantage to using these devices is their ubiquity and accessibility. If you made a direct copy of your files to a disc or flash memory device, for example, they can easily be read by any modern operating system on another computer (Windows 2000 and above; Linux kernel 2.2.x and above; Mac OS X) with a DVD or CD drive or functioning USB port. This means you can "restore" your data, even without specialized backup hardware. Moreover, in the event of a disaster, you can often recover data more quickly from a CD, DVD, flash memory device, or external hard drive than from a specialized tape format or device.

Cons

• External hard drives, though convenient and cost-effective, may not always be conducive to best backup practices, such as making routine off-site copies or conducting incremental backups.
• Since it is easily readable, from a data-security point of view, direct copies of data stored on CDs, DVDs, flash memory devices, and external drives pose more of a problem in the event of loss or theft. Even with password encryption, this data is less secure than it would be in a harder-to-read backup archive.

Although discs have fewer compatibility issues overall, the data stored on them may not be readable on every workstation, especially if your nonprofit has older hardware or donated machines with varying specifications. With writable DVDs, for example, there are a plethora of standards (DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD-RW, to name a few). For a guide to formats, read Webopedia's DVD Formats Explained.

Does that mean that CD, DVDs, and flash memory devices, and external hard drives are useless? Absolutely not! Here are some ways to use them:

• Use CDs and DVDs to archive old data. Old information — such as audit records or historical data — may still be of value to your organization. CDs and DVDs are also appropriate for storing data that you won't need to modify, such as photos and finished printed materials. Both generally involve large files that you may need to refer to but aren't likely to go back and change. Archiving old data files to discs is also a great way to supplement your tape-based backup strategy, because it lets you save resources by backing up big chunks of files that won't change. Plus, disks make your archives portable — and it's easy to store a copy off-site.
• Use flash memory devices for transferring files, or as a secondary backup. Flash memory devices are great for making quick, easy, redundant backups of super-critical files such as databases and accounting files.

Most of all, it’s important to ensure that whatever system you opt for at your office, that you’re considering both local and remote options and doubling efforts to keep your data intact and on-hand in the event of an emergency or system failure.