In Praise of Tape Backup: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 08-01-08

This is a guest column by Jeff Mordkowitz, The Profit Coach. Jeff is the first person I’ve talked to who not only uses tape backup in a SOHO setting, but likes it. Most of what we hear about tape these days is unflattering, so I thought it was important to include the other side of the story.

None of the manufacturers listed below is paying me a commission for including them, and I don’t believe they’re paying Jeff, either.

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I love the tape backup system I put together for my home office. I guess I learned about the necessity and convenience of a tape-based disaster recovery/business continuity system from my old days in the NYC world of finance (banking). It’s not hard to do and addresses the needs I have for professional protection for my small business.

I use a four week (daily, weekly and monthly) “progressive” tape backup system (only files that have changed since the last backup are copied). The tapes are labeled A, B, C and D (one for each week). Each Sunday I clean the drive and swap in the next tape. The software tells me if I’ve put in the wrong tape. Tapes B, C and D are completely overwritten with each usage. Tape A is pulled out of rotation every four weeks for approximately three months (to have a quarterly backup) and once a year (to have an annual backup).

The system is set up to read after write (compare what was written to the tape to what was on the disk, and as mentioned, it also backs up open files). When the backup is finished, it sends me a nightly email with the previous evening’s backup status.

I back up my DATA folder, a few small folders in Program Files that have key setup options, and Documents and Settings. FYI, don’t forget to run Office 2003 Save Settings Wizard every couple of weeks if you use Microsoft Office. You will lose almost all custom settings if you don’t .(Office 2007 doesn’t have this option yet.)

I also restore a few files weekly to test the system. The old cliché, “You don’t have a backup system until you’ve verified a restore,” rings true here too.

I keep my daily tapes in another room in a fire-proof, water-proof box and my “A” tapes go to a safe deposit box in a local bank periodically. Fires, floods, water main breaks, hurricanes, brush fires, gas leaks (and of course disk crashes) occur regularly in different parts of the country. How long will you have a business (or a happy spouse and family) without any or all of your data? And, without doing a rotation, you can’t retrieve multiple earlier versions of your files. (Oops!)

Equipment (Don’t let the list prices scare you off.)

Software:	I use EMC’s Retrospect for Windows Single Server Edition (v7.5) with the Open File Backup add-on (a necessary add-on IMHO)
Hardware:	Three Dell computers (one laptop and two desktops cabled (100MB CAT 5 wire) to a Linksys WRT300N Router)
Tape Drive:	Seagate STT3401A 20/40GB TRAVAN Internal Tape Drive
Storage Media:	Imation TRAVAN 40GB TR7 20/40GB Data Tape Cartridge
Drive Cleaning Media:	Imation TRAVAN NS Dry Process Head Cleaning Cartridge, 30 Cleanings.
Protective Storage:	Sentry Safe 1 hour Fire-Safe and Waterproof Chest, 0.36 Cubic Feet

If you have any questions, I work as a Business Coach and you can call me at 917-579-7652, email me at Jeff@TheProfitCoach.net or visit my website at www.TheProfitCoach.net. Here’s to protecting our data!

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The one caveat I would add is that to make this work, you need to manage the tape rotation manually. For some people, that’s not a problem. I have a friend who’s never used backup software because she’s scrupulous about copying her data into backup folders and then transferring it into archive folders. (And she has a Mac, so creating a system image is fairly easy for her.)

Combined with the safe and the safe-deposit box, and the regular verification of backups, there’s no reason tape can’t be a workable solution. (And notice that it only takes one tape drive to back up three computers.)

Thanks again to Peter Shankman and Help A Reporter Out.

P.S. Be sure you bolt the safe to the wall or bury it in the ground if it’s small enough to be carried off by thieves.

Technorati Tags: HARO,TRAVAN,tape backup,Jeff Mordkowitz,Profit Coach,Imation

Rotating Backup Media and Other Tricks: FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 03-30-07

Alas, I am in a tearing hurry this morning. I hate being in a hurry. I’m good with deadlines, but I’m not at all good at hurrying. Things tend to take longer when I hurry.

Despite the fact that I don’t have time to write a regular column, I do have several handy bits of backup-related news to share, so I’m going to direct you to some other sources of useful information.

The last time I talked about rotating backup media was in 2005, as part of the general discussion of tape backups. The most complex backup rotation schedule (at least of those I was surveying) is called the Tower of Hanoi.

A company called BackupCheckup has now created a web-based Tower of Hanoi Backup Scheduling Assistant. A friendly member of their staff pointed it out to me in an e-mail recently. Here’s what the website says about the service:

The Tower of Hanoi method of tape rotation provides for archiving an effective number of backups. It also gives the maximum ability to go back over time with a limited number of tape sets. The disadvantage is that it is one of the more complex rotation methods to keep track of.

Backup Checkup’s Tower of Hanoi scheduling assistant will keep track of which tapes to use next and will send you a friendly email reminder on the date the backup is to be run. This greatly simplifies the task of tracking which tapes to use. You can also come back here to determine which set of tapes to use when you need to restore data.

It’s a free service, so if you use removable media like tape, REV drives, or even flash drives and keep getting confused about which tape goes with what day’s backup, you might want to check it out.

To any backup vendors who might be reading this: I’m happy to investigate and mention your product if you approach me politely and it’s appropriate for my readership (small offices and home-based businesses). I’d much rather a direct approach than a quasi-spam posting in the comments, though I will let those comments stand if they refer to legitimate backup products.

For those of you who use external drives or online backup services and don’t need a rotation schedule, here are a couple of other things that have come down the pike recently.

Scott Hanselman accidentally deleted all his father’s e-mail and set up a family backup policy to prevent a recurrence. His account, including hand drawings of the new setup, is here.

Mac OSX Hints has an article with a script for making fast backups to an ISO image (which is the thing you need to burn a CD). The author of the script, “Eldino,” has an engaging article about why he created it and what it does, starting out with

I bring my iBook everywhere, and I store on its drive 80% of my important data, since I use it for studying, working, scripting, doing projects for university, listening to music, downloading stuff, browsing, printing nice articles found on the Web to PDFs, etc. Scared by the fact that hard drives fail when you least expect it—and trust me, they still fail if you (like me) love your hardware more than your girlfriend.

If you’re a Mac user and want to be able to back up your drive to an image, check out the article.

So that’s it for today. I hope you find something useful in at least one of those articles. Now it’s time for me to go earn a living.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 1-28-05: Is Tape History?

Dear FileSlinger™ clients, colleagues, and friends:

Tape of one kind or another is the oldest of computer backup technologies. For decades tape was the only way to store computer data. Computers inherited tape from teletype machines. These tapes were actually rolls of paper with holes punched in them in binary code. (See a photo.) At this point in time all computer data was kept on punch cards or punch tape.

By the 1950s, mainframes and supercomputers were using reel-to-reel magnetic tape to store and back up data. In the 1970s, quarter-inch cartridge tape (QIC) began to replace the half-inch reel-to-reel tape. By the 1980s, when I met my first computer (a Radio Shack TRS-80), QIC was the standard tape format for backing up standalone computers. By comparison with the reel-to-reel systems, a QIC drive was inexpensive, which made it more appealing to those with small businesses than the larger-format tape.

The Ur-Guru has this to say on the subject of QIC tape:

“They were slow as hell. The tapes often required a 1 or 2 hour format process prior to use, and they weren't as reliable as people wanted to make you believe. In fact, those things in an environment with smoke would mean the drive would die within months.” (The Ur-Guru is a heavy smoker.) “Dust, etc. were also major killers. Cleaning the heads was like cleaning the head of a tape deck, but... usually after doing that things would not get better... often it got worse. In about 3 years time I must have gone through about five brands of QIC-80 tape streamers (250MB it was I believe) and probably a total of 10 drives.”

And we think backing up is a hassle now!

So who would want to use tape? Well, the only alternative at the time was 5.25-inch floppy disks, and for anyone running a business, particularly a software and graphics business as the Ur-Guru was, those weren’t an option. The files were too big to store on those disks. Even when 44 MB SyQuest disks came along, and then 100 MB ZIP disks, and eventually writable CDs, tape was still the least expensive way to store large quantities of data.

By that time QIC had been replaced by 8mm “helical scan” Digital Audio Tape (DAT). To hear tape drive manufacturers like Exabyte tell it, DAT was a wondrous revolution. It did allow for much more data stored on the same length of tape. It was, as the Ur-Guru points out, “Great for sound. Great for data. But unfortunately also not as secure and solid as manufacturers made you believe. Same issues, same problems. But cheaper for the tapes and a lot more expensive for the drive. I remember paying something like $2000 for my 12GB DAT streamer. However, it was the only way to do backups of large amounts because writing CDs was just too damn slow (2x and 4x speed writers being the top of the line at the time).”

Most owners of personal computers didn’t have large quantities of data, so floppy disks and ZIP disks were just fine for backup. (My parallel-port 100MB ZIP drive is still working, and I was able to get rid of a lot of floppies by getting it.) In fact, most owners of personal computers today—and that means most small and home offices—still don’t have large quantities of data relative to their other options for storage.

So who would want to use tape, and why? Stay tuned for next week’s Backup Reminder Newsletter and find out!

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 7-2-04: Backup Links & Tape Backup

Dear FileSlinger clients, colleagues, and friends:

This week, in addition to the usual reminder to back up your data and/or hard drive if you have not yet done so this week, I have a couple of links to backup-related resources for anyone who wants to pursue this subject in greater detail.

ZDNet (publisher of a variety of computer magazines) maintains a large database of news articles as well as a library of white papers, webcasts, and case studies (mostly produced by hardware and software vendors). For many of the latter you need to register not only with ZDNet but with the sponsor of the white paper or webcast, so it can take a bit of time filling out forms and answering surveys in order to be able to look at the content. There is no charge for registering either place, however.

ZDNet Backup News

ZDNet Backup White Papers, Webcasts, and Case Studies

After noticing a webcast entitled Tape Backup 101 (sponsored by HP), I spent a few moments pondering the subject of tape backups, something with which I am not intimately familiar. I remember hearing about them first when I was an undergraduate and doing all my computing (which basically amounted to e-mail and word-processing) on the IBM mainframe. If, when you graduated, you wanted a copy of your data, you had to ask for it on tape. I never did, thus leaving behind both my senior thesis and a couple of novels—but I am not sure how I would have gotten the files off of the tape and into a usable form when I arrived at my Macintosh-based grad school department anyway.

Back in those days, all of my computer documents could be kept on one floppy disk, anyway. Even at the time I left grad school in 1994, it took only a handful of disks to hold my enormous (but unfinished) dissertation, my (unpublished) novels, my Quicken data, my e-mail, and my contact databases. So I was a long way from needing to make tape backups.

The disadvantage of tape as a backup medium is obvious to anyone who has ever compared a CD to an audiocassette: you have to move through it sequentially in order to find anything. Nevertheless, for many years tape was the only conceivable medium for backup of really large quantities of data, because nothing else had the capacity. Even home offices might have them, and certainly universities and corporations did.

These days most home and home office users are more likely to use external hard drives, CDs, or DVDs for backup. They are easier to search and harder to erase accidentally than tapes. But tape is not dead: many companies use it for archiving their older backup materials even if they have network storage arrays for their shorter-term backups. So while 3.5" diskettes seem to be going the way of their 5.25" brethren, it appears tape will be with us for a while yet.

Send me your backup questions and I'll do my best to answer them—but if you want a tape system installed, I'll refer you to someone else.

More backup news next week,
Sallie

FileSlinger™ Backup Reminder 6-25-04: Dead Media

Dear FileSlinger™ clients, colleagues, and friends:

I've been searching the Web for interesting items on backups and came across an article discussing the frequent failure of backup systems (due to one reason or another) and the even-more-frequent failure of businesses and individuals to have backup systems. One response written to this article was from a developer at a major storage management company, insisting that his company's products were very good and you could count on them. The further responses to this letter ran along the lines of "As if."

Then there were two articles on the subject of "dead media"—the first one arguing that because hard drive read/write speed can't keep up with processor speed, we need another kind of disk to replace them. Many programs these days resist writing to the drive in order to maintain their speed—which is part of why you need so much more RAM than you used to. (And why having programs set to autosave your files can slow you down a lot if you are working with large files.)

Writing to other media is even slower. My new DVD-writer will write to a CD at 24x, but slows down to 1x when inscribing data on a DVD-RW. (Anyone who can answer the question "1x what?" gets a prize.)

The other article discussed the obsolescence of longer-term storage media—anyone remember 5.25" disks? Since back in the days when I was an academic discussing electronic library projects with colleagues, people have been concerned that if they store their data electronically, it will be unreadable in the future, whereas writing on paper could still be read centuries from now.

Well, maybe. There are in fact fairly substantial fragments of perfectly legible ancient writing preserved on Egyptian papyrus. I got to spend one summer proofreading the printout of the newly-digitized version of a lot of them, back at the University of Michigan. But the survival of those documents depended on special conditions of climate and storage, and there are not very many people who can read the actual papyri (or even medieval manuscripts, in the case of Greek and Latin), because the style of writing is strange even to those with knowledge of ancient languages.

Most of the ancient texts we have today come to us because they were copied over and over: as one copy deteriorated, another was made. Greek texts went from papyrus to parchment to vellum to paper and were eventually mass-produced by printing press and finally scanned or typed in to electronic databases.

So it is with our electronic data. When we get a new kind of storage medium, we tend to copy our old data onto the new medium. This is just as often because the new media takes up less physical space as because we are thinking about long-term preservation. When I got a ZIP drive, I was able to get rid of a lot of floppy disks by copying them onto ZIP disks. The same holds true for ZIP disks and CDs, though before rewritable CDs became so common, ZIP disks still had an advantage over them. In most cases, we will keep moving what matters to us onto new media—and, if we still use those files at all, into new formats.

Besides, computers allow us to make so many copies, without deterioration of quality, that it becomes ever easier to make sure that some copy of a work is preserved. The challenge becomes one of having so much data that we can't remember or can't find what's there, so I will conclude by saying: label your backups.

But first go and make them.

More backup news next week,
Sallie