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BACK IT UP! Your Guide to Dodging Data Disaster
(Should be Done at Least Once a Month)

Negative Attitudes About Backing Up Are Your Worst Enemy

Many small businesses don’t back up their data at all, and others use improper media for the job. I’ve often asked computer professionals, “Which is more important: Backing up your data, or restoring it?” Almost invariably, they will answer that backing up the data is more important.

We’ve been trained to think about backing up our data, and when you go to any of the popular hardware companies that offer data protection solutions, they sell backup solutions, not restore solutions. Therein lies one of the problems - a misleading mindset. Protecting your data is not about backing it up. It’s about being able to restore that data when, not if, you need to.

We all have a negative attitude toward backing up data, but even when we do it regularly; lots of things can go wrong. Choosing media poorly suited for backing up critical data is a major problem. A significant number of small businesses still back up their data to floppy disks, which is a very bad idea. Floppies are not suited for backing up anything important because they are unpredictable; sometimes they work trouble free for decades, sometimes they fail right out of the box, and sometimes they fail after just a few uses. Floppies are the worst backup choice.

Media - To Use or Not To Use

Tape backups are better than floppies, but if you’re going to use a tape drive to back up your company’s data, then plan on spending at least $1200 for a reliable one. Several problems can occur with backup tapes. A poorly designed tape drive can stop and start frequently in the same area. It can drag the tape across the heads producing wear spots, called “shoe shining.” These areas no longer store data properly, and will result in data loss. Low quality tapes can suffer from stretching; due to the constant back and forth motion of the tape head, or from heat and cold. Stretched tape produces alignment problems and data loss. Dust, humidity, and heat can likewise cause problems. Tapes exposed to harsh conditions may be unreadable; a good storage environment is vital to maintaining tape reliability. Another problem area is tape rotation and retirement. One medical facility we had dealings with ran their tapes until one of those tapes literally fell apart in someone’s hands. If you decide to go with tapes, be sure to rotate out the old ones on a regular basis and replace them with new ones. Don’t wait until they fall to pieces.

DLTs (Digital Linear Tapes) are pretty reliable - almost as reliable as hard drives - but they are expensive. It costs approximately $2,500. The tapes go for $40.00 for a 20 to 50 GB storage capacity. Be sure to stick with the manufacturer’s specs for rotating and retiring tapes, and take care to avoid exceeding the tape’s or the drive’s limits.

CDs are often used for backing up data. On the surface this seems like a good choice. CD burners are pretty fast now, and most writable drives come with free software. Yet there are some caveats. Buy only high quality, name brand CD-Rs. CD-Rs are much more reliable and readable than CD-RWs when it comes to writing and reading back. Some CD burning software requires that the same software, and possibly even the same model of CD drive, be installed on both the target and backup machines. CDs are also subject to “rot,” where they gradually degrade over time. Admittedly, the odds of CDs “rotting” are probably very small, but scratching a CD can be done very easily and can leave the CD, or parts of it, unreadable.

Extra Hard Drive - we use a removable one in it's own little pull out drawer in our PC - allows you to backup large amounts of information in a short time and then take the drive out and store it somewhere else (ideally, off-site in a climate controlled lock box or vault). They have some definite advantages - they allow you to backup data fairly quickly; and external removable ones can be moved easily from one machine to another, making it easy to back up multiple machines, or to restore data to different machines. Be careful if you choose this solution. Some drives have operating temperature limits in the high 80s or low 90s (Fahrenheit). Modern CPUs run hot, and the temperature inside a PC case could easily reach or exceed drive limits. Also check the manufacturer’s specs - some drives have an astounding 1% non-recoverable error rate. Select your removable drives with care and as with all backup solutions, check the manufacturer’s recommended operating parameters and stay well within them.

How to back up on an Extra Hard Drive:

• We drag and drop all folders and files mentioned below onto the extra hard drive on a weekly basis as we close up shop for the night every Thursday night, and then we have a week old back up no matter what happens to our current hard drive with the OS on it. This is where we back up all our stuff at the last minute before we do a hard drive wipe also.

Here are the types of data to back up:

• Fonts (If you collect fonts like we do, this is a big issue! Do not forget to back this folder up. Do a search for the folder on your hard drive called FONTS.)
• My Favorites or My Bookmarks (Depending on which Browser you use, the folder will be named one of the above. This will back up all those site links you have been collecting. Wouldn't want to have to reproduce that list, huh?)
• My Documents (This folder is where you should be putting all your saved Office Documents, like, WORD, EXCEL, PUBLISHER, POWER POINT, etc. If you have been saving any type of documents, like databases, or what not, in another location, not under My Documents, you need to back up that folder too!)
• My Downloads...we have a folder on our desktop called My Downloads and every time we download a shareware program, an upgrade that we bought online and didn't get the CD for it, a browser upgrade, or anything like that, we save the .exe and Read Me files in that folder. That way, we can back up this folder and sit there and click the Set Up files on all these programs after the drive is wiped and we are reloading our programs and we don't have to try to remember what all we lost that didn't have actual CD's and go to the download site and download it again and go through all that hassle. Now it is backed up in one folder making our lives and our reload so easy!!
• Financial Info and Programs need to be backed up. You should be using the backup feature that these come with to do daily backups of this data, but if you aren't, at least do it now. Programs included in this are Microsoft Money, Quick Books, Quicken, Peach Tree Accounting, Turbo Tax, etc. Use the backup data utility in any or all of these types of business and financial programs that you use at the last minute before you wipe, so you get the latest and greatest version of the data. Make sure no one in your office uses these programs after you have done the backup, so you don't loose that last bit of data!!
• My Music folder should be where you are keeping all those mp3's that you have downloaded. If not, get them all backed up, where ever they reside on your hard drive.
• My Pictures folder is on newer OS set ups. If you have this folder or any digital camera image folders on your drive, back them up.
• If you use, Dreamweaver...for designing web sites, or another such program...there are things called Site Definitions that you will want to back up. You will also want to back up all your sites in their folder(s).
• If you use Adobe Photoshop or another such design software, make sure you back up your plugins and so forth.
• Last but not least, do a last minute export of your Microsoft Outlook (or Outlook Express) folders, files and emails, by using the import/export utility found under the tab at the top called 'File'. Save all your folders and sub folders from InBox to Contacts as one .pst file. This file may be too large to save on a CD, you might have to save it on a zip disk or another hard drive.