What Archives Really Are and Why You Might Need Them: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 09-12-08

Back in July when I put out my call for guest bloggers on HARO, a kind PR professional referred me to Casdex. I was initially a bit skeptical about their digital archiving service, or rather, I expected my readers to be skeptical because of the price tag. $99/month for 5 GB? Compared to online backup services, that’s an outrageously high price.

But archives are not the same thing as backups. You need backups to be up-to-the-minute and to keep up with changing data. The frequency with which your data changes determines the frequency with which you need to back up. (Boy, that sentence really demonstrates what a grammar-pedant I am.)

Archives are for the data that doesn’t change. More importantly, archives are for data that shouldn’t change. Data that you need to produce in the event of an audit, or a court case. Or something as simple as your will, or the contracts you have with your clients, where you want to be able to prove that this is exactly what the contract said on the date you signed it, and yes, you really are entitled to interest on late payments.

In most cases, you hope you never have to retrieve the data that’s in your archive. You keep all your supporting documents for your tax deductions for 7 years, but you want those years to pass without any IRS audits. You don’t want to get into disputes with your client where you have to prove that the contract said a particular thing and yes, they really did sign it. You don’t want to fight with your siblings over whether something really is the last will and testament of your parents.

But if something like this happens, you’d better be able to prove your side. And that’s where digital archiving comes in. To quote the Casdex website as it was in July (it’s just been redone), archiving

protects your business from identity theft by storing your information in pieces in separate locations, salvages your company from disaster situations like floods by preserving your data in a remote location that’s always accessible via an Internet line, and lets you be 100% compliant with SOX and all those other fun government regulations facing companies of all sizes today. You create your file and set your own file retention time—which means that the data can be entered, saved and even forgotten—but if and when it needs to be retrieved again, it will be there.

The new website also makes the point that many companies waste time making repeated backups of data that really belongs in archives. But David Barley, Casdex’s CTO, put it to me this way: spending $99/month for digital archiving is cheaper than paying an auditor $60/hr to go through the paper records in your storage unit. A large company that needs to be compliant with SOX might pay $5 million for an archiving solution.

Even small companies might be subject to those “fun government regulations.” A therapist in private practice still has to deal with HIPAA, which not only requires you to keep patient information for a certain period of time, but to destroy it within a certain period of time. Casdex lets you do that automatically by setting data retention policies, either for individual documents or for folders. You get a report that tells you that your file is about to expire and prompt you to do something about it.

Datasheets on the new website emphasize the simplicity of the interface: you just drag and drop the items you want into Casdex. It’s so intuitive that there’s no need for training, or a manual. (I think they might overestimate the IT-savvy of their potential customers: nothing is so simple that it requires no explanation at all. A step-by-step guide with screenshots, or a video tutorial, never hurts.) You can access your account from any computer, and share documents with clients or with branch offices. Casdex keeps track of who uploads a file and when, and maintains the history and lifecycle of the file.

Attorneys dealing with the 2006 changes in the way lawyers have to deal with electronic information will be particularly interested in Casdex’s hashing algorithm. For those not familiar with it (I wasn’t), hashing lets you apply a digital fingerprint to your files. You then get two keys that match to show that a file hasn’t been tampered with. LexisNexis has an authenticating service that charges $1200 to fingerprint just one PDF. $99/month starts to look a lot better when you know that.

And 5 GB starts to look a lot larger when you think about how little of your data is likely to need true archiving like this.

Those of us whose industries have so far escaped government regulations might choose to take our chances on that IRS audit, but among the professions Casdex lists on its new site are

• Financial (SEC Rule 17a-4)
• Legal (2006 rulings about what documents are acceptable in the courtroom)
• Real estate (particularly if you’re a mortgage broker in the middle of the housing meltdown)
• Architecture (if the building falls down, you don’t want to be the one getting sued)
• Accounting (IRS requirements for electronic storage systems)
• Medical (HIPAA. It’s designed to protect patient privacy, but it creates exponential paperwork for doctors, dentists, and therapists.)

If you think hard about your own business, you can probably imagine applications for digital archiving. Say you’re a software developer, or a graphic designer, and you need protection beyond filing a copyright form or just think that $99/month is a better deal that $35/document. Theft of intellectual property is at an all-time high because of the ease with which electronic documents can be copied. If you’ve worked hard to create speaking and training materials, you might need to prove that you had them first, before someone else found them online and got rich using them.

Gosh. Maybe Casdex should hire me to think up new applications. ;-)

Remember, though: archives are not a substitute for backups. You still need to be able to restore the files you work with every day. So even if you’re risk-tolerant and don’t want an archiving solution, make sure you back up early and often.

Backup with Room to Spare: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 07-25-08

When I put out my request for backup stories on HARO, two of the first respondents were eager to tell me about Spare Backup. Maria-Christina Zajac of Avalanche Strategic Communications offered to set up an interview with Spare Backup CEO Cery Perle, and Heather Schroeder at Corporate Advocates wrote to me about the new Spare Mobile service.

Spare just announced last week its Spare Mobile service that may be of particular interest to your readers. The new service provides users with the benefits of real-time mobile access to their content without the risk of lost data due to a malfunctioning device. In addition, Spare users can remotely access photos, music and podcasts from their home computers anytime, anywhere from their mobile device.

Just in case I wasn’t sufficiently convinced of Spare Backup’s wonderfulness, she added:

Spare Backup doesn’t just back up your data, it can actually help you transfer all of your data from your old computer to your new one in 3 easy steps. I switched from a desktop to a notebook about a year ago and I still have things on CD because I didn’t know how else to transfer my files! It’s so easy my mom can do it. :-)

“Easy,” as I discovered when I interviewed Cery Perle on July 15th, has always been a priority for Spare Backup. Cery was motivated to get into the backup business after experiencing a data loss catastrophe. The company he worked for at the time did have a backup system, but someone had forgotten to insert the backup tape for the day he needed. (Shades of the Institute for Backup Trauma’s 2005 video with John Cleese, except that Spare Backup has actually went public in 2003.) Cery wanted a product easy enough for him to use, and the options available at the time didn’t fit that description.

The product I downloaded definitely does. Spare Backup has an attractive interface, dominated by a big green “Click here to Backup” button. (Pedant’s point of contention: “back up” as a verb should be two words.) A sidebar on the right offers tips for changing what to back up and where to store your backup. The default location is online, where you get 50 GB of storage space, but Spare Backup will also work with CDs and DVDs, external drives, and network drives.

The user interface is fairly self-explanatory, but there are detailed user guides with screenshots available, too. I did notice a few slightly odd things. Under “Settings,” you have the following options:

• Select files for online backup
• Online backup schedule
• Select Files for local backup
• Manually include/exclude files
• Account Information
• Advanced

Having the “manually include/exclude” separate from both the offline and online backup options seemed strange to me. Isn’t that part of selecting files for backup?

The default option for either online or offline backup is to back up everything. Since I didn’t want to wait all day for files to transfer, I instead opted to back up just my Microsoft Publisher files online. I then discovered that unlike many backup programs, which back up only your C drive unless you tell them otherwise (and are sometimes configured only to back up one internal drive no matter how many you have), Spare Backup automatically backs up all your internal and external drives, though not your network drives. So it went searching through my C drive, then the D drive where I keep fairly-recent data that isn’t part of current projects, then the F drive (my Free Agent Go). It didn’t copy anything from the M or P drive, but then again, the P drive wasn’t connected properly and the M drive only has a Safety Drill image on it right now, and no individual Publisher files.

Because I back up data from the C drive to both the D drive and the F drive automatically, there are now several duplicates in my Spare Backup storage area. (I’m not too worried: I’ve only used 1.26% of my online storage capacity.) If I adjusted this backup job to exclude the D and F drives (or at least one of them), then I could solve the duplication problem.

Spare Backup automatically pauses when it detects mouse or keyboard activity. The idea is to keep from slowing down your computer, but that can slow down your backup job instead. If your priority is finishing the backup job, you can adjust this under the advanced settings.

One feature Cery mentioned to me, which I haven’t tested, is the ability to restore individual e-mail messages to Outlook, and not just the whole PST file. I meant to test it, but since all my PST files are large, and you can’t back up individual e-mail messages (at least, I didn’t see that option), I decided to do the Outlook backup onto one of my external hard drives.

And so I discovered that while recovering files from online backups is fairly intuitive and done right through the regular Spare Backup interface, recovering from offline backups requires you to run a program called Local Launcher that gets put into the same location as your offline backup.

On the one hand, this makes sense. It means you can restore the data from the external drive even if all you have is the drive, and not the computer you installed Spare Backup on. But it’s a pretty crude interface by comparison with the main program, and it doesn’t let you restore individual messages.

Spare Backup’s best features are clearly reserved for the online backup service. And speaking of online backup, Cery told me that the Spare Key you get when you download the program (and which you need in order to recover your data; I had to enter it in Local Launcher) Is housed at a third company. That means none of Spare Backup’s employees can get to your data, and neither can anyone at the company holding the keys, because the only person with all the pieces is you.

Spare Backup does a private label business for bigger brands. For instance, if you buy a new Sony Vaio, the backup program you’ll find pre-installed on the machine is really Spare Backup. Offering online backup services helps hardware companies retain customers. If you have the customer’s data, you keep the customer. (Spare Backup has a 93% retention rate.) This is why the big enterprise backup companies like EMC and Symantec are buying small online backup companies like Mozy right and left.

Spare Backup is also working on an enterprise product for up to 500 users. (Disclosure: I may be writing a white paper about this for them, which would make them a client, which would at least potentially bias my opinion.)

Next week we’ll have another guest columnist for you.

Putting the Humor Back in Backups: FileSlinger(TM) Backup Reminder 05-23-08

Is this the late-late-early show or the early-early-late show? Looking at my calendar and asking myself what the chances are that I'll manage to write a second column by Friday (when I have to get up at 4:30 AM to get ready for the BACN meeting at 7:30 AM), I decided just to post-date this and send it out now.

Last week TechTarget sent me a link to an “e-zine.” I don't know why they called it that; there's no sign that you can subscribe and get new issues. It's essentially a white paper and probably the reason I got a phone call and an e-mail message from a hapless salesperson at ASEMPRA whose marketing department doesn't know enough to put a “Don't contact me” checkbox on its download forms.

Anyway, the white paper is called “New Tools for Better Backups,” and, like most white papers, it focuses on enterprise technology: deduplication, storage resource management, VM (that's Virtual Machine) Backups. The kind of thing that gives most of the folks who read this blog a serious case of My Eyes Glaze Over.

But in the midst of these articles was a full-page ad for the latest installment from the Backup Trauma Institute:

“Are you looking to gain control of your company's digital information?

“Or maybe your sanity?

“Well, you're in luck because now you can get ‘Friendly’ advice from a professional who's truly passionate about helping you manage your data — Dr. Harold Twain Weck. That's right, John Cleese is at it again as Dr. Twain Weck to give you friendly advice on your most critical digital information protection and storage challenges.”

First, if you've never visited the Institute for Backup Trauma, go check it out. This award-winning campaign for LiveVault's Continuous Data Protection services appeared in April 2005. It makes two major points: how much trouble a company can be in without reliable backups, and how problematic tape is as a backup medium.

Three years later, Iron Mountain owns LiveVault and John Cleese is dispensing advice of dubious friendliness regarding some important questions about compliance, security, and whether there is, in fact, a mountain of iron. My favorite question is “How can I get our executives in trouble?” but my favorite answer is “How do I keep Mr. Wiggles from destroying electronic evidence?” That one expounds on some really creative ways to destroy a hard drive.

Even though Iron Mountain's solutions are aimed at the enterprise and may not be immediately useful to you, the Friendly Advice Machine is an entertaining diversion—and one that makes me glad I don't have to worry about compliance, discovery, and managing millions of e-mails.

Technorati Tags: Iron Mountain,LiveVault. John Cleese,Friendly Advice Machine,Backup Trauma

Is Your Data Safer in the Cloud? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 04-18-08

The other day I attended a presentation by someone who works for Google Sites, the new incarnation of JotSpot. He told a story about how he'd dropped his laptop and had to replace it, but it didn't matter, because the presentation was “in the cloud” and he could get to it from any computer that had an Internet connection.

In this case, “in the cloud” means that it's on servers at Google. More generally, the phrase refers to data stored on hosted applications. I'm not sure where clouds come into it; somehow I think of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and probability clouds, but that's probably me mis-remembering high school math and science. Naturally, if you're sitting at a computer in your home or office and your data lives on a server at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Wordpress.com, Typepad, or somewhere like that, then there's a lot of information moving back and forth whenever you edit those documents, and some of it gets transmitted by satellite through literal clouds.

Anyway, the etymology doesn't matter for the purposes of this backup reminder. What matters is that even the storage and processing capacity of personal computers increases, hosted services proliferate, meaning that more and more people keep quite a bit of data “in the cloud.”

We talked a few Reminders ago about how hard it can be to back up your data if some of it is in Facebook and some on TypePad and some in your Google Reader account and some in your Yahoo! Mail account and so on. But there's also a positive side to not storing data on your own computer. The server rooms at Google, Yahoo!, and your own web hosting company are almost always better designed to resist theft, fire, and hardware failure than what you have at home. Data centers have security guards, sprinkler systems, and Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks locked into air-conditioned cages—much tougher for someone to walk off with than your laptop.

On the other hand, if you get cut off from your Internet connection for some reason, you can't get to any of your data. Back when I was in college, I used the university mainframe for word-processing, e-mail, and chat. (Swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, anyone?) The computer center was full of “dumb terminals:” screens and keyboards designed to let you log into the mainframe, wherever it was, and use the programs it ran. If you wanted your own copy of anything from the mainframe, you had to ask for a tape of it. (I never did, which I sometimes regret, except that I doubt I could ever have gotten the data off it.) If you wanted to print something, you sent a command to the laser printer and then went to the print window to pick it up in an hour or so.

And if the mainframe went down, there would be a few dozen students sitting around in the computer center, and more scattered across the campus, who were unable to do any work at all. (The first thing to do when walking into the computer center was to look at the handwritten status board to see whether it said "Up and Running.")

Some of today's hosted services do let you work offline, and then sync up as soon as they have a connection. But before you decide to keep all your data online, you need to be sure you can get to it when you need to. That almost certainly means having more than one way to get online.

And, of course, you have to be willing to expose that data to the people who work for Google, Yahoo!, and the like. Google probably knows more about us than we know about ourselves already, but that doesn't mean we want to turn everything over to them. (Are they reading your mail? Probably not, but they're sharing a lot of information about your online behavior.)

It can be a sensible precaution to keep very little data on any device that's at frequent risk of being lost, stolen, dropped, or having coffee spilled on it, but that's not the same as putting all of your data online and using your $3000 Vaio as a dumb terminal. If you're going to do that, you might as well get a $300 ASUS Eee instead.

Technorati Tags: Google Sites,cloud computing,Asus Eee,hosted applications

Special Offer on ION Backup through November 2nd

You may remember that I reviewed/beta tested Universe Point's ION backup service back in August. ION's unique selling proposition is monitored backup: they check to be sure your backup jobs have completed successfully.

Today I got the following e-mail from the ION sales department:

Dear Sallie,

Universe Point is currently running an amazing special on ION, the first monitored backup software. You will receive your ION Server or Workstation license for free (up to a $700 value) when you sign up for our monitoring service.

We have salesmen waiting by the phones to help you so give us a call (610-352-1150) or send an email to sales@universepoint.com. This offer ends on Friday, November 2nd, so don't miss this opportunity to protect and secure your data for as little as $30/month.

This special is only available if you call in or email our sales team.

I thought ION was a good product, and Universe Point provides good support (or did for me), so if you're in the market for monitored backup, you might want to take advantage of the special.

And no, I don't get a percentage. (Pity, that.)

How Much Is Your Data Worth? FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-31-07

Last week the VP of Marketing at Data Risk Management contacted me in response to the backup reminder I wrote nearly two years ago about backups and insurance. My conclusion at that time was “It’s possible to get insured against the cost of losing your data, but you’re only going to be insured in the amount it would cost you to restore your data if you had up-to-date backups. If your business is out of operation for weeks or your client data is permanently lost because you have no backups, you’re out of luck.”

What the marketing VP said to me was that his company was “facilitating the data insurance market in a profound way.” I'm still not entirely sure what that means, but I took a look at the website, and what they're offering is interesting.

I was expecting data insurance the way I'd always thought of it: you pay premiums and get money if you suffer from catastrophic data loss. This is something different.

Their website explains it like this:

Insurance companies can't insure the value of your data because data loss is difficult to prove and there would be a high rate of fraudulent claims. Data Storage companies do not have the technology to safely guarantee the value of your data. If they lose your data—they might refund a few months of your storage fees.

So what's their alternative?

We store your data in the safest, most cost effective way possible. If we can't give you your data—you get a check for its full value.

And who determines that value? You do, and that's what your "premiums" are based on.

This is the tricky part. How much is your data worth? If you purchased a mailing list (a practice I advise against, but for the sake of example), then the list might be worth what you paid for it, assuming you could get the same list again from the same source. Alternately, it might be worth what it has brought you in product sales.

As for data you create, the most prudent thing might be to set its value at what it would cost to re-create it. If a client paid you $X to develop a program, write a white paper, or whatever, then you might set its value at that amount. You might need to double that amount, however, or add to it the income you would lose while re-creating it.

There's going to be some data it's not possible to reconstruct, for one reason or another. How do you value that? “Sentimental value” is an expression used to refer to items that most people wouldn't pay money for, but things with sentimental value are often irreplaceable. No amount of money can bring back your late grandparents or return your child to an earlier age to pose for a photograph. Does that mean you insure your personal items for more money, or not at all? Would money compensate you for the loss?

“Many companies value 100 MB of data at over 1 million dollars,” the site claims. All I can say is that either I have the wrong kind of data, or I'm not charging enough, because I can't think of any 100 MB of data I have that cost me and my clients that much to create, or that it would cost me that much in lost income to re-create—though there could certainly be some fairly severe implications for the future of my business if I had to drop everything to re-create something I'd lost.

Let's take, for example, my Outlook .pst file, where I store e-mail, contact information, and appointments. Those are all important things, which is why I back that file up frequently. I'd certainly be in trouble if I lost it all. At a million dollars per 100 MB, it would have a value of almost $6 million. Since Data Risk Management charges 10 cents per thousand dollars of value per month, that would be $600/month. I suppose that if my Outlook data were really worth $6 million, it might be worth it.

Let's look at a more realistic scenario. The minimum value allowed for data is $100 per megabyte, which would put the total value of my Outlook data at about $60,000, which would be sufficient to cover the cost of reconstructing that data from other sources, or at least enough of it to deal with the present and the future. The cost of coverage would then drop to $6/month, which is certainly within range for small and home-based businesses.

The interesting thing about Data Risk management is the way they combine data storage with insurance. By storing your data in multiple secure data centers, they reduce their likelihood of having to pay out on a claim. And by charging $1 per gigabyte for data retrieval, they help to ensure themselves enough funds to pay out if they have to. And you want a company like this to have a sustainable business model, because the biggest risk of putting your data into a startup like this is that they won't be around this time next year.

Technorati Tags: Data Risk Management, data insurance

Connecting Your Backups: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-24-07

Apologies for the late posting of this week's reminder. I had to attend a 4-hour business meeting in the middle of writing it, and I had too many appointments this week to write it in advance. "Those pesky clients," as I sometimes jokingly call them, remain my priority.

I've been popular this week: three different companies have asked me to write about their products and services. Rather than mash them all into one article, though, I'll deal with them separately.

This week's star is Zoogmo, "Your online backup community." If you think that phrase sounds familiar, you're right: I wrote about CrashPlan's similar approach back in February. Whereas CrashPlan works for Mac, PC, and Linux, Zoogmo is Windows-only (XP and Vista).

I confess I rather like the name "Zoogmo," which reminds me of Greek zeugma ("yoke") and refers to a figure of speech most appealing when it connects two unrelated ideas, e.g. "She left in a huff and a carriage."

They also get points for their series of videos about how to use the program. But I do have to add a few caveats to the claim on their home page, however well it ties in with the infinity symbol in their logo:

With Zoogmo you get FREE unlimited backup that automatically runs in the background and lets you protect your data at multiple remote locations that YOU choose.

Free? Well, Zoogmo doesn't charge you. (Their business model? Don't ask me. It's not included in the FAQ.) And presumably your friends and family members won't charge you to use storage space on their computers. But if you use Zoogmo to back up to an external drive, naturally you have to pay for the drive. And your friends paid for their computers, too.

Unlimited? Well, theoretically--if you have an unlimited number of friends with an unlimited number of space on their computers, and don't mind your data scattered to an unlimited number of places. What "unlimited" really means in this context is that Zoogmo doesn't put limits on how much data you can back up. (But maybe I should have the Ur-Guru test it to see how it handles multiple terabytes.)

On the other hand, being able to choose--and know--where your data goes is a good thing.

For some reason, the first time I tried to download the beta, I got the following error message: "Exception in AddUserToXmpp 50 - The operation has timed out." The second time the download started (1.57 MB, which it doesn't say on the download page), but my signup information was not replaced by a "Thanks for downloading, here's what you do next" page.

I was a bit surprised that apparently you can ask any existing participant of Zoogmo whether s/he wants to be a backup partner. Though I'm not sure any of the people on the list right now are real people, or there for the sake of example. I'm not entirely sure I want to find out, either. Asking random people to be your "friend" is bad enough. Asking them to store your data strikes me as nothing short of insanity, even if Zoogmo's claim that your backup partners "won't even be able to tell what kind of files you are storing on your computer." (Seems to me there could be some pretty serious liability issues between partners, even so.) But for the sake of example, since the program wants you to pick a partner, I selected the name of the Zoogmo team member who sent me the info about the product.

Once you have a partner--or several--you can move on to deciding what you want to back up. You can do this by category (My Documents, e-mail and contacts, Firefox bookmarks/IE favorites, etc) or by file. The default seems to be to check everything. For some reason, though, when I started unchecking items, I got a warning saying that I was attempting to back up more data than I had agreed with my partners.

Well, I hadn't agreed anything with my so-called partners, because I was never prompted to enter into an agreement with them. Apparently Zoogmo makes that request to the partner for you, as a closer look at the "partners" window shows a "waiting for approval" note next to the name of the chosen partner. (Guess I should have watched the rest of those videos.)

The interface is straightforward, as the only possible activities beyond choosing partners and files/categories are "backup" and "restore." But as with ION's file transfer function, you have to set up port forwarding on your router in order to offer storage space to your partners. There's a link to information about how to do this under the "advanced" tab. (And for anyone who's curious, their proposed port for access is not the same as ION's, so you could use the two together.)

A word on the subject of port forwarding and routers. If you have broadband Internet access (cable or DSL) and don't have a router, get one. It will save you from thousands of automated attacks against your system, because every router builds in firewall protection. Most SOHO users don't need separate (expensive) hardware firewalls, but there's no point volunteering to join a botnet. And having a router is way less intrusive than using one of those irritating so-called Internet security packages. But I digress.

It's not clear what happens if you have several backup partners. Does all your data get copied to each of them, or does Zoogmo just move on to the next after the first one is full?

So I can't provide a live field test today, but Zoogmo certainly looks as though it would work for the right people under the right circumstances. The right people being folks who trust each other and all have high-speed connections and plenty of hard drive space. Oh, and whose computers are running most of the time, or at least likely to be running at the time any given partner needs to restore something from a backup. It might be especially worthwhile for those who don't trust online backup services (or don't trust the governments who can demand access to their data) but who still want some offsite backup.

If anyone starts using Zoogmo, let me know how it works for you--or doesn't. You can comment here in the blog, or e-mail me: sallie [at] fileslinger [dot] com.

And as a bonus for waiting so long to get this, you get an extra link, this time to the CNET community newsletter, for members' suggestions about the best way to back up and restore your computer to the same condition it was in before the crash.

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?

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 9-16-05: Getting Your Data Offsite

Last week I got a phone call from Ilana Debare of the San Francisco Chronicle asking how to protect your data from earthquakes, floods, fires, and hurricanes for her September 10^th article about disaster planning for small businesses.

The answer, of course, is to store a copy of your most critical data far, far away from your office and computer. I touched on this topic two weeks ago when discussing “Backups in the Air, On the Air, and Underwater,” but it deserves further consideration. It also gives me the opportunity to include a testimonial for the inexpensive online service EZBackup, for which my colleague Terry Leake of TTopper Consulting is a local reseller and of which my client Kathryn Kemp of Aspire Marketing is a fan. Here’s what Kathryn says about EZBackup:

EZ Backup gives me real peace of mind. I live and die by the information on my laptop, and knowing there is a copy of my data that is in a safe place and is easily retrievable crosses a big worry off my list. Laptop computers are especially vulnerable to being damaged and to being stolen, and the benefit of knowing my data is safe far outweighs the cost of the service.

Terry’s description of how the service works is as follows:

The backup program works by copying the specified directories over the Internet to their secured servers. The connection is secured at both ends, and is pretty hack proof. The first backup takes the longest time, because it's copying all the files, but subsequent backups take less time because it's checking to see what files have been changed.

EZBackup’s prices start at $9.95/month for 250 MB of data—comparable to similar consumer-oriented online backup services.

One advantage of EZBackup (and most of its competitors, to be fair) is that it lives up to its name: once it’s set up, you no longer have to think about it. My informal surveys on the subject of what people want in a backup system rate “set it and forget it” pretty high, so any program or service that can be scheduled to run automatically has advantages over those which require direct human intervention and therefore memory.

The disadvantage which all these services have is that they slow down your computer and hog your internet connection while they’re running. Of course, the part about slowing down, or even preventing use of, the computer is also true for local backup programs, particularly drive mirroring software like Ghost and TrueImage. Backing up any open file is chancy at best; you certainly don’t want to bet your business on the results.

It’s not necessary to pay a monthly service fee in order to get remote storage for your backups. I’ve just been evaluating SmartSync Pro ($35 for a single-user license; free trial download) for Kickstartnews.com, and one of its features is backup to/synchronization with a remote computer. I’m going to steal shamelessly from my review for Kickstartnews (due out sometime today or tomorrow) to discuss the DIY options for offsite backup.

SmartSync Pro provides two ways to back your data up to a remote computer: via e-mail and via FTP. The FTP option also allows you to create a mirror to duplicate the files on two different FTP servers.

Most web hosting providers also provide both public and private FTP directories, and most small and home office users have much more storage space on those servers than they’ll ever use, providing a built-in remote server for backup files. (If you’re not sure how to connect to your FTP server, check the account setup information you got from your hosting company when you set up your website.)

Instead of copying your files directly to the remote server, SmartSync Pro creates a compressed “package” containing all the files, then uploads it to the remote server. (You can password-protect this file, which is important for any data which you’re storing off-site.) Once the package is ready to go, you can open the files or run the programs which use them without worrying about interfering with the backup. A good thing, too: even over a cable connection, it takes a long time to transfer that package onto a remote server.

My 1 GB of critical data (Outlook PST file, business documents, and Quicken data), compressed down to about 700 MB, was 4 hours in transition—and timed out before copying was complete. I had to divide my data over multiple smaller profiles in order to get the files onto the server before the connection timed out. It made for a great exercise in deciding which of my files really are critical.

The problem isn’t with SmartSync Pro: it’s the nature of consumer broadband, which often puts a cap on upload speeds. Even with a USB 1.1 connection to my DVD-writer, I can burn a DVD with 4.7 GB of data faster than I can upload 1 GB to my FTP server. As for storing an entire Ghost backup of my machine online (assuming I had that much storage space on my web server, which I don’t), I could drive the DVDs to Oregon and come home again in the time it would take to upload them. And if I had a middling-quality DSL connection instead of cable, I could probably drive the DVDs all the way to my family in Cleveland. This is why companies pay for T1 lines.

So if you have large quantities of data that you want to store offsite and a T1 line isn’t an option for you, encrypt your data and put it onto CDs or DVDs, pop them into jewel cases, and mail them in padded bags to friends, family, or associates at least 50 miles away. If you feel reasonably confident that your bank’s vaults will survive that flood, fire, earthquake, or tornado, you can store your media, or even a spare external hard drive, in your safe-deposit box. (One advantage to 2.5” and smaller hard drives is that they’ll fit more easily into small protected storage areas, but I wouldn’t recommend sending them through the mail.)

Do you have a recommendation for an offsite backup option I haven’t mentioned? I’m always looking for stories of personal experience from real SOHO users.

Finally, remember that while offsite backup is good insurance, it’s not a replacement for onsite backup. When your computer goes down, you want your backups right there with you so you can get back up and running again, and if your machine won’t boot, it’s pretty hard to connect it to your online backup service.

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.

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.

Hope for Bank of America

Cashing in on the recent highly-publicized disappearance of Bank of America backup tapes, GST, Inc., of Lake Forest, California, has announced the release of a host-to-tape on-the-fly data encryption appliance called SafeDATA™. The product pages on the company's website include a handy 12-page presentation explaining what SafeDATA™ is and why it's a necessary addition to tape backup systems.

SafeDATA™ is about the size of an external hard drive, but with a starting price of $17, 250, it's not likely to appeal to the SOHO market. Most home-based businesses and independent professionals don't use tape backups anyway, and encrypted hard drives can be purchased for far less money.

But I hope Bank of America's IT department is rushing out to buy them. I don't want it to be my financial data that falls off the back of a truck.

Source: BusinessWire, March 7

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 10-31-03: Off-site Backups

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

Though I do try to get these reminders out on Friday, they do sometimes slide for a few days while I try to find something both new and useful to say about making backups.

Backing up your files isn't exciting, but it's important. I got yet another reminder of that in yesterday's paper, reading the story about the family that lost 8 houses in the Cedar Canyon fire.

One of them was writing a book. Her only copy was on the computer that there wasn't time to save.

"Only copy" is a very risky proposition.

Some records are important, but you don't need two copies of them: your bank can send you replacement statements, for instance. (Of course, they will charge you for it.)

With a lot of things, it's good to have both a digital copy and a hard copy. I keep my bank statements and business receipts even though all the information is in Quicken. I've also scanned all the photos my grandmother gave me, and was able to pass the originals on to my aunt, on whom the role of family archivist has devolved. For those pictures to be completely destroyed, something would have to take out both our houses. (I have them both on my hard drive and on CD.)

And that's the kind of backup you want to have for anything that's really significant. Your hard drive might well survive even a severe earthquake, but it's pretty unlikely that there's going to be anything left if your machine gets caught in a fire. And a disaster on the scale of the fires that have swept Southern California could well destroy your regular backups.

So if you're writing the Great American Novel, put a copy onto a CD and send it to friends or relatives out of state, even if it isn't finished. And do the same with anything else you have that's truly irreplaceable.

Until next week,
Sallie