FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 8-26-05: Backup in the New York Times—Don't Let This Happen to You

Yesterday two different people sent me links to David Pogue’s column in the “Circuits” section of the New York Times, so I thought I’d better mention it here.

The headline is “Another reminder to back up,” with the much more provocative subtitle “You can only be lucky for so long.” In it, Pogue describes the adventures (and headaches) caused by the crash of his Dell hard drive, which ultimately inspired him to consult DriveSavers, story to be continued. The person he talked to at DriveSavers told him that the only good hard drive is the one that’s backed up. Pogue had backed up “My Documents,” but not his Outlook PST folder or his Dragon Naturally Speaking “training” files.

I’m glad to see backup mentioned in a high-profile non-tech publication, of course. What surprises me is that such a well-known author and columnist on tech subjects should have failed to back up such an obvious thing as his Outlook data. (Whoops, there go 2000 e-mails from readers of the column.)

Which brings me to a question that one of my writing clients asked me the other day. “With your background in languages, what the heck are you doing writing about computer backups?”

First, I try to respond to what clients ask for, and back in 2003 one of my Tech Services clients asked for a weekly backup reminder. (This was the day before I had to spend 12 straight hours salvaging his data, reformatting his hard drive, and reinstalling all his software, after which I got a serious lecture from my bodyworker about throwing myself on laptops as if they were grenades.)

Just as importantly, though, it’s because of situations like Pogue’s. People who ought to know better—who probably do know better—still don’t back up. And then, eventually, tragedy strikes.

And how, asked a podcaster who just phoned to discuss using his audios as the basis of an e-book series, do you write about something you don’t have a background in? (Just in case you don’t know, my degrees are in classical languages and literature, not computer science, engineering, or anything like that.)

Research, that’s how. The same way I wrote about Greek and Roman drama and all the other things I had to write about when I was in graduate school. Research, including practical experience testing products myself where I can, and asking other people about their experiences.

Actually, after two years of writing about something, you do have a background in it. But you don’t have to be an Ur-Guru to say “If it’s important, back it up.” You don’t have to be a geek to be able to back up, either. There are plenty of no-brainer backup solutions (though they tend to cost more than the ones which require more thought and work). In other words, for all the excuses people make, there’s no excuse.

David Pogue has promised to tell us all about his DriveSavers experience in his next column. For his sake, I hope he gets his Outlook data back. Even if he does, the lesson he’s learned about what he needs to back up is an expensive one. I’m sure he’ll remember it, but I don’t recommend you follow his example. Learn from it instead.

You can read and comment on the full NYT article, but go make your backups first.

Time to Restore vs. Time to Back Up

On Friday, while I was writing my weekly backup reminder, Henry Newman (a man who can use the word "architect" as a verb and get away with it) published a great article called "Getting Backup Right" in the Storage section of Internetnews.com.

Newman's premise is that what you really need to think about when you're setting up a backup system (especially for an enterprise) is what happens when you have to use your backups. If you have everything on tape but all the tapes are in a data storage center in the next state, you won't be able to get up and running until you can get those tapes. That could mean a lot of down time, which translates into lost money.

Here are the questions which Newman suggests you ask yourself before you decide which backup system is right for you:

• How are you going to restore the operating system and what are the expectations for how long this will take?
• How much user data will need to be restored and what are the expectations for how long this will take?

The article examines a number of other issues related to network backup of multiple computers, but these two points are the most significant for small and home office users. They essentially translate into "How much down time can you afford?"

If you have the time (and skills) to reinstall your operating system and reformat your hard drive, then you don't need to back up the operating system. If you have all your software installation CDs or files (for downloaded software), and the time to reinstall them and get your preferences set up, you don't need to back up your installed programs.

But if you can't spare the time involved in that (minimum 2 hours for the OS, and possibly 10 hours or more for the software on a fairly typical home or home office computer), you need a backup solution that backs up your entire drive as installed (something like Ghost or TrueImage). The last Ghost restoration I did from a FireWire drive took me all of 15 minutes.

What you absolutely must back up, however, is the data you create yourself, whether that's music files, videos, photos, illustrations, spreadsheets, word-processing documents, e-mail, or contact databases. The closer you have that to hand and the more frequently you back up, the faster you'll be able to get back to work.

Yahoo! Groups=Backup?

Here's an online backup suggestion I hadn't thought of, posted to the August 19th edition of SpeakerNet News by Beth Terry.

Try Yahoo! Groups for backing up. I had just set up a Yahoo! group for my 2-person office because it was easier to share calendars between PC and Mac with no new software or learning curve. It is no cost and incredibly easy to set up. You are also able to restrict access and make the group invisible.

Once you set up your password and follow the easy steps to creating a group, you can upload your files into a secure area. Go to Files, click on Add File, Browse for your file and upload it. It is just as easy to delete it once you are back safe and sound at home.

I haven't tried this myself, but it sounds like a simple solution, akin to using your Gmail account for storage.

I do want to caution anyone who tries it that data stored online is at risk both in transit (while you're uploading and downloading) and while in storage. So I wouldn't recommend putting anything super-sensitive up there unless you've encrypted it separately. As a quick way to get backed up without investing time and money into software and hardware, it's definitely better than nothing.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 8-19-05: The Family That Backs Up Together, Part 3

Last week we talked about backing up corporate laptops. This week we’ll check in with my father's wife, Pam.

Dad and Pam have been married for almost 15 years. Pam is the only one of my family members who subscribes to my newsletter. Not surprisingly, she was the first person to respond to my post-vacation e-mail asking about backups.

When I asked my kinfolk about backups, I also asked whether any of them had ever suffered serious data loss due to a computer crash or other problem. Pam’s answer to this was “When I had my old Aptiva computer the motherboard failed and I lost all of the information on my hard drive, but that was in the days of floppies and my critical work product was backed up on those floppies so it was not a catastrophic event.”

Pam has both a desktop computer in her office at the Cleveland house and a laptop which she takes with her when she joins Dad in Chicago. Unlike Dad’s laptop, hers is her personal property and not supplied by an employer, so she is responsible for backing it up herself.

Because of her frequent travel between Chicago and Cleveland, Pam was initially hoping to find a backup solution which would create a bootable duplicate of her drive so she could plug it into Dad’s computer, reboot, and run all of her own software as well as having access to her files.

Alas, it doesn’t work that way, though the language in which CMS advertises their external laptop drives sure makes it sound as if it does. There’s a difference between being able to take a drive out of its case, stick it into your computer, format it, and then boot from it and being able to plug your USB drive in and boot from that into an exact duplicate of your installed system. (Though, interestingly, I have a client whose RAID-1 machine always tries to boot from the USB external drive if it’s plugged in, so after backing up he has to remember to unplug the XHD.)

I know there are thumb drives from which you can run certain specialized programs, so the day is probably not too far off when ordinary end-users can in fact carry drives instead of laptops, but we’re not quite there yet.

Even after I gave her the bad news, though, Pam decided to go with the CMS 40 GB ABS Plus drive for laptops, which comes with BounceBack Professional. This is a USB 2 external drive, so she’s also getting a Hi Speed USB 2.0 Cardbus Adapter. “I was hoping to have this up and running before vacation but ran out of time,” she wrote. “So I will let you know how this works.” I’ve never used BounceBack, professional or otherwise, so I’m curious. The ABS series of drives from CMS have gotten good reviews in the Mac mags (or they had at the time I was shopping for 2.5” external drives), but they seemed to cost more per megabyte than drives which didn’t come with proprietary software, and the bare 80 GB Toshiba drive and separate drive housing which I ended up buying cost between 1/2 and 2/3 of what I would have paid for the ABS Plus.

However, not everyone wants to fumble with teeny weeny screws and ribbon cables while they assemble their own external drive, never mind figuring out how to format it. (I admit, knowing where I had to right-click in the “Computer Management” pane stumped me for a while.) And the ABS comes with some handy features for people who prefer their backup in set-it-and-forget-it mode, like FastSync, Scheduler, and Power Down. Plus it comes in some nice bright colors. But at $200 for 40 MB, it’s definitely one of the more expensive drives of its kind.

As I mentioned above, Pam also has a desktop computer at home, and she’s been backing this up on CD using Adaptec Easy CD Creator 4. She’s planning to move the hard drive backups onto the ABS Plus as well, because it will be faster and easier. (I might have recommended a larger drive for backing up two computers, but it depends on the size of the hard drives on the computers being backed up, and on the amount of data being stored there.)

I’ve asked Pam to post a comment here on the Backup Blog when she has the drive set up, so we can all find out how well the ABS Plus lives up to its billing.

Pam teaches classes for paralegals at Myers University, but she doesn’t know how Myers backs up its computers. My guess is that their system is pretty similar to that used at Dad’s corporation or at the universities where I studied and later taught: network storage and backup of those servers onto tape. The Myers IT department has lots of nice pictures of new-looking computers and listings of business-related computing courses, but no specs on the campus’ overall computing facilities, support staff, or policies and procedures, and no direct contact information. So either I’ll have to pick up the phone (not that!) and try to find the right person to ask, or my curiosity will just have to go unsatisfied.

Now that I’m coming to the end of my family, I’d like to invite readers to write in and tell us how you back up your computers. I’ve already had one or two people do so. I think real-life stories are better than abstract product reviews and announcements, though I plan to continue with those, particularly on the blog in midweek.

And remember: backup systems only work if you use them!

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Want to read about something besides backups? Visit Sallie’s other blogs: Author-ized Articles and FileSlinger™ Favorites.

Replacing Tapes with DVDs

In his August 15 post Rethinking backup, ZDNet's Paul Murphy suggests replacing standard tape drives with a combination of RAID array and DVD superdrive. "The cash savings are obvious but other things may be more important. For example, high quality DVDs outlast tapes, cost less, and require less storage space."

It's true, people talk a lot about the 30 year shelf life of tape, and DVDs, like CDs, are sometimes subject to "rot." But if you're actually using tapes instead of keeping them on shelves, they wear out very quickly, getting stretched, tangled, etc—just like audio cassette tapes.

To make the proposed solution really successful, however, a company would have to determine which data really needed backing up. A tape holds a lot more data than a DVD, even though going through multiple DVDs to recover data might be faster than going through a single tape. And no one seems to have found a way to automate what Murphy calls "Just the Facts, Ma'am" backup: "a super automated diff[erential backup] that stored just the changes in those files."

Readers have written in with a number of suggestions, including Intelligent Disk Backup from Net Integration Technologies. Many object that without the software to sort and compact the data, the proposed solution isn't really a solution.

The tone of the discussion starts to deteriorate after a while, but there is an important lesson in this. The easiest way to back up is sort of like the quickest way to move house: throw everything you have into boxes and put it on the truck. But that means you need a bigger truck--and maybe even a bigger house to move into. There's a trade-off between the simplicity of backing up your whole drive and the storage space it takes to do that.

If you only have a handful of computers, you can probably get them all backed up onto one external drive, but then again, that depends on the computers. A handful of computers like mine would easily fit on one good-sized XHD. A handful of the Ur-Guru's computers, on the other hand, need something more.

If you have storage space to spare, then you don't have to worry about compressing or selecting the data you back up. If not, you need to determine priorities. Maybe all the data that really matters would fit on a single DVD.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 8-12-05: The Family That Backs Up Together, Part 2

Last week we talked about how my brother and cousins and aunt and uncle back up (or don’t). This week brings us the last two major players in the family backups department, my father and my stepmother. (My mother doesn’t own a computer. I tried getting her one, and she gave it to my great-uncle—whom I should also ask about backups, come to think of it. I wouldn’t want to give unfair preference to my father’s side of the family.) We'll start with Dad.

My father works as a very senior attorney for a large oil corporation whose U.S. offices are now based in Chicago. Dad commutes between an apartment in Chicago and a house in Cleveland, and he uses a corporate laptop with a docking station and external keyboard at both locations.

Dad is one of those people who wouldn’t use a computer if he didn’t have to, so he doesn’t have a computer for personal use. His machine (which runs Windows 2000) is almost useless unless attached to the corporate network via a secure VPN (that stands for Virtual Private Network)—a fact I learned the hard way when setting up the router in his Chicago apartment. (If you don’t have the logon password, not only can you not access the network functions, but the machine gets completely locked up. It’s not pretty.)

Employees at Dad’s company each get a personal drive which is actually part of a corporate server, of which there are several, in different locations. This drive is designated (“mapped to” is the geek way of putting it) H. If you open up Windows Explorer on Dad’s laptop, and go to “My Computer,” you’ll see Drive C, the internal hard drive, Drive D, the CD-ROM drive, and Drive H, the network drive. Other employees will also see Drive H on their computers, but it’s no more the same Drive H than their Drive C is the same Drive C, so employees can’t see each other’s documents.

This setup is actually quite similar to what we had on the Warwick campus back when I was an academic. In that case, most documents were stored on your computer’s hard drive, but most of the applications, for which the university had a site license, were served from a network drive. If you didn’t use your Novell Network password when you logged on, you couldn’t run those programs.

Dad backs up his Outlook PST file to the H drive “every couple of weeks if I remember.” (My father does not subscribe to my newsletter.) He doesn’t back up his document files, but believes that most of the documents are in the PST file anyway (by which I deduce that he either mails them to or receives them from his colleagues using Outlook).

The next question, of course, is how that H drive gets backed up, and how often. Dad kindly asked the IT staff, who were good enough to answer. “The server with the H-Drives is backed up on a daily basis. Not all servers have the same backup policies and rotation schedules. Yet, for the most part, the H-Drives are secure and the backups done on a daily basis are also secure. The backups are placed on a backup tape or tapes which at the end of the week get sent to outside storage (most likely Iron Mountain). After one week, the backup tapes are returned. At this point we have one set of backup tapes on site for the current week and one week's worth off-site. After the tapes are returned, they are recycled for the next backups (this being the third week of rotation). The tapes are over-written. The purpose of the backup tapes is for restoration only.”

Iron Mountain, for the record, is also the storage facility used by City National Bank and Time Warner, whose missing backup tapes created a scandal earlier this summer. Before this rash of missing tapes, the company had a good reputation. They’ve been doing corporate document storage (paper as well as electronic) forever. And it’s not their fault if their clients don’t encrypt their backup tapes.

If the oil company’s tapes are encrypted, there’s no mention of it in the message. Odds are that they’re not: 60% of respondents in an Enterprise Strategy Group survey did not encrypt their tapes, and only 7% always encrypt their data before backing it up. Encrypting tapes, or rather, the data that goes onto them, seems to be an idea that’s just barely dawning on the corporate world. (Maybe Dad’s company should check out LiveVault and ditch the tapes altogether.)

But purely in terms of being able to restore from backups, Dad is in pretty good shape. My personal recommendation would be for him to make sure he copies the documents, as well as the PST file, onto the H drive, and that he do it every week rather than when he remembers it.

I wouldn’t recommend that he put his work documents onto an external drive or CDs at home, though, at least if it’s of a sensitive or confidential nature. The H drives might only be secure “for the most part,” but they’re still more secure than most people’s personal computers and media, just as the data centers will be far more secure than most people’s homes. And who wants to be liable for losing something like that?

Not a lawyer, believe me.

If you’re a teleworker for a large corporation, don’t forget to back your files up to the company network. And check to see what your company does to back up and what kind of security precautions they take with their backups. Who knows? You could save them from a Missing Tape Scandal.

FileSlinger™ Backup Blog Appears on the Marketer's Podcast

I listen to The Marketer's Podcast regularly, and last Friday, fresh from writing my weekly reminder newsletter/post, I invited Alan and Andrew (the producers) and their listeners to come over and check out the Backup Blog. These guys are terrifically responsive to the feedback they ge, so not only did they come check out the blog, they actually backed up. What's more, they announced this on their next show, and they've given me permission to post the audio clip here. (To listen to the whole "epipod," just go to www.themarketerspodcast.com or subscribe in your Podcatcher or news aggregator.)

Hear what they're saying about backups Down Under (465K MP3 file).

And a special welcome to anyone who's joined the e-zine list or subscribed to the blog as a result of hearing the show!

ComputerWorld Provides 10 Tips for Faster Backups

Robert Farkalay of Overland Storage's August 4 opinion piece in ComputerWorld offers 10 tips for faster backups. He's thinking of the corporate/network environment, so not all of his suggestions apply to small or home offices, but if you have even a small network (like, say, the Ur-Guru's), these might be good guidelines.

1. Use virtual tape (disk-based backup). Tape is rarely a good solution for small systems and networks anyway.
2. Use a fast connection (like iSCSI) between your backup server and backup storage target. ("iWhat?" I hear you ask. No, this is not a new product from Apple. It stands for "internet SCSI" and it's a gigabit ethernet connection, 10 times faster than your standard 100 Mbps network cable.) This, too, might not be practical, but the second part of tip 2 is having an exclusive connection—don't share that line with any other device. That you can do with ordinary ethernet. In fact, you can do it with USB or FireWire. The fewer signals your cable has to carry, the faster they'll go.
3. Remove network bottlenecks. Principally, this means using a dedicated server for your backups. Put only backups on it, not anything else. It will back up faster if it's not also trying to send e-mails and web pages.
4. Reconfigure backup jobs to run in parallel. There's one for the more technically-inclined, though if you have a large enough network to need to worry about this, you'd better either have an IT staff or be a geek yourself. It makes intuitive sense, though: if all the computers can be backed up simultaneously instead of having to go one after the other, the total time spent on backups will be less. And any user can tell you that the time during which a computer is either slowed down or unavailable is one reason backups get postponed.
5. Install media server backup on critical servers. What that really means (apart from buying some expensive software) is that the drive that holds the data should connect directly to the backup drive. The further the data has to travel through a network, the longer a backup will take.
6. Back up to multi-stream capable disk. That means a specialized backup appliance—no doubt a worthwhile investment for anyone with a large array of computers, but not necessary (or affordable) for home office users.
7. Select the backup software best suited to the workload. Now there's a tip anyone can use. The kind of backup software (or hardware) you use really depends on the data you have to back up. That's why there's no single answer to the question "What's the best backup solution for me?"
   
8. Use a backup server with plenty of horsepower. If you turn your half-dead Pentium II into the backup server, the backups are going to be slow. For those of us who really don't need a backup server at all, only a drive, it's worth bearing in mind that backups to a 2.5" (laptop) or smaller drive will be slower than to a 3.5" (desktop) sized drive, because most laptop drives run at 4200 rpm, whereas desktop drivees run at 7200 rpm.
9. Use "image backup" to back up small files. If you backed up every e-mail message individually, it would take forever, even though the individual messages may only be a few K each. Most e-mail client programs store your messages in some kind of groupings, like Eudora's mbox files. Outlook lumps your mail in with your calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes, not to mention your attachments, in your PST file, creating one large file to back up. I'm not sure what kind of "image backup" software or function Farkaly means here, but the principle is clear.
10. Use fast disk (preferably external RAID) on application servers. So far the emphasis has been on speed at the receiving end of the backups, but speed at the sending end is also good. Read speed matters as much as write speed. Backing up from a laptop is going to be slower than backing up from a desktop (and doubly slow if you're going from a laptop to a 2.5" notebook drive, though it actually seems quite fast enough to me if done through FireWire or USB2).
    

So thanks to Robert Farkaly and ComputerWorld for the thought-provoking suggestions. They may not be useful to all the readers of this blog, but it's worth considering their parallels in the SOHO computing world. I can guarantee that if you switch from USB 1.1 to USB 2.0, you'll notice a difference, and if you upgrade your 4x CD-writer to a 48x CD-writer, you'll be amazed.

Learning the Backup Lesson the Hard Way

Backup has been a hot topic in the ComputerWorld Blogs since July 31st, prompted by the saga of Joel, who lost the customer's data on July 28th.

I sympathize with Joel, because I've lost customer data too—though in my case I had made a backup, but it didn't work. Apart from the probability of losing both your client and your fee, losing someone else's data is guaranteed to make you feel even worse than losing your own data.

And even IT professionals neglect to back up their data sometimes, as the CW bloggers admit. When was the last time you backed up yours?

Hard Drives Get Longer Warranties

Seagate and Western Digital are both increasing their warranties—at least when you purchase in bulk. Seagate started it, and Western Digital hastened to follow suit in order to keep up with their competitor.

Given that most hard drives fail within their first two years, a three-year (or five years, for 'enterprise' drives) warranty is definitely worth the purchaser's while.

As an end-user purchasing an external drive, additional drive, or replacement drive, you might not get such a good deal, but read the fine print when comparing prices anyway. All else being equal—or nearly—get the drive with the longer warranty.

30 GB DVDs on the way

Just when you thought that new dual-layer DVD burner would last you a while, Toshiba and Clariant decide to dig in and create a 30 GB HD-DVD disc. HD-DVD itself is still in the prototype stages, as is rival format Blu-Ray, so who knows whether we'll actually see production models. It does, however, appear that we're going to see a continuation of the compatibility problems we've had with DVD recording formats. It's probably best to wait to see which format emerges triumphant before making any next-generation optical drive purchases.

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 8-5-05: The Family that Backs Up Together, Part I

Here as promised is the first installment in the reminder miniseries “The Family that Backs Up Together.” The truth is that my family doesn’t actually back up together, or even all on the same schedule, but with three generations of computer users spread across the U.S. and beyond, my family provides a kind of microcosm in which to explore different backup options as applied in real life.

As I mentioned in my previous column, I spent the week of July 16-23 in the company of 14 relatives by blood and marriage: my father and his brother and sister, their respective children and grandchildren and spouses and in-laws. Even though I’d pre-loaded a newsletter to go out while I was on vacation, I spent some time on that Friday hounding my family members about how they backed up their computers.

“I don’t have one,” my sister-in-law Donna said. “Alex has one and the kids each have one, but I don’t have one, so I let him take care of that.”

My not-so-little brother wasn’t there to ask at the moment, but his e-mail response arrived in the nick of time: “We do nothing to back up at home. I occasionally have burned pictures to CD, but found some that became unreadable after a few years.”

I can see I’m going to have to work on Alex.

My uncle Robert, last of the family to get online, doesn’t own his own computer either, though he uses them at work. (Very few people these days can avoid using computers at work, even if they want to. Auto mechanics and laundromats have computers.)

Alex, like Robert, works for a law firm, but Alex has a company laptop and Robert doesn’t. Alex is spared backing up any data on the laptop by virtue of the fact that there isn’t any data on it: everything is kept on the company network.

That’s a sensible approach for companies to take, given the frequency and ease with which laptops are stolen. The data on the machine is definitely more sensitive and probably more valuable than the hardware. Alex’s firm, in fact, uses a web-client based system, so the data actually lives at the IT company’s facility and not on the law firm’s premises. As far as Alex knows, the IT company backs up to tape every night and sends the tapes to a secure facility for storage.

My father’s sister Jean (mother of my cousin Jason the Mac geek) also uses a laptop provided by her employer to work from home, though in her case she’s restricted to dial-up connections and didn’t feel any need to bring her work with her on vacation. (Given the fact that the land line only seemed to work in one room, and that was Alex and Donna’s bedroom, it’s just as well.)

Because Jean’s employer takes care of backing up its own network, Jason doesn’t do anything with her laptop. He does back up his mother’s desktop machine (which runs Windows 98 SE), though it’s a bit tricky.

Jason, as I said before, is a Mac person. The software on his network/firewire external hard drive (which he keeps plugged into the router) doesn’t work with Windows computers. So before he runs his own backups, Jason has to back up Jean’s hard drive over the network. He does this by copying her drive (about 6 GB in total) onto his own hard drive. That way Jean’s data gets backed up along with his when the software does its thing.

“And what about you?” I asked my cousin Amanda after her brother had finished explaining this. After years of working multiple jobs in restaurants, salsa bars, and real-estate offices, Amanda and her husband Jose-Luis now run a business buying, fixing up, and re-selling houses in the Los Angeles area, so their business data is on their home computer.

“I haven’t set anything up for them yet,” Jason said. Since getting laid off from his job as an Earthlink help desk staffer a few years ago, Jason has been helping out with the construction business, so it would be natural for him to be interested in the technical side even if not for the family connection. But Jason lives with Jean in Pasadena and Amanda and Jose-Luis are in Santa Monica, so he can’t supervise their computer 24/7.

“I don’t know,” Amanda answered on her own behalf. “Jose-Luis does it about once a month. Onto disk, I think. Our housemate the computer expert set up the scripts.”

At eighteen months, Amanda’s son Andrew doesn’t have his own computer yet, but he’ll happily sit in Amanda’s lap at the keyboard. Still, he’d rather watch Elmo on DVD. At seven, my nephew Zachary explained to me the dinosaurs-versus-dragons game he’d popped into the computer in the office at Grouse Nest. I wonder…is it too early to start educating Zachary about backups?

Tune in next week for part two of “The Family that Backs Up Together,” when you’ll get to Meet the Parents. But first—go make your own backups!

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NOTE: You have permission to reprint and distribute this article free of charge as long as it remains complete and unaltered and you send a copy of or link to your reprint to sallie@fileslinger.com. Online reprints should link to the FileSlinger(TM) Backup Blog.

Testing Blog Links

The Blog Business Summit put out a call for bloggers to link back to one of its posts in order to test the effectiveness of inbound links on search engine placement. So here is my one and only non-backup-related post on this blog. This is only a test...

Most Backed Up Company Award

In a sidebar to an article about lost, stolen, and strayed data, ComputerWorld gives us the Auto Warehousing Co, which backs up to both disk and DVD every day, then ships the DVDs to the home office every month, as well as transmitting the data over a private network.

The article's other sidebar provides a checklist for preventing backup security breaches.

Oh, and the conclusion of the main article? The weak point in your security network is the delivery truck carrying your tapes or disks.