Back Up Solutions

Backup is a very significant operation that must be planned and well thought out. Your entire organization’s future existence may depend on it. We provide a series of Backup Solutions from very inexpensive Flash memory Solutions to very complex and expensive NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions with On-Line Secondary Backup to guarantee that Off-Site Storage.

There are many industries that require Off-Site Storage as part of a backup procedure. The regulations can be audited and your auditors may actually have to report your non-compliance. HIPPA, The SEC, The FED, State Insurance Regulators, and many other government or industry regulators require Off-Site Backup, Mail Archiving and System Backup of Client, Customer, or Critical financial data.

Your firm may not be in compliance with your industries regulation.

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Back Up Plans

The purpose of a system backup is to insure that the business entity can continue after a major or minor disaster. This disaster can be the result of a physical break in, a security breech, a disgruntled employee, a fire, flood or other natural disaster. In any event, the backup should be complete/robust enough to recreate the business environment so the business can continue.

To do a complete system backup there are three separate backup actions that must be taken.

Data Analysis, Critical Data Backup, Complete Data Backup.

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General Backup vs. Intelligent Backup

A general backup is one where the entire data set and system state are copied to some media set. If the backup software can accomplish this task it must backup all open files in a way that they can be recovered. This is the most used backup method and works pretty well as long as the data set and system state are reasonably small, and the system has enough time to complete the backup before it has to be put back in use.

An intelligent backup is one where the state and function of the data is known and the critical data needed to insure business continuance has been identified. The static data/resources has been identified. The minimum data set has been determined.

Before any intelligent backup can be taken, a data analysis must be done. Data has four classes; Critical Business Data, Essential Business Data, Ancillary Business data, and Static Business Data This analysis is necessary because the data has to be identified before you can perform an intelligent backup.

Critical Business Data:

• Data that is a requirement for business continuation
• Accounting database
• All Critical Business Application Data
• All Backup Files from Business Programs
• Exchange Mail Server Data Store or Other Mail Server Data Store
• Backup Outlook PST Files
• Backup Archive Data
• “Key Person”, My Documents Directories
• Personnel Data Files
• Payroll data
• Current Expense Account Data

Essential Business Data:

• Backup or Audit Trail Data
• General Data Backup of all other important data
• Any Newsletter, Marketing Publications, Business Flyer Documents.

Ancillary Business Data:

• User My Documents on Server
• User My Documents on Local System
• Any Personal Data Stored on the Local Drive
• Any Data Stored in a Program Directory

Static Business Data:

• Electronic Images
• Completed Publications
• Previous Years Backup Data
• Tax Information
• Past Years My Document Files

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Types of Backup

You should usually take a full backup when the system you are using is in a quiescent state, with all your files and applications closed. There are backup systems that can reliably capture Open files and restore them but they are expensive.

The backup window is important because you must know if you have enough time to complete the backup process. The Backup process consists of two parts, the backup and the verify. The backup process is used to capture the data, applications and system state on the computers that you are backing up. The Verify process consists of the comparing the backed up data on whatever media contains the data, and the actual data on the computers.

In a perfect world your backup window is wide enough to allow both parts to occur on a quiescent system. In this world your comparison would come back as identical. If your backup window is narrow then you will be using these system when the verify process is being performed. In this case your verify will complete but it will most likely report comparison errors. The above case may not be perfect but it will allow you to visually verify the comparison report. This will reassure you that 80%-90% of your backup was completed.

Advantages:

• Full Backup yields the fastest restore time.
• Full Backup requires only one image to complete the restore operation.
• Each Backup Image is completely self contained.
• Full Backup is the more reliable backup method.

Disadvantages:

• A Full Backup up is the slowest backup method.
• the storage space requirements are the highest for a full backup

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Incremental Backup

The backup window in the case of the incremental backup is much smaller. An incremental backup is a backup set that based on the changes to the full backup set since the last time a full backup was preformed. The process is basically very simple.

Let’s assume we are starting a backup set on a Monday. A full backup is performed along with a verify. This will take a long time compared to an incremental backup. Tuesday thru Friday’ss backup will be an incremental backup. This process is repeated every week. This allows the backup window to be very small for Tuesday thru Friday’ss backups. Since incremental backups only backup changes since the last backup, it is a very small backup set. It does not take very much time to backup a few 100 or 1000 files.

Advantages:

• Backing up is faster than a full backup
• The storage space requirements are lower than for full backup

Disadvantages:

• Restore is slower than restoring from full backup
• Restore requires as many incremental images as were created since the last full backup + the last full backup image.
• Any error in an incremental image can cause the entire restore operation to fail.

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On-line Backup

The on-line, off-site backup of critical data is a cost effective solution and it is painless because it happens automatically. If you think about it in monthly costs, a second server and tape drive will cost about $5,000. It will have about a 3-4 year life. That is about 104.00/month for 4 years. You can on-line backup about 14GB of data every night for the same amount, with no up front costs. If you want to back up more than 14GB is cheaper to use Tape, but you have to deal with all that goes along with that

Disaster recovery can be handled in many ways that balance expense against need;

• Complete Backup that is manually taken off site everyday
• Complete backups that are automatically stored off site.
• Continuous data backup that stores data on a network attached storage device.
• Continuous data backup that stores data on a network attached storage device with a built-in tape drive and an on-line off-site backup failsafe.
• Complete redundancy with an off-site server.

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Differential Backup

Differential backup contains all files that have changed since the last FULL backup . The advantage of a differential backup is that it shortens restore time compared to a full backup or an incremental backup. However, if you perform the differential backup too many times, the size of the differential backup might grow to be larger than the baseline full backup.

There is a significant, but sometimes confusing, distinction between differential backup and incremental backup. Whereas incremental backs up all the files modified since the last full backup, differential or incremental backup, differential backup offers a middle ground by backing up all the files that have changed since the last full backup. That is where it gets its name: it backs up everything that's different since the last full backup.

Restoring a differential backup is a faster process than restoring an incremental backup because only two backup container files are needed: the latest full backup and the latest differential.

Use differential backup if you have a reasonable amount of time to perform backups. The upside is that only two backup container files are needed to perform a complete restore. The downside is if you run multiple differential backups after your full backup, you're probably including some files in each differential backup that were already included in earlier differential backups, but haven't been recently modified.

Advantages:

• Restore is faster than restoring from incremental backup
• Backing up is faster than a full backup
• The storage space requirements are lower than for full backup

Disadvantages:

• Restore is slower than restoring from full backup
• Backing up is slower than incremental backup
• The storage space requirements are higher than for incremental backup

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