FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 2-25-05: Backup4All

Having a blog is supposed to increase your standing with the search engines, and I believe it. The FileSlinger™ Backup Blog and newsletter archive is starting to attract attention—at least from the makers of backup software. On February 7 I received an inviation to review Backup4All, a shareware product from Softland in Romania, and to become an affiliate reseller if I liked it.

So I downloaded the free 30-day trial from www.backup4all.com and started to check it out. Between that time and this writing, Backup4All has gone from Version 2.3.0 to 2.3.1, so it’s clear the company is working hard to stay on top of bugs and continue to make improvements. The website is easy to navigate, and visually appealing highlighting the product’s features and providing links to reviews, documentation, and even a newsletter and RSS feed to keep you up to date on improvements. Download and purchase options are prominently displayed, as is the award from SnapFiles.com.

The program itself, which runs on Windows 98 through XP, is a modest 3.89 MB download (about 5 MB when installed). Backup4All has a cheerful, colorful interface. You can use either the menus, the large, easy-to-remember icons, or shortcut keys to create, explore, test, and restore from your backups. It also comes with very thorough documentation, a 108-page illustrated PDF file written in good English. Extensive help is also available via the Help menu or on the website.

The Pro version of Backup4All ($45) makes four different kinds of backups and can backup to local disks, removable media, USB/Firewire drives, or over a network. All versions of the program are compatible with one-button backup drives. The Mirror, Classic, and Professional versions all have built-in CD/DVD burners, so you can make your backups directly onto CDs or DVDs, and erase rewritable media. It also works with packet-writing (UDF) formatted CDs and DVDs (e.g. Nero’s InCD or Roxio’s DirectCD).

Features I particularly like are the ability to run programs either before or after making backups (so you can schedule a backup followed by a shutdown of the computer, for instance), the Test Backups function, and the reminder to label your CDs. The Full, Differential, and Incremental backup types are all compressed in .zip format and can be password-protected. (Their contents can also be viewed in the same way as any other .zip file.)

I did find some of the terminology potentially confusing. A “mirror” backup in Backup4All is not a drive mirror such as Norton Ghost produces, but rather a direct, uncompressed copy of the files. Similarly, a “full backup” will copy all of the files you select, even your whole drive, but it doesn’t preserve the system state. This is a backup program for your data, not your operating system and software.

If you’re a Windows user and you don’t have a backup system yet, give Backup4All a try.

More alternatives to tape

The Ur-Guru just sent me a link to an article by Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos in Tom's Hardware Guide called "Backups to Disk: Four Tape Alternatives Put to the Test." They're not kidding when they say "test," either: each one is dismantled and examined from all angles, with photos and screenshots.

The first page of the article points out that no single hard drive can be a truly secure backup medium for the same reason you have to have backups in the first place: the high rate of hard drive failure. The overall conclusion of the authors is that the products they review are viable short-to-medium-term solutions for small and medium businesses.

As for the products themselves, they range from the Accordance ARAID M100 (a mini-RAID system using two notebook drives) to the 7-bay High-Rely in its 19" rackmount (kids, don't try this at home), the Iomega REV external SCSI drive, and the StorCase Data Express (an internal USB 2 drive). Each product has its own strengths and weaknesses, of course. Read the article and decide for yourself whether one of these is for you.

Flash Drive with a Tiki Twist

Backups are rarely funny, but I had to laugh when I saw this. Guaranteed to appeal to your teenager (or just your wackier side) the Big Tiki Drive from TikiMac features a lighted 6-foot "lava cable" and glowing red eyes, and comes in capacities of 256 MB to 4 GB. Prices range from $59 to $429. At nearly four inches in height, it's bigger and more obvious than most flash drives—but then, that's the point.

While you're visiting the TikiMac online store, you can also pick up a LavaPad (light up your mouse pad in 7 colors) or some LavaWire and LavaUSB cables—or just browse around and enjoy the humorous marketing.

Disaster Recovery Nightmare Contest—Win UltraBac Disaster Recovery Pro

Windows IT Pro wants to hear your data recovery horror stories, so they're sponsoring a contest. If you've backed it up but couldn't recover it, fill out their survey. The best (or is it worst?) story wins a copy of UltraBac's Disaster Recovery Pro Standalone Server software ($695 value). Deadline for submissions is March 31, 2005. The winner will be notified by April 20, 2005.

Back up that cell phone!

Attention cell phone users! A recent survey conducted in the UK showed that 1 in 5 people use their cell phones as their only record of phone numbers. I've started to do it myself: why bother writing clients' numbers down in my date book when I can just put them directly in my phone? It's so much easier to call that way.

It's also risky business, because the odds are better than even that you'll either lose your phone or have it stolen inside of 3 years. I managed to do both simultaneously within a year of becoming a cell user, myself. (I've been much more careful since, and now carry the phone in my surgically attached handbag.)

Phones themselves can be replaced, but the phone numbers and other data you keep in them are stored in the phone, not on the network. (And some of us prefer to keep it that way. I really don't want my cell phone provider to have all that information, thanks very much. I have the small businessperson's innate distrust of huge corporations.)

Very few people could re-create their entire cell phone directory from memory. (I can't even remember who I have in there, never mind what their phone numbers are.) I'm not alone in my memory failure, either: only 1 in 20 of survey respondents thought they could re-create their phone directories from memory, and they were probably exaggerating.

If you have the right kind of phone and the right kind of service plan, you may be able to sign up for data backup via your cellular provider. Or see the October 29, 2004 Backup Reminder for a more detailed discussion of how to back up your cell phone to your computer.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 2-18-05: No Backup? No Job!

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

It isn’t just small and home office users who have to create their own backup solutions and make their own backups. Many corporate employees do at least part of their work on a company laptop—and 42% of small and mid-sized companies surveyed in the 2004-2005 Imation Data Protection Survey leave it to the employee to back up data kept on that laptop. Only 28% of the companies surveyed have a system in place to back up the data on employee laptops to their corporate network.

If you’re an employee with a company laptop, you may already know which category your employer falls into. If you’re not sure, ask your IT department what would happen if your laptop drive suddenly failed and you lost everything on it. Would they be able to restore it? If not, you’ll know you have to find your own backup solution—unless you’re in a position to change the corporate IT policy.

Of course, your company can only back your files up to their network if you’re connected to it. If you work on that laptop without being connected to the network, you may still have to come up with your own backup solution, such as putting the files on a CD or an external drive. (A thumb drive may be sufficient, depending on the size and type of the files you work with.)

Otherwise you may find yourself having to explain to your boss what happened to that absolutely critical report.

If your company is among the ones which backs up all the data on employee desktops and laptops, you may still not be out of the woods, because many IT departments set up their automated backup systems, ship the tapes offsite, upgrade the software when necessary—and never check to make sure that they can actually restore from those backups. A backup you can’t use is as bad as no backup at all—if not worse.

How do you test your backups? The surest way to know they work is to actually restore a machine or a file from them, but most backup software comes with a "verify data" option to ensure that the files did indeed get copied. (Even consumer CD-burning software like Nero provides a "verify data" option when making a data CD.) If you make manual file backups, take the disk out, put it back in, and try opening the files you put on it.

Verifying slows down the backup process, which is why some IT managers (and individuals) turn it off. Backups for a large system can take hours, and may mean that you can’t use the corporate network (or your PC) while they are running. That can be inconvenient, though major network backups are usually scheduled for the wee hours of the morning when there aren’t many employees using the system anyway, and many SOHO and consumer backup programs can be similarly scheduled as long as you’re willing to leave your machine on when you go to bed or out to do the shopping. (Potentially dangerous if you have a cat or a small child—see “The Cat Ate My Backup” in the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog Archives.)

The time you might save by not verifying your backups is nothing to the data you might lose. And if you actually work in the IT department and it’s your fault the backups are no good, there’s a good chance you could lose your job as well.

Backups are Big Business

According to Investors Business Daily, storage has become a $50 billion market, rife with competition.

Storage is a growth sector because data is a growth sector. "The world produces 250 megabytes of unique information per year for every man, woman and child on earth," writes IBD's Brian Deagon, citing a study by UC Berkeley. (What I want to know is how they figured that out.) Remember to protect your unique information by backing it up regularly—and maybe you should buy a few shares of Seagate while you're at it.

Back Up Your Blog

After a total meltdown that took them offline for five hours (a long time in the life of a blog), Blogcritics.org's Eric Olsen offers this warning:

"HERE IS THE LESSON: anything of value on a computer - your home computer, work computer, laptop, servers that host your website, etc etc - must be backed up, ideally independently of the primary computer...It is YOUR responsibility to make sure this happens - lesson learned."

There follows a list of books and products to help you make your backups, headed by Implementing Backup and Recovery: The Readiness Guide for the Enterprise, written by four guys named David.

Most of you probably don't host a blog server, but if you have a blog, make your own backups of it periodically, just in case disaster strikes at your blog-host or ISP—unless, of course, you don't mind losing all your posts.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 2-11-05: Rotating Backup Media

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends.

No discussion of tape as a backup solution would be complete without treating the subject of Tape Rotation, or, more generally, Backup Rotation. Plug either phrase into Google and you’ll get a vast collection of hits outlining different strategies based on how many tapes you use and how often you back up.

Why rotate tapes at all? Why not just rewind and tape over the previous backup? Well, as most of us know from experience, tapes wear out: there are only so many times you can record or play any given tape. This is also true, if less obviously, for rewritable CDs and DVDs, and even for floppies, ZIP disks, and hard drives. Rotating your backup media makes each individual tape or disk last longer—even if it is one of the reasons that tape backup is an expensive solution for a small or home office.

For people like me who are allergic to math, these rotation strategies are pretty confusing, though the principle is fairly simple: you start with a full backup and then make daily and/or weekly incremental backups (just the files that have changed) until it’s time for the next full backup. Depending on how many sets of tapes or CDs/DVDs you use, you’ll have backups that cover anything from a week to several months.

Why would you want so many copies? Isn’t the most recent backup enough?

Yes and no. If your files get lost or damaged, or your computer gets infected with a virus or swamped with spyware, your most recent backup might not do you much good. You’ll want a backup from a time before things went wrong. I keep the most recent three Ghost backups, labeled by date, as well as making daily backups of my files. That way, if I need an earlier before-I-messed-with-it version of a file, I can restore it from a previous week’s Ghost backup.

Tape rotation also allows you to keep all but the tape (or disk) that you’re using that day off-site, ensuring that you’ll never lose more than one day’s work.

Of course, you need to be using backup software that can recognize which files have been backed up, but that’s standard for tape-backup software and even included in the Microsoft Windows Backup Utility.

How many tapes or disks do you need for a backup rotation? The true geek’s answer to that question is “Just one more,” but the minimum is three and the maximum is 20. (For instructions on backup rotations using three, six, and ten tapes, see the Imation website.) Three tapes or disks are probably sufficient for most small businesses, but it depends on how valuable your data is to you—or how paranoid you are.

There are actually names for different methods of tape rotation: the Tower of Hanoi (5 tapes), Round Robin (5 tapes), and Grandfather, Father, Son (GFS for short; 20 tapes). If you like mathematical puzzles involving stacking rings on rods, you’ll enjoy these. If, like me, you fail miserably at such tests, you’re probably going to choose another backup option out of sheer confusion. You might even be inspired to pay a visit to the Tape Sucks website.

Exabyte does provide very detailed instructions for these methods in its Basic Backup Guide, but even they describe the Tower of Hanoi as “too complex to track tape rotation manually.” Heck, I could tell that just looking at the picture at ABC Technologies.

Rotating your backup media makes sense, but if you’re not using an automated system, stick to something simple. A backup routine which is too complex is a backup routine you won’t use, and having no backups is much riskier than wearing out a tape or CD by re-using it every day.

That about winds it up for tapes. Tune in next week for more backup news from The FileSlinger.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 2-4-05: Tape and the Independent Professional

Last week’s newsletter provided some of the history of tape as a backup medium. But what’s the status of tape today? Why would you choose tape over optical storage (CDs & DVDs) or external hard drives? Are tape backups a viable option for small or home office users?

Tape storage has definitely not gone the way of the 5.25” disk. In fact, tape is big business. And, for the most part, tape is also for big businesses. Your ISP undoubtedly has a huge automated tape storage facility where robotic arms insert and remove tapes as needed to handle the unbelievably large amounts of data hosted on its servers.

The great advantage to tapes is that they can be shipped off site to a secure facility. You don’t really want to put your external hard drive in the mail. Also, tapes themselves cost less per GB of storage than drives do, though not very much less, at the rate hard drive prices are dropping. Tape is also (as the manufacturers keep pointing out) a proven medium. For many companies, tape has been a way of life for decades, and replacing tape with a different medium would be far too expensive as a capital investment. Tapes have a 30-year shelf life (in proper storage conditions, which does not mean the real world); CDs and DVDs haven’t even been around for 30 years yet, and are vulnerable to “rot.”

But back in SOHO-land, if you’re still shopping around for backup solutions and haven’t already invested in a tape drive, how does tape stack up against its competition?

Not too well, in my opinion.

Say you get one of Exabyte’s sleek VXA-1 external tape drives. The SCSI model costs about $900, plus $100 or more for a SCSI controller if you don’t have one; the FireWire (1394) model will run you about $1000. It comes with one 66GB tape. To do tape backups properly, you need 7-10 tapes (or sets of tapes if the drive you’re backing up is more than 66 GB), because you have to rotate them. (Among other reasons for this, overwriting a single tape too many times damages it.) Tapes cost about $70 apiece.

By comparison, you can get a CD/DVD-writer for under $200, though even the new double-density DVDs only hold about 9 GB of data, so you’d need seven of them to equal a 66 GB tape, and DVDs are more expensive per GB than tapes are.

And you can get a Maxtor One-Touch II 250 GB external hard drive for about $250. That’s almost four tapes’ worth.

You can buy both the DVD burner and the XHD for less than the cost of the tape drive and tapes, and send the DVDs offsite. As for the shelf-life issue, how often are you going to need data that’s 30 years old?

In most cases, tape is not going to be the backup medium of choice for independent professionals with only one or two computers. Once you start getting into the “small-and-medium-sized business” (SMB) range, tape becomes a more viable option. Once you’ve got a network in place and a cluster of computers to back up, things get more complicated. At that point Exabyte’s $3000 10-tape autoloader may start to look like a good deal.

But even then there are alternatives, such as Highly Reliable Systems’ multi-bay hard drive and DVD backup systems or the Mirage Virtual Tape Library, which can read and write data much faster than tape drives. Tape, no matter what its good points, is a linear medium, and computer tapes are prone to all the same problems as audio and video cassettes.

If you prefer DVD to VHS for your movies, why would you want tapes for your computer?

Perfect Backups in 10 Quick Steps?

I thought I'd go look on Technorati and see who else might be blogging on the subject of backup, and found the site "Backup Brain," most of which is not about backups at all. It does however have a prominent link to a product called "10 Quick Steps to Perfect Backups," available in PDF and MP3 formats for $20 each. According to the publishers, it's a best seller.

A new subscriber to the FileSlinger Backup Reminder Newsletter asked whether I was going to provide a step-by-step guide as part of the newsletter, and in so doing gave me ideas for several short articles I could write to include in the blog or on my articles page.

Not that I really believe that perfect backups actually exist. Even the definition of a good backup depends on who you are, how much you need to back up, what kind of equipment you have, and how much time, effort, or money you're willing to devote to making, testing, storing, and (if necessary) restoring from backups. Some principles apply across the board, but the perfect solution for a one-person, one-computer company is not necessarily the perfect solution for a large corporation with hundreds of computers.

If anyone out there has read the book, feel free to post comments on the results you got from following their steps!

Don't let Tech Support nuke your data!

Along with other horror stories in his "Customer Support Nightmares" feature, CNET's Dan Tynan warns us that tech support staff can put your data in danger by telling you to reformat your hard drive without telling you that you need to back it up first. As I write this, sixteen readers have weighed in with their preferences for backup solutions and their experiences of wiped-out drives.