FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-29-05: Backing Up on Vacation

I’m back from beautiful British Columbia with all my data intact and some new backup information to share.

My first backup encounter was on the flight to Seattle. Southwest Airlines’ July Spirit magazine contains a special business section called “Most Underrated.” Guess what the most underrated business practice is? That’s right: backing up. Southwest has this to say about it: “We know that you’ve heard it hundreds of times before, so why haven’t you backed up your hard drive in the last 11 months? Huh? Why? Do it.”

Now, I like to think that people who read this newsletter/blog have backed up more recently than that, and I prefer to be more polite about urging them to do so, but the point is well taken.

Being on vacation is definitely no excuse for not backing up.

As I said last week, I took my external hard drive with me on this trip. It went into my checked luggage along with the digital camera, the removable floppy drive, and half a dozen chargers and cables. So my backup schedule was pretty much the same as usual in terms of daily file backups, once I’d found something to act as a lap desk and hooked things up.

This trip was our biennial family reunion vacation, and the largest one yet, with twelve adults and three small children, not to mention three laptops and at least four digital cameras, plus portable DVD players, MP3 players, and the like. My brother and my cousin Jason the Mac geek had both brought wireless routers so we wouldn’t all be fighting over the limited desk space in the underfurnished office, and once the cable guys came out on Monday, we were able to get online and keep up with the most urgent things we’d left behind.

An internet connection is a very good thing to have when you’re on vacation, purely from a backup perspective. Almost everyone takes photos while on vacation, and these days they’re usually digital photos. In addition to first transferring mine onto my laptop and then copying them onto my external hard drive, I uploaded all my photos to my FileSlinger FTP directory. This was only partly for backup purposes: I wanted to show them to the Ur-Guru, who wasn’t able to join us this year, and e-mailing 200 MB of photos wasn’t feasible.

Jason, who didn’t bring his iBook (his father is borrowing it), uploaded his photos directly into his Yahoo! Photos page, originally created to show off pictures of his nephew, Andrew. Jason and I did some photo-swapping via the flash memory cards our cameras use, and he uploaded my photos as well. That meant there were copies of my pictures in four different places, pretty much guaranteeing their safety. And because I copied Jason’s photos to all the places I put my photos, his were just as safe.

My brother Alex has the best camera equipment of any of us and usually takes the best photos, which he puts up on his own website (or used to, anyway. The domain name seems to have expired). His camera doesn’t use the same format or same kinds of cards as Jason’s and mine do, so we always have to wait until after the vacations to get copies of his photos. This year, unfortunately, none of them turned out, for reasons Alex doesn’t yet understand.

Fortunately for all of us, Alex had the rest of us as backup photographers. I’m making slide shows from photos that Jason and Pam (my stepmother) and I took, and you can see the first two, Grouse Nest Exterior and Grouse Nest South Wing on the FileSlinger.com website. (Sorry, I don’t have a Mac version yet. I’m working on it.)

Traveling is when your data is most vulnerable: that laptop, camera, or USB drive could get dropped, stolen, have something spilled on it, catch a virus from a strange network, or who knows what. Even if you don’t have access to your regular backup method, you can use the internet to upload or e-mail copies of anything important. (But don’t put it in your public_html directory unless you want Google to find it and have half the Net reading it by the time you get home.)

Even if you do bring your regular backup equipment along, an online copy is a good idea, because there’s no guarantee that the backup drive will be any safer from thieves and small children than your main drive is. (Some of the drives out there these days are so tiny that you have to worry about infants swallowing them.)

If you’re planning a vacation, plan your backups as well.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-22-05: The Backup News Channel

I’m on vacation with my extended family this week, and though we’ve been promised high-speed internet access where we’re staying, I thought it would be a good idea to put an article “in the can,” so to speak, and program it to go out, so you wouldn’t miss your reminder even if I couldn’t get through to the Net. (And yes, I took my backup drive with me. Traveling is the perfect time for something to go wrong, at least according to Murphy’s Law—not to mention the small children who will be running around.)

Back when I started writing this newsletter, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to think of something new about the subject of backups every week. That was before I signed onto Google News Alerts. Now I get several possible topics every day. I can’t know a week in advance what will come up in the world of backup between 16 and 22 July, but I can give you a sample of what arrives in my inbox on a daily basis.

I should say that I’ve edited these listings—the news alerts also usually include entries about traffic backups and backup players on sports teams. Even so, as you can see, I get many more possible topics each week than I can write about—and more, I’m pretty certain, than you actually want to read. So I select the items which seem most relevant to home office and small business users, follow the links, do a little research, and prepare my week’s article.

If any of these headlines looks interesting to you, click on the link. And if you see anything you want me to write about, just let me know.

July 1

EMC Dantz Retrospect Strengthens Encryption, Backup to Disk, and ...
CTR - Los Angeles, CA, USA
... ProtecTIER platform a... ViaRemote Backup and Recovery Service Protects Branch Offices, SMBs, Mobile Workers Sto... EMC Corporation ...

Attackers seek vulnerable Veritas Backup installations
ComputerWorld - USA
last week in its remote backup agent to take control of computers running the software, according to the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). ...

Backup Service Shell Game
InfoWorld - USA
... your money? That's the situation one reader suspects he finds himself in with a data backup service called Virtual Backup. "A couple ...

July 6

StorageQuest Announces REFLECTOR™ for Primera® - a Network ...
PR Web (press release) - Ferndale,WA,USA ... July 6, 2005 -- StorageQuest Inc., the leader in network attached optical storage management, today announced the REFLECTOR line of Network Backup & Archive ...

Data Protection Management and Backup Reporting Helps Companies ...
Emediawire (press release) - Ferndale, WA, USA
As the demand to meet compliance requirements increases, so does the need to bolster security, storage and backup reporting in IT. ...

Zycko to distribute Asigra's agentless backup and recovery ...
eBCVG - USA
Asigra™, the technology specialist in agentless distributed backup and recovery software for network computing, today announced that it has signed its newest ...

Disk-to-disk Appliances Add Hot Backup
ENT News - USA
Unitrends is shipping new software for its disk-to-disk backup and restore appliances that enables administrators to back up the entire system all the way down ...

Webcast: How to solve the biggest backup & restore problems facing ...
ZDNet - USA
Slow backups running into key productivity hours. Running out of backup capacity. Changing backup tapes after hours and on weekends. ...

July 8

RAID and removable disk in one backup appliance
ComputerWorld - USA
The company said the product would be cost-effective for branch offices that might otherwise need to have separate nearline and tape backup devices. ...

Tape Alternatives Multiply
InternetNews.com - USA
... Not only is the pace of the advance accelerating, but users are now faced with an ever-broadening choice of technologies for backup, archiving and other ...

Alcyone Backup
Pressbox.co.uk (press release) - London, UK
... So far there's no universal cure from data loss and the best way to protect your files is to backup them. Alcyone Backup is a simple ...

July 9

Microsoft takes disk-based backup for a spin
CNET News.com - USA
The product, dubbed System Center Data Protection Manager, is designed to tempt more companies to try disk-based backup and recovery through a tried-and-true ...

Newport International Group's Spare Backup Inc. Establishes ...
Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA
PALM DESERT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 8, 2005--Spare Backup Inc., a subsidiary of Newport International Group (OTCBB:NWPO), announced today that it has ...

MS Prepping Disk-Based Backup Launch
Enterprise IT Planet - Darien,CT,USA
... DPM 2006, however, is the company's stab at the corporate backup and recovery space. The offering is aimed at businesses looking ...

Fastora ExBoot EXB-0111 Backup and Recovery device
LetsGoDigital - Emst,Gelderland,Netherlands
... "The ExBoot is the perfect backup solution for the masses because of its small ... It features a one-touch button, which launches the automated backup software. ...

July 12

MS launches disk-based continuous backup product
Earthtimes.org - USA
It will be the first disk-based software solution of its type and is expected to help companies save much time that is spent on data backup and recovery. ...

Up Close: Backup computers are key in disaster plan
KHOU (subscription) - Houston,TX,USA
... vital services. CyrusOne houses backup computers for hundreds of Houston businesses, hospitals and government agencies. But it's ...

Newport International Group's Spare Backup Inc. Signs Reseller ...
Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA
PALM DESERT, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 12, 2005--Newport International Group (OTCBB:NWPO) announced today that its Spare Backup Inc. ...

Plan B: Always Have a Backup
Small Business Computing - USA
... DRC: Small businesses benefit from a combination of user training and a backup plan that employees can access themselves to recover files they mistakenly ...

BakBone Introduces Backup Encryption Software to Safeguard ...
CCNMatthews (press release) - Toronto,ON,Canada
... software, is addressing customer demand for robust, automated and easy-to-manage security solutions with the introduction of advanced backup encryption software ...

July 13

Backup Encryption Mulled
Byteandswitch.com - New York, NY, USA
Given an alarming number of disappearing backup files in recent months, it's no surprise that Encrypt your backup! is the main message ...

Hackers exploit backup tool flaw
VNUNet.com - Haarlem, Netherlands
Internet security organisation the Cert Coordination Center have warned that hackers are exploiting flaws in Veritas Backup Exec software. ...

Spare Backup Establishes Reseller Network
WebHosting.Info - San Francisco, CA, USA
Company establishes reseller network for its online backup service; service costs $15.99 monthly and includes 5 gigabytes of remote storage. ...

UConn Foundation computer backup tapes stored at unauthorized site
WTNH - New Haven, CT, USA
(Storrs-AP, July 13, 2005 6:16 AM) _ The University of Connecticut Foundation has notified the campus community that computer backup tapes containing personal ...

DriveSavers in the New York Times

Among the interesting tips in this article about data loss and data recovery services is the fact that while drive reliability has gone down, drive recoverability has gone up. DriveSavers reports recovering up to 90% of the data from 85-90% of drives. Of course, they keep components of 10,000 different models of drives around so they can attempt to get your drive up and running again.

Most hilarious is the fact that the founder of DriveSavers doesn't back up his computer, for fear of putting himself out of business.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-8-05: Why Back Up?

I asked one of my readers what I should write about today, and she suggested a reminder about why it is we need to make backups. As it happens, I collected a number of statistics for my presentation to the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology last week, so I have them handy—and they are indeed sobering.

Every 15 seconds, another hard drive crashes.

And when I say "crash," here, I don’t mean those cases where your machine mysteriously freezes up or you get a Blue Screen of Death but your computer is fine when you reboot it. I mean "crash" in the literal sense, where one of the moving parts of your drive has crashed into another moving part and is chewing its way through the disk and sending your data to permanent oblivion. All those virtual bits and bytes still depend on a physical medium to hold them.

You can usually tell when your computer has had this kind of crash, because the drive starts making strange noises. (You can hear some of them on the Data Recovery Net website.) This is akin to the horrible noises that your car starts making if something goes seriously wrong with the engine, though you may not actually see smoke coming out of your PC tower.

1 in 5 computers suffers a fatal hard drive crash during its lifetime.

Given that the lifetime of an ordinary computer is five years at the outside, that means this will almost certainly happen to one of your own computers over the course of your lifetime.

The other four computers will die of something else, like the power supply problem that put paid to my previous laptop.

The overall average failure rate of disk and tape drives is 100%—all drives eventually fail.

Not only that, hard drives have a much higher failure rate than they used to. And even if it’s not the drive that goes, you’re going to need to be able to move your data from one computer to another when your current machine stops working or becomes so obsolete that you might as well not have a computer.

60% of companies that lose their data close down within 6 months of the disaster.

These days it’s all but impossible to run a business without a computer. Even the local laundry keeps its client records and invoices on a computer, and there are very few hairdressers, bodyworkers, housecleaners, or home care workers who don’t rely on the internet to find and communicate with clients. Even those few who don’t own computers rely on people who do, like accountants and designers.

Recreating data from scratch is estimated to cost between $2000 and $8000 per MB.

Simple drive recovery can cost upwards of $7,500 and success is not guaranteed.

Those two figures go a long way toward explaining why so many companies that lose their data shut down. Replacing hardware costs money, but not as much as replacing or retrieving data. If you’re a one-person, one-computer business, the drive recovery attempt may run you in the hundreds rather than the thousands (and some companies won’t charge if they don’t get your data back), but it’s still going to cost you a lot more than an external hard drive will. And the time cost for you or your employees to re-create and re-enter your data makes the costs for data recovery (which start at around $200/hr) look trivial.

40% of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses don't back up their data at all.

Given the figures I’ve quoted above, this is roughly akin to playing Russian Roulette with only one empty chamber. Somewhere along the line, you’re going to suffer a severe hardware failure. The only thing that prevents hardware failure from turning into data loss is backups—regular, frequent backups that you check for validity and label clearly.

Remember: your business data is your responsibility. Back up early. Back up often.

Target Thinks Pink for USB Drives

That's right—if you're looking for a USB key drive in bubble-gum pink, head on over to Target. (You have to go in person; the website only lets you order this Dane-Elec drive in blue or red, either of which I would personally prefer to the pink).

I'm sure my four-year-old niece would love it, but I think Target might be a little off the mark in producing bright pink gadgets and accessories in an attempt to appeal to adult female shoppers. Not many businesswomen are going to want to carry a pink PDA case into a meeting.

As for teenagers, when I was that age, the last thing I wanted to wear was pink, unless it was that several-shades darker verging-on-the-trashy hue that we called Promiscuous Pink. Even then, we usually reserved it for lipstick and nail polish.

That said, I'll admit that all three colors of these little drives are rather cute, and $24.99 for 256 MB isn't a bad price.

At least it's not pastel pink.

Tape Wars: "I'm not dead yet!"

I keep seeing more items about tape in magazines and online, so I thought I should post a few of them.

Computer Technology Review's most recent print issue (or the most recent one to reach me, anyway) has a story headlined "Tape is Here to Stay." Why? According to the author, Rich Harada, president of the Tape Technology Council (and therefore perhaps just a little biased, as are the disk-based-backup manufacturers proclaiming tape's demise), tape remains the least expensive way to add storage capacity—at least if you have a tape system in place already. Disk-based backup systems are "perfect complements to tape subsystems" and tape is "the most adaptive storage technology for over 50 years."

Well, maybe, but that doesn't absolve it of all the problems people have had with it. I don't know any small-business users who prefer tapes to hard disks or optical disks as a backup medium. The gentleman protests too much, methinks.

If your company is committed to tape (and the cost of setting up an automated tape backup system for large quantities of data amounts to quite a commitment), you might want to follow some of the suggestions made in a couple of other recent articles.

From Baseline's June issue come Briana Hallstrom's 7 Steps for keeping tabs on your backup tapes (slightly abbreviated by yours truly):

1. Re-examine your process for disposing of backup tapes.
2. Encrypt the data on your tapes.
3. Don't let junior staff members handle the backups.
4. Store backup tapes in more than one location.
5. Be alert when transporting tapes—this is when the data is most vulnerable.
6. Look into other forms of storage.
7. Audit your tapes and maintain records.

I'm not sure step 6 counts as a tip for managing tapes, but the others seem like sound, even obvious advice, and beg the question "Why aren't companies doing this already?"

And on Monday Curtis Preston wrote an opinion piece for Computerworld called "A Simple Solution for Lost Tapes," in which he recommends:

1. Not using commercial courier services like FedEx to ship your tapes
2. Encrypting your tapes so that whatever happens, nothing confidential will get into the wrong hands.

There will always be some hackers good enough to break any code, but it seems to me that the least you can do is keep the amateurs out. And if you're looking to start a career in computing, the tape-encryption business is booming.

To read other FileSlinger™ Backup Blog posts about this subject, type "tape" into the search box at the top of the right column.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-1-05: Backup Insights from Teens

For ten days every year, three thousand teenagers from around the country descend on downtown San Jose for the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology, where they get to visit high-tech companies and universities, hear keynote speeches from industry leaders, and “work to develop solutions to real-world dilemmas.” (I asked whether any of the solutions they came up with were ever applied; apparently not.) Not to mention taking advantage of the free (and of course totally unsecured) wireless in the halls of the San Jose Fairmont and eating (shades of school cafeterias) chicken a la king in the Regency Ballroom. These are very bright kids, some of them already developing software or working as consultants while finishing high school.

Yesterday I went to talk to them about backups. It’s a little intimidating to speak at a technology forum to a group of people who are guaranteed to know more about computers than I do, but I realized, as I was preparing my presentation, that backups and data loss are not really a technology problem.

Oh, yes, the statistics and surveys claim that between 44% and 78% of data loss is due to hardware failure, and anyone who has used computers over any period of time knows that hardware fails constantly. Hardware failure is more likely than human error (like hitting the delete key at the wrong time) to trash your files, and much more likely than actual disasters such as floods, fires, and PG&E. But if you have current, valid backups, you won’t lose data when your hard drive fails. You just have to replace your equipment.

According to Lasso Logic, 80% of small businesses don’t have adequate backups. They may be defining “adequate” by comparison with their Continuous Data Protection service, but it wouldn’t surprise me that much if 80% of home-based businesses didn’t have any backups. As for home users and students, the percentage without backups may well be higher.

In preparation for yesterday’s presentation, I asked parents (not, I confess, a statistically valid sampling) about the backup habits of high school students. Their responses were almost all along the lines of “Our teenagers never back up” or “She backs up her homework to the school network, but that’s it.”

I also posted a question to the NYLF online community asking what they would lose if their computers committed suicide or their school burned down. Tech Forum participants and alumni had an interesting variety of answers, ranging from making a point of never storing data on their hard drive at all to using their iPods for backups to having RAID arrays, domain controllers, and tape drives. One of them pointed out in his response that “this group of Tech attendees probably backs up more than any typical student. It just isn’t as easy as it should be, and more than that, people (students and adults) don’t think about it until it’s too late.”

Curiously, none of the 16 people who posted answers to my question on the community bulletin board was in the group of 36 I faced across the high-ceilinged conference room in the San Jose Fairmont yesterday afternoon. When I asked them why they thought people didn’t make backups, their answers were consistent with the replies of their peers.

“It takes time.”

“External drives cost money.”

“General ignorance.”

After going through some examples of different approaches to raising awareness about the need for backups (and selling backup solutions), I had them break up into small groups to brainstorm answers to the following questions:

1. What backup solution do you think is best for teens/students? How would you market it to them?

2. What would a backup product have to do or have to get people your age to use it?

3. If there was a law or school policy requiring backups in order to use computers, how would you enforce and implement it?

4. What kind of backup solution would work for your grandparents, and how would you sell it to them?

5. What do you think is the best way to keep off-site backups secure?

6. How can we raise awareness about backups? Can you think of techniques that would succeed where Maxtor’s Backup Awareness Month failed?

For both teens and grandparents (and many of them did have grandparents with computers), they agreed that a backup solution would have to be inexpensive, simple, user-friendly, and preferably automatic. Here are some of their suggestions:

• Make your backup device small and colorful—easy to carry, easy to personalize.
• Integrate backups with other computer activities, for instance, backing up the computer every time you download music.
• Design the backup software so it translates your data into music while copying it to the backup drive.
• Use pop stars in ad campaigns.
• Use subliminal messaging to implant the urge to back up. (Illegal, but tempting.)
• Stage midnight raids or random inspections to see whether people are backing up.
• Have your corporate or school network detect whether people are backing up and impose fines or take away user privileges for people who don’t have backups.
• Wipe all data off the system every week: if you don’t backup, you lose your work. People would get the idea after the first time.
• When marketing backups to grandparents, focus on saving family memories and compare backups to health insurance for your computer.

The thing that struck me as I thought these ideas over later was the emphasis on making backups fun. “Fun” and “backing up” are not terms that usually appear in the same sentence. One of the respondents to my bulletin-board posting described her process of backing up to both a network drive and a USB key as “tedious and more like a chore than anything.”

Drives that look like sushi or rubber duckies or tiki statues are one aspect of this, but that only gets to the problem of a device being fun to own. Making a backup program fun to use, now, that’s a challenge worth taking up. Can we translate backing up into a video game? How would you go about converting data streams to music? Would we have a different genre for each type of file? Is there a backup equivalent of ring tones for cell phones?

Given a little time, I bet these kids could figure it out.