Why You Should Back Up Your Hard Drive (and a really simple procedure for home computers)

Hard drives are the part of your computer that stores all the information (including music, documents, spreadsheets, photos, videos and everything else) that you put onto your computer. All the information that makes it your computer. They are also, for a variety of reasons, one of the parts of your computer most prone to failure.

When they fail the results can range from a busted computer which someone needs to carefully pick the data off, through to all of your information being permanently and irretrievably lost. However, usually some, if not all information (photos, music, documents, spreadsheets etc) is lost when a hard drive fails.

Now we can talk about the odds of a computer hard drive failing after so many hours, or this percentage failing etc, but that may not necessarily give you a particularly good sense of what that means. So here's something that might seem a little more concrete. Over your lifetime of owning home computers chances are you will have at least one hard drive failure.

Think about what you keep on your computer. Do you have a copy of it? If not it's about time your got some backups started.

For home these don't need to be complicated. Something as simple as an external hard disk, or even a USB memory stick (although if you have lots of photos you will probably find they are a bit too small, but heh its something) can do the job. For a really simple backup attach your external hard drive and then copy your "My Documents" folder onto it using the procedure below. Hopefully the pictures below will make some sense out of it (Sorry for those that know this bit - not everyone does so you will just have to be patient). The "My Documents" folder will contain most of the stuff you have put onto, or created on, your computer, but there can be exceptions.

So to backup your "My Documents" folder open an explorer window grab my documents with the left mouse button:

Once "My Documents" is highlighted go to "Edit" and choose "Select All":

Once this is done all the files on the right will be highlighted. Now using your left mouse button grab the group of files on the right, and drag it to your removable disk.

Once you let go of the left mouse button the files will start copying to the new location.

If the files dissapear from their original location, or anything else seems to go wrong then you can use the undo command to reverse the last action:

Using an external hard drive for backups is a perfectly good solution (for home), provided you are disciplined about it. That "discipline" bit is often where people get into trouble. if you are worried about forgetting then the good news is that technology can help. There is software available that can make backups even easier to do (automatic in many cases).

If you think you want an automated software solution then let us know. There are some good solutions in the space that will help with making backups routine.

Why We Use NAS Rather Than Tapes

If you took a look at our last blog entry you might wondering what we use for backups if we don't use tape.

That's easy - we use Network Attached Storage (NAS for short).

Compared to tapes NAS have three major advantages:

1. They can keep up. Tapes are so slow that many in the industry now do what is called "Disk to Disk to Tape", where the backup is first done to another set of high speed disks, which can then slowly and ponderously stream that data to a tape drive. Getting rid of the "to Tape" bit is the next logical step.
2. Less External Dependencies. A NAS unit is a complete system that you can attach to your network and start pulling files off. A tape needs a tape drive, a semi functioning computer, driver software, backup software, and they all need to be accessible before you can start pulling off files.
3. Unlike tapes, which are a bit of an out sider from a mainstream technology perspective, NAS units use normal everday Hard Drives. So as the capacity of normal every day hard drives increase, the capacity of NAS units keeps pace. Tapes on the other hand are always playing catchup, and are usually around an order of magnitude behind in terms of cost effective storage.

Now if you are seeking a long term archive then tape is still your best bet, but that is not what most businesses are after in our experience, particularly once retention of data in programs like MYOB/QuickBooks etc is explained. Even then, NAS, which is powered up once every couple of years is probably just as good. Tape has the benefit that it can be just left to sit on the shelf for 10 years. Now, where did I leave that tape driver software...

5 Common Mistakes Business Make About Backup and Recovery

We are going to be talking about backups over the next few weeks - we are going to be talking about backups quite a lot. More precisely we are going to be talking not only about backups, but the other less frequent but oh so important bit - recovery.

The problem with the way most businesses approach backup is that they might take some backups (might) but they have never given a whole lot of thought to the other side of the equation - recovery. And there are some sobering stats here - probably the most sobering I have come across is this one:

"93% of businesses that loss access to their critical data for 10 days or more file for bankruptcy within 1 year. 50% of them file for bankruptcy immediatelly" - US National Archives and Records Administration.

So it's not only if you can get access to your information again, it's how quickly you can do it. And that is where things start to get interesting.

To get us started on our month of DR (Disaster Recovery) here are 5 common mistakes that businesses make about backup that means when push comes to shove they can't recover:

1. As long as I have my data I'm okay

Wrong.

Access to your data is contingent on a number of other pieces of infrastructure being in place. Sometimes this is a simple as a computer with say Microsoft Office installed in which case provided you can find a computer you are probably okay. But sometimes it relies on an application server, which has had 100 patches applied to it, which no one exactly remembers, and there was some bizarre tweak that someone had to give it to make it work etc.

Can you get access to the data again - probably. Will you get access to the data again before you are out of business? Much harder to know.

2. An Online Backup Over The Internet Is Our Best Option

Usually Wrong.

Online backup solutions are targeted at home users, and small businesses. They provide handy interfaces to help you see which files you are backing up, history etc. The problem is they are driven by people who, due to their limited IT knowledge, don't actually understand which critical parts of the system need to be backed up. For example, if you are using Exchange server only the system adminstrator has the access they need to the mail store.

If your whole server packed it in exactly how long will it take your online backup company to get you a copy of your data - a day, two days, a week? Have you ever asked? Have you ever tested their ability to deliver?

Also, as 1 above just backing up your data isn't really enough.

3. We Use Tapes

Wrong.

There are so many issues with tapes it is hard to know where to start:

• You need a tape drive (seems obvious right). But what if your previous tape drive was damaged (say by a power surge) so you can't move it across to the new server you just bought. Can you still buy the type of tape drive that you had previously keeping in mind it's probably three or four years down the track? This is what we call in the industry a "depedency".
• Tapes aren't growing in capacity fast enough to keep up with modern hard drives. Time and again we see new customers which have been sold a tape drive which can't backup a tenth the capacity of their server hard disks.
• Tape drives can subtly alter the length of tapes over time so that tapes will only work with that particular tape drive. Even if you can find a replacement tape drive your tapes may not work.
• Tapes need to have the basic operating system up and going to support the correct drivers. So if you are rebuilding from scratch you need to build a basic server, then install the tape drive and software, then restore (hopefully) and then reconfigure the server.

4. If a Part Fails In Our Server We Will Be Able to Get a Replacement Part

Wrong.

The scenario is like this - components in the computer industry tend to turn over on 12-24 month timeframes. After that the big PC/server manufacturers (HP, Dell, etc) will continue to carry spares for "warranty" customers. However, chances are they wont "sell" you one of their components - they need to hold an inventory to cover the customers which did pay for warranty.

Normally parts fail after at least a couple of years in service, meaning chances are you can't buy a replacement anymore. So if you don't have a warranty you probably can't get a like for like replacement. If you can't get like for like replacement then there is an awfully good chance that you will have to rebuild the system, or at least use a time consuming process to make the new part work with the old system.

Now this isn't true for some parts, like the power supply, or a non-integrated network card. These can often be easily replaced. But for the big components - like the RAID controller, Main Board and Hard Drives, it usually is.

5. If Our Server Crashes It Will Only Take a Day or Two to replace it

Wrong.

Yes you can go to Harvey Norman and buy a PC this afternoon. Servers are a different type of beast entirely. Because there are less of them sold they haven't reached the point where they are a standard item that retailers carry.

If you are lucky, and your business is small enough you may be able to limp along on a PC for a few days, although depending on your restoration strategy it could take days to get it correctly installed.

We will be discussing some of strategies we think you should pursue over the next few blog posts. Stay tuned.

Filtering Your Internet Connection with Open DNS

As we mentioned in our recent newsletter there is now a really quick and simple way to filter your Internet connection to:

1. Stop kids from seeing content they shouldn't.
2. Keep people away from sites they shouldn't be accessing.
3. Protect you from phishing sites and other Internet nasties.

That method is "OpenDNS.com".

Setting up OpenDNS is really easy, and will take only a few minutes. To do it for your home network or computer read on.

First - do you have just one computer or a number of computers using your Internet connection at home?

If you have just one computer then you can follow the instructions for setting up your computer. If you have a number of computers you are probably best of configuring your router so that the setting will apply to all of your computers without having to change each computer individually.

Once you have done that you are now being protected by OpenDNS at a minimal level (which just protects against phishing). However, to get the best out of OpenDNS you should now go and create an account.

After you have created an account you can adjust what sort of websites you would like to be filtered. By default you will find the category level is set to minimal which just stops known phising attacks.

There are some really easy options to choose here. For example "Low" will also filter out pornography, while moderate will filter out other adult related content. So for home, you might set this to low or moderate. You can also "customise" and choose exactly which categories you want people to be able to see, and which ones you don't.

Go and take a look - this is a really neat tool and compared to what you used to have to do to solve these sorts of problems is very simple.

If you would like to try setting it up for the office network just let us know. We can also give you a hand at home if you need some assistance.