Is Your Data Leopard-Proof? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-27-07

Sometimes things converge. Then they usually fall on your head. So far this week’s convergence has not resulted in any injuries, but it may provide my readers some amusement and even be of some use.

The first thing that happened was that I got 1) a blog comment and 2) a couple of e-mails from Nic Darling, “the marketing guy” at UniversePoint, the company that makes ION™ Monitored Backup, which I’ll be reviewing in a future Backup Reminder (probably next week or the week after). Nic directed me to the list of “inane design suggestions” he made to the CEO when first hired by UniversePoint. The suggestion that particularly caught my eye was number 4:

“The software should be leopard proof. I realize that this will be difficult as leopards can swim AND climb trees, but I know you can manage it. (Man, I just really want to stamp NOW LEOPARD PROOF on a software package).”

One reason the idea of “leopard-proof” backup software appeals to me is outlined in an article in yesterday’s Wired entitled “Disaster Planning is Critical, but Pick a Reasonable Disaster.” The author, Bruce Schneier, points out that an effective disaster preparedness plan isn’t the one that equips you to ride out a quarantine in the event of the avian flu pandemic which never materialized or enables your company to continue to function after a direct nuclear strike which obliterates the entire continent (in which case you and your customers are probably all dead anyway). “In general, you can only reasonably prepare for disasters that leave your world largely intact. […] Disaster planning only makes sense within the context of existing society.”

Backing up your data is only one part of disaster preparedness, but the same basic principle applies. Most of us can’t provide for every conceivable contingency, but some contingencies are more likely than others. If you live in California, like me, it’s reasonable to plan for both earthquakes and fires. If you live in the southern US, it makes sense to plan for hurricanes. In most places, it’s worth considering the possibility of theft, though the security of the building which houses your computer equipment will affect the likelihood of that problem.

All of those possibilities are a good reason to have some form of off-site backup. What form that takes and how often you update those backups depend on your budget, the frequency at which your data changes, and how valuable it is to your company.

So where does leopard-proofing fit into that scheme? The Ur-Guru and I did meet a leopard once, but it was much more interested in the flock of wild turkeys walking through the field than in coming into the cabin to chew on our computers. Even apart from the difficulty a leopard would have getting into a data center, it’s hard to see what motivation the creature would have for taking a bite out of a hard drive. None of my computer equipment is even large enough to provide a reasonable heat-source to a leopard.

Making the equipment cat-fur-proof, now, that would be an accomplishment. It’s a challenge to hermetically seal a computer case and still allow things (like your network cable) to be plugged in. And I suspect most of my readers are far more likely to face marauding housepets than hungry leopards. So it’s worth making sure that your backups are safe from furry family members.

Which reminds me, Seagate has clearly made an effort to make its FreeAgent Go drives positively cuddly. The stickers sealing the anti-static wrap on the drive and its USB cable are bright yellow and say “Hello!” The installation guide says “This won’t take long” on one side and “Please enjoy” on the other. Oh, and let’s not forget the sticker on the outside of the box that says “160 Glorious Gigabytes.” (I am not making this up.)

When I bought the X drive, it was an unformatted, naked drive from Toshiba which I had to install in an enclosure and then figure out how to format. No such worries with the FreeAgent Go. Unwrap it, connect the two-pronged USB cable, and presto! You have a drive. Actually, you have a Welcome Screen and a Start Menu courtesy of Ceedo, and the option to install the FreeAgent software and to set up your drive like a giant U3 USB stick.

That’s not what I want this drive for, and indeed I’m not sure the built in sync function is really what I need, either, but the fancy options don’t detract from the ease of use and storage capacity. It seems like quite a sweet little drive, and I expect to write more about it when I’ve had time to use it more.

My only objections are aesthetic. The exterior of the drive is black, mostly, but one entire end of the thing lights up in a shade of yellow-orange reminiscent of road signs and school buses. Why this color, which I would expect people to associate with the need for caution, I don’t know. And I’m not sure what inspired the dark brown-and-yellow-orange FreeAgent interface or Ceedo theme. Has Seagate been taking design tips from UPS?

Although, come to think of it, yellow and black is a color scheme associated with leopards.

You see what I mean about convergence?

Shaking Up Your Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-20-07

The earthquake at much-too-early-AM today reminded me that it really might be a better idea to sleep with the computer under the bed than on top of it. On the other hand, I’d probably give myself a hernia reaching for it every morning, and the ceiling is the only thing that can actually fall on it where it is. And if that happens, I might not be around to worry about my data. (Yes, I sleep with my computer, at least when the Ur-Guru isn’t here. So sue me.)

Though my clients might still be around to worry about their data, in which case it might be useful if someone knew my main password. If the machine is trashed, one ought to be able to get to the data by removing the drive altogether, but if it’s only the Sallie that’s trashed, perhaps better to keep the computer intact. (Though I don’t know…maybe I’d prefer to have it self-destruct if I stop breathing. I go back and forth on these kinds of things.)

Let’s pass over the question of whether it’s morbidity or senility that turning 40 has brought me, however, and get on to the stories I said I’d have for you last week. So we’ll start with Sandy’s dead CrackBerry. Sandy is the author of the about-to-be released book fEmpowerment: A Guide to Unleashing Your Inner Bond Girl, but no special effects were used in the creation of this story.

My BlackBerry has “off and on” had the bottom line of keys stop working (that means, for example, b-n-m do not work). A “hard reboot” (dumping the battery out and back in) fixes it. It doesn’t happen all that often, so I hadn’t taken the time to go get another machine from the Nextel folks.

Monday, I was out and about, and (of course) I have a passcode on my BlackBerry. My passcode includes the letter “B.” I’m sure that you can imagine where this is going… I hit the passcode to get in a few times, “counting down” the passwords you’re “allowed.” Used them all—it dumped the BlackBerry and then gave me a “507” error (which is a circle with a line through it, over a small picture of the screen—not very pleasant).

After I cursed a lot, I had a “light bulb” moment and realized what had probably happened. So I went home, since now the machine was a hunk of junk. (Have you seen the guy put the iPhone through the blender in “Will it Blend?” That’s how I felt.) I figured that I had to call support and they would ask for my mother’s maiden name and 2nd aunt’s middle initial, and then they would allow me to boot up the hunk of junk.

Uh—no. If you do this, your BlackBerry gets fried. As in no retrieval-oh.

Luckily I synch the BlackBerry every day when I get home—so I’d “only” lost what I’d done that day while out and about. And far MORE luckily, I have a service plan that includes “real person” support, so I toddled off to the Nextel store, and they replaced it with a new machine, and I synched it up to the computer, and downloaded all the info back into it.

So, that’s the words to the wise.

I don’t actually use any kind of a PDA at all, but having no option but to recycle the hardware seems like a slightly extreme reaction to password problems, and it’s not like Sandy was carrying military secrets around. I suspect this particular “feature” of the BlackBerry was invented to satisfy security-conscious enterprise and government users, who are daily embarrassed by stories of laptops, backup tapes, and the like falling into the wrong hands.

It’s harder to see the value of total hardware lockout to an individual. And come to that, frying the device if you mess up your password doesn’t prevent employees from deliberately passing on company data. I hope they can at least send it back to the factory and get it refurbished and reissued.

On the other hand, Sandy did get a new device with working keys out of the adventure. Because the data was backed up, having to replace the BlackBerry was annoying and inconvenient, but not catastrophic.

Then there was my colleague Donna Papacosta in Canada, where Apple is apparently less paranoid about repossessing dead hard drives than they are in the US. Her 13-month-old MacBook keeled over without warning one day. “Of COURSE my files were backed up,” she said in response to my comment on her original post. “Except for the ones that weren’t.”

Unless you’re using a continuous data protection solution that copies everything the minute it changes (and eats bandwidth for breakfast), you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose *some* files if you suffer a fatal drive error. Donna is now backing up several times a day, both online and to an external drive. That’s often enough that anything that slips through the cracks is probably something you can live without, or recent enough to be easier to re-create than the project you were working on last week.

Get all the details of Donna’s MacBook adventures on the Trafcom News Blog. But make a backup before you go off to read it.

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Examining Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-13-07

I’m writing this on Wednesday evening, because I’m going to be at a conference all day tomorrow and Friday. I’m just a trifle distracted by preparing to be the media, and bemused at the thought of myself as “the media”, though actually I’ve been “the media” since long before blogging existed and certainly long before anyone gave press passes to bloggers. (Those were the days when I ran a web journal and wrote reviews for it, so I attended a lot of performances and interviewed actors and directors when they would speak to me. But I digress.)

The conference is about new “memes” in technology. Backup is not new, and it’s not popular or interesting enough to be a “meme.” So I’m not expecting to find much material for the Backup Reminder there. Obviously, it’s not as author of the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog that I got invited to the conference. Truth to tell, someone else got invited, and I got deputized. If you’re interested, I’ll let you know where to find the recordings when I’m done.

By next week I expect to have some backup tales to tell, as one colleague’s hard drive died a few days ago and a client’s BlackBerry just “blew up.” But for today I wanted to talk just a bit about how wide this world of backups and storage really is.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that enterprise IT and personal computing have almost nothing in common. Some of you reading this may work in large organizations and wonder what I’m talking about, because you have a Dell on your desk and you use Microsoft Office and that’s not too different from what you have at home. But I’ve been doing some writing for a corporate IT department, and it’s not just the scale that makes IT in large companies different from the kind of small and home office computing I’m familiar with.

The company I’m working for has about 650 employees, which means they’re not technically a large company, but since most of my clients have zero employees, it seems pretty big to me. And it’s big enough that it doesn’t just need to implement familiar things (like Windows and Microsoft Office) on hundreds of machines; it employs software and hardware that a small business would have no use for. And guess who gets to explain what the IT department does to the rest of the company?

So there I sit interviewing people each month, attempting to create mental parallels with thing I’m familiar with and thanking the gods that I don’t work in a corporate IT department. I’ve done some freelance computer consulting, and on the whole it’s a pretty thankless task. Sometimes you get to be a hero, but most of the time you’re doing something tedious, and sometimes you have to tell people that their hard drive is hosed and it’s too late to make a backup. Ergh.

I asked one of the IT people I was interviewing about what the company did for backups. Like many—probably most—big companies, they back up to tape and send the tapes offsite. Except, so far as I can tell, there are several different systems (not only for multiple locations, but because there’s an IBM midrange running the Enterprise Resource System and a Windows system for everything else, plus assorted specialized software for certain facilities. And the R&D folks will decide to run long calculations overnight and mess up the backup windows, or back up their data to the wrong drive share, and then things get lost if there’s a need to restore. And restoring from tape, of course, takes hours.

I don’t care what these people get paid—it’s not enough.

Fortunately for me, I don’t have to become an expert in enterprise IT to do this job. And I made the decision early on to keep the focus of this e-zine/blog on small and home office computing. That’s what I know—and I know a lot more about it now than when I started writing this Backup Reminder in 2003. (Four years ago this month, in fact, right after I recovered from a marathon data-rescue and reinstallation.)

But there’s still a whole lot I don’t know—and am not sure I want to know. This was brought home to me by the SearchStorage.com “Disk Storage Final Exam,” which asks questions about hard disk technology for the enterprise. Based on my existing knowledge, I couldn’t answer any of the questions with certainty. Even when I checked the “see answer” buttons (which open new windows to articles; a trifle confusing), I didn’t get all of them right, though some of that was because the scoring is extremely picky: sometimes they wanted one-word answers instead of two, or vice-versa, and everything has to be in all caps.

SearchStorage (which gave this blog an award back in January, to my everlasting surprise) also has a quiz about data backup. This one doesn’t have an automatic scoring feature, and one of the “answer” links appears to go to the wrong page, because remote backup definitely is not the same thing as single-instance storage. That came clear pretty quickly, even though I’d never heard of single-instance storage before taking that quiz. (What I am hearing about a lot is “deduplication,” which is aimed at achieving the same thing.) Nor had I heard the term “hot backup,” though I’d certainly encountered the concept.

It was worth taking the backup quiz, and I may explore a few of the items further, but the phrasing of the questions seems a bit vague. Without actually reading the articles, it’s hard to see what they might be getting at. I suspect the point of the quiz is to get you to read the articles, but as it stands, I’m not sure it’s that effective at testing what you already know about backups.

But that begs the question of what I would put on a quiz about backups. I’ll have to think about that one.

No One Is Spared: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-06-07

In response to my sulk last week about my dying disk drive, one Mac-using friend wrote:

Luckily for me I'm just a humble user now--and I've got a Mac. When I had a similar looking problem some time back it was quickly fixed the next day by a tech at the Mac Genius Bar. A firmware problem; remedied on start-up from the keyboard.

Signed:
Gloating in Berkeley

Of course, anyone who’s been reading long enough knows that Macs have disk failures, too. In case you didn’t, there’s a new article on the subject by Robin Harris over at ZDNet, entitled “Death of a Disk”. It’s actually about the death of two disks, both Macs.

And Apple has a policy of repossessing your dead disk if they replace it, which has rubbed a few people the wrong way, with some reason. But I’m not going to rehash that here.

Macs may or may not have more reliable operating systems and software than PCs. In general, Apple seems to build fairly good-quality hardware. But it’s also worth remembering that the only real reason there are so few Mac viruses is that so few people own Macs. If Apple had a larger market share in computers, there would be more viruses designed to attack them.

It’s possible that I could take my ailing X drive to my favorite repair person and get the problem sorted out. I could, indeed, try putting the drive in a different case myself, and see what happens. (Possibly I could have avoided the on-again, off-again problems I’ve had with it by buying a more expensive case in the first place.) If I were a serious hardware geek, I’d certainly do that. But then, if I were a serious hardware geek, I’d probably have half a dozen 2.5-inch drive cases just lying around my office.

There does come a point at which you have to decide not to throw good money after bad. Not that I consider the X drive a bad investment. The poor thing has been in constant use for several years now, and it’s come along on several trips and thus withstood being squished into overhead bins on airplanes, not to mention surviving my car accident last September.

But having a professional diagnose and correct the problem will almost certainly cost more than buying a new drive which has twice the capacity and a 5-year warranty. And I’d still have a four-year-old hard drive nearing the end of its natural lifespan, which would substantially undermine my trust in it. And you have to be able to trust your backups. So even if I get a new case for the old drive, I’d want to get a new drive.

And in the meantime, I don’t have to panic, because I have the data on two other drives. Some of it is also on CD or DVD. Some of it is in my Mozy online storage account. So even if I can’t recover the data from this drive (and I think I probably will be able to), I’m safe.