Earthblog

How confident are you that your company data is safe?

60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster (Home Office Computing Magazine).

Imagine for a moment that one day you come to work to find that all your company data have simply vanished. By "data" I mean your email, your Word and Excel documents, PDFs, databases, contact lists, accounting data, etc, etc--basically most everything that makes your company what it is and has allowed it to operate and grow as a business since its inception.

How will your company recover from such an event? Are you going to recreate years worth of data in a few months, all the while trying to support and manage your current business obligations? For most businesses, small, medium, or large, this will probably be too much to bear.

Catastrophic data loss for small companies can happen with a single event: a hard drive failure. Computer and server hard drives alike have something called a MTFB (or Mean Time Between Failures). This means that hard drives are perishable items. The MTFB determines in a statistical sense how long a hard drive is expected to last before failure becomes likely. More often that not, the MTFB is grossly exaggerated by the hardware manufacturer. At any rate, whatever the MTFB might be, it is never to be depended on. Hard drives can last for 10 years or 10 days before they die, depending on all sorts of mechanical, electrical, or environmental factors.

The question is not if this hard drive is going to die, given enough time, but only a question of when. And no one can tell you, with any degree of certainty, when that might be.

The crux of the dilemma with small businesses, when it comes to data protection, is that they can't even remotely afford the types of redundancy and fault-tolerance solutions common to enterprises with vastly larger IT budgets. But there are ways to protect your company data that will fit most any small business budget.

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks).

RAID is a difficult subject to discuss without indulging in a lot of technobabble. But let's say you're writing your memoires on a typewriter while a ghostwriter sitting at an identical typewriter beside you duplicates your every keystroke. You end up with two copies of your memoires. This is a good thing in case you lose your own copy or your cup of coffee spills on it.

This is basically what RAID does between hard disks in a server. RAID comes in several different flavors but the most common one for small businesses is RAID 1 or disk mirroring.

A RAID 1 array creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two or more disks. So if one hard drive fails, an exact copy of your data is safe on the other hard drive. This can not only prevent data loss, it can also significantly reduce company down-time.

Most servers today, say from Dell or HP, will have RAID technology already built in, or it will certainly be an option. RAID is your first line of defense against severe data loss and should not be considered an option.

Is RAID enough to protect my company data?

No. While RAID is very effective at preventing data loss due to a single hard drive failure, it does nothing to prevent data loss due to data corruption, accidental or deliberate deletion, data loss due to viruses, or operating system corruption. If your data becomes corrupted on one hard drive, this corruption will simply be mirrored over to the other hard drive.

So it’s critical to have a data backup strategy as well.

Data Backup

Backing up company data typically involves two elements: backup software and a backup destination. A popular backup software suite is BackupExec by Symantec, but there are many backup software choices. Windows operating systems come out of the box with a backup software program called NTBackup.

The backup destination might be a tape drive, remote server, or external hard drive. External hard drives are very common backup destinations for small businesses due to their inexpensiveness. 1TB hard drives (or 1000 Gigabytes) can now be purchased for around $125. In practice external hard drives are great backup destinations—fast, cheap, and reliable—but they have a critical flaw: it is not practical or advisable to store external hard drives offsite.

Why is it important to store copies of your data offsite?

Fires, floods, burglaries, to name a few.

Tape backup drives have the advantage that they have durable, compact, and replaceable cartridges that are convenient to store offsite. But there are many problems with tape drives as viable backup solutions for small business. I have written an article on these issues here.

An example of a common tape backup drive:

Online Backups

Online backups have become increasingly popular as competition between offsite storage companies have increased and storage costs have gone down.

How do online backups work?

There are many companies nowadays that provide offsite data storage. How does your company data get from your own servers or computers to this offsite location? It does so by using your Internet connection.

Instead of your company data backing up to a device within the walls of your own company, like a tape drive, it backs up to a remote server, across the Internet. This offsite server could be located anywhere theoretically. In the event of fire, flood, burglary, your data is still safe because it is offsite.

Online Backups + Onsite Backups

The problem with online backups, when used alone, arises when you have to restore your company data. Restoring gigabytes worth of data across an Internet connection can take a very, very, very long time. Meanwhile your business grinds to a halt. So online backups should never be used alone. Online backups are your last-ditch resort in the event of catastrophic data loss.

The ideal then is to combine both local onsite backups with remote offsite backups, and to do so in a way that requires a minimum of human intervention. In this case, during a backup operation, your company data is first backed up locally--for example, to an external hard drive or NAS (Network Attached Storage) device--and then later, according to a set schedule, is "pushed" or "duplicated" to an offsite backup server over your Internet connection. At any given time your company data is stored on at least two different locations, both locally and remotely. This hybrid solution can sound complicated but can actually be fairly simple to set up and surprisingly economical. 

See demo below of iBackup, an industry leader in online data backup and storage.