The Short Story

If you are an individual or small business, you should strongly consider an online backup service like Carbonite or LiveVault. Why?

The Full Story

Updated 9/30/07 - Francis Ford Coppola is appealing for thieves to return his backups. When they broke into his office in Argentina, they stole his computer and his backup device (see Rule #1 below).

I don't have flood insurance. On the one hand, I live on a hill. On the other hand, I live relatively close to the Ohio River, and I have no idea if I live in a flood plain. I never think about it. It took me a good thirty minutes to come up with this example. I have too many other things to worry about, so I'm just getting on with life. (Now I won't be able to sleep. Crap!)

Getting on with life is good, but most people need a nag to remind them of dangers that are beyond their normal focus. Right now, I want to nag you about backups. If your livelihood depends in any way on a computer, you need to spend at least a little time thinking about what to do when disaster strikes. I'm going to talk about how to know when a backup scheme is good or bad, and make some recommendations for backing your data up. I'm focusing here on the self-employed and small-business owners. If you have 300 employees and no disaster recovery plans, well, that's just criminal...

What Is Backup Beauty?

The job of a backup is simple. Periodically, you make a copy of the data on your computer. This is a backup. (Too elementary, folks?) When your computer goes kablooey, you retrieve the copy and put it back on your new computer. Then you're back in business (figuratively and literally).

Based on my years of experience in Information Technology and Human Nature, I've sussed out what I think are the most important qualities that go into a Beautiful Backup Experience.

Here are the bare minimum requirements in order to be a Beautiful Backup system:

1. Backups must be stored off-site. If your building catches on fire, your backups can't help you if they went up in flames as well. Some copy of your data must be stored in a separate location. The farther away, the better.
2. Backups must be transparent. If your backup system needs user intervention to work, or it gets in your way, you will start doing things to get around it, consciously or no. (I once knew someone that tried the padlock-on-the-fridge-door trick to lose weight. I'll let you guess the number of days until the padlock stayed unlocked hanging on the fridge door).
3. Backups must be automatic. If you have to click on a button every time you want to do a backup, you'll eventually forget. Guaranteed. And if you forget, how does that help?
4. Backups must be tested. This is the most important! Get a spare computer, restore your backup, and make sure you can get what you need! Don't have a spare computer? Buy one! They're less than 300 bucks, for crying out loud! Without this, you never really know if you will be getting everything back.

Once you've put your backup system into place, you should test it at least every quarter, but preferably more often (say, monthly).

What Are The Paths To Backup Ugliness?

First of all, your computer(s) more than likely already comes with backup software of some sort. Ignore it.

Really. Don't even bother. Why? Well, I'm sure it works quite well, and copies all your files to a DVD or tape drive (some allow you to back up your files to another file server). Here are the problems:

• There's manual intervention. Unless you're backing up to a file server, you have to babysit the program and make sure it has fresh DVDs or tapes. This violates Requirement 2 (transparent backups).
• You have to take backup media off-site. If you back up to a DVD, and set the DVD next to the computer, you're not protected from physical disasters like fires, floods, etc. This violates Requirement 1 (off-site backups). On the other hand, having to remember to take the DVDs off-site clearly breaks Requirement 3 (automatic process).

Now that I've got that out, there's one way that these bundled backup programs could be effective: automatic scheduled backups to an off-site file server. If you're lucky enough to be able to put computers in two different locations, and understand how to set things up, your main computer could save its backups to the remote computer. If anything happens to the main location (think fire), chances are the backup server wouldn't have gotten destroyed as well.

However, this can be a bear to set up reliably, even for professionals. Unless your data is sensitive, or you need immediate access to it in the event of a disaster, you should really consider subscribing to a backup service.

How Can We Achieve Backup Beauty?

There are a ton of companies that have set up Web-based backup systems. The one that always comes to my mind is Carbonite. When you subscribe, it puts a backup program on your computer. It automatically scans all your data files, and if it finds any new stuff, it will ship it off to Carbonite's server which are... well... I have no idea. But I know it's not in my office (otherwise, I'd be getting a rent check), so that's off-site enough for me. There you go. Automatic, transparent, off-site. The only thing we didn't hit is 'tested', but that's up to you. And I'm sure their system is more tested than anything you or I would come up with.

What's the drawback? Large sets of data can be a problem. Personally, I use the computer-to-offsite-computer backup I described earlier. I have about 500GB of data that I want backed up, and you can imagine how long it would take to download that over the internet.

Also, if you have an office full of computers, you might have an office full of subscriptions, too. That's where things start to get complicated. No matter what system you end up designing, though, remember the Beauty Principles and you won't go wrong.

Further Reading

I'm going to write some more about basic Disaster Recovery techniques in the coming weeks, so keep checking back.

UPDATE: There's an article up about RAID basics.

To Sum Up

If you have one or two computers you need backed up, strongly consider an online service like Carbonite or LiveVault.