How a 1-800-HOSTING Geek Maintains His Backups

John Cunningham — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:53:38 +0000

Backups, backups, backups, everywhere you hear of backups. That is both a good and bad thing since backups can’t be stressed enough. You have heard enough about backups from a server stand point, but what about the most important machine, yours! I’m talking about your local computer, the one that warms your house in the winter. I have been into computers for over a decade and more importantly, I have those same files from all those years. How? Backups!!! Here is how I’ve done it.

Simply put, extra hard drives. Before the years of cheap consumer backup solutions I would simply make a 1:1 copy of my data from drive to drive. Forget about compression and zipping, pure and simple copy/paste. Sure it was more expensive, but I never trusted any other program with my data. If it was there and I could browse through it, I knew it was okay. Over the years I have gotten smarter as I learned some tricks of the trade. One of the most important thing you can do is put Windows and your programs on 1 partition (or 1 hard drive). I say this because I have tried making Windows one partition and “program files” another, only to be in a worse off place when it comes time to recover from a disaster. There are too many programs out there that embed into the registry and if you have a new OS but old programs, things won’t work right. I will go elaborate on this later. So whats the big deal? I’m talking about those unrecoverable party pictures down in New Orleans, or the large MP3 collection. Keeping those safe are whats more important.

Recently, I’ve gotten smart(er). What I do with my personal computer is have three dedicated hard drives. One hard drive for the OS and programs, one drive as a buffer drive, where I temporarily store anything new that is incoming (optional), and most important, the third data drive. It’s my largest drive in my personal computer. TIP: On this drive I have the “My Documents” folder. So anytime I reload an OS, I simply right click “My Documents” and choose “change location” and point it to my docs on the data drive” Microsoft makes a simple tutorial on this. Mind you, my data drive has always been W:\. Why ‘W’? It’s way down in the list of letters to choose from so I don’t have to worry about plugging in too many flash drives. All my pictures, saved game files, taxes, and iTunes files are on W:\ so all I have to do is reference it if I have to reinstall anything. This has helped me a tremendous amount when having to reinstall simple programs like iTunes or some of my games. They already reference your “My Docs” folder and are ready to go. Anytime I get a new hard drive as a replacement, I simply copy 1:1 over to the new drive and relabel it W:\ and poof. Everything is back the way it was.

What about backing up that data drive though? A true god send, Acronis True image. Before, I said I would never trust anything with my data. I have tried so many different programs to keep a 1:1 synced backup. I fell upon Acronis True Image and they have saved my computer a number of times. No, I’m not getting paid to say this and no, I don’t work for them. I am a simple consumer like you. I take a snapshot of my C:\ and back it up onto my W:\. I then backup the W:\ off-site or onto another computer. That way, I have backups of backups and helps keep the cost down on the extra hard drives. I always keep a fresh base copy so I can roll all the way back if need be. A middle “got everything the way I want it” copy and lastly a “latest copy” This helps keep disk space and confusion down when it comes time to restore.

If you are thinking, “but Ben, RAID has proven itself on an enterprise level and at home blah blah…” RAID is not a backup solution! I use RAID on my NAS at home that houses my backups. Too many times have I seen RAID fail not because of a failed hard drive, but a bad controller card. Murphy’s Law at its best. However you backup your personal data is up to you. Just make sure it’s not on the same computer you need to restore.

Disaster Prevention and Recovery

Mark Kraus — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:59:20 +0000

Today’s business operates on a model that requires 100% uptime and 0% data loss. All websites, from banks and store fronts to blogs and social networking, cannot afford any downtime as it could result in loss of revenue. Data loss can require hours of recreating the data which is also unfavorable to a company’s daily operations. Many companies, large and small, have disaster recovery plans, but even fewer have disaster prevention plans. These two concepts are vital in ensuring 100% uptime and 0% data loss.

Disaster Recovery

Most people are familiar with disaster recovery, though they may not realize it. Disaster recovery is a combination of procedures and technologies that bring systems back to a working state from a disastrous failure. The disaster recovery plan for a company can be as simple as a single server with backups running, or as complicated as having a 100% survival plan that would completely recover from any number of potentially unfortunate circumstances. The most common disaster recovery technology is data backups. Data backups copy all or some data from one server to another server, off-location. Alternatively, they can be stored on removable media such as backup tapes or hard drives.

Disaster recovery’s primary advantage is that it allows you to bring a system back online from complete failure. Hardware is not perfect and failure is not always predictable. Additionally, any other form of disasters such as fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms can cause a system to fail. A solid disaster recovery plan can alleviate the inconvenience of a hardware or weather related failure. However, the major drawback of disaster recovery is that it is slow. Restoring a single server from backups can take anywhere from 24 hours to a week, depending on the amount of data to restore and the backup technologies used. As it stands, disaster recovery does not ensure a 100% uptime but does ensure a 0% data loss.

Disaster Prevention

Disaster prevention is a combination of policies and technologies to prevent a system from going down. As stated previously, very few companies are aware of disaster prevention and even fewer actually implement it. Disaster prevention can take form in many ways, the most common being user policies. These are security permissions and internal company policies that are implemented to prevent a system from failing due to user error. Redundancy technologies are also a form of disaster prevention. These technologies provide redundant hardware and software to ensure that if one set fails, the other stays online. Redundancy technologies include hardware RAID, load balanced clusters, and off-site failovers.

Disaster prevention’s primary advantage is that it will ensure your systems are up 100% of the time. With a website, frequent hardware, software and OS maintenance may need to be performed, which requires a server to be taken offline. Redundancy allows this process without downtime via an alternate server or set of servers that continue providing the site. Also, if one server fails, the others can take over seamlessly. A large disadvantage to disaster prevention is cost. Redundancy often times means doubling or more, the operating costs of hardware, licensing, and maintenance. Smaller businesses may find it cost restrictive to implement redundancy. A company needs to evaluate the value of it’s uptime to determine viability of redundancy and no one formula fits all. However, if your primary revenue stream comes from your web presence, disaster prevention needs to be highly considered.

Which One to Use?

Neither disaster recovery nor disaster prevention alone can provide for 100% uptime and 0% downtime. Increasing more effort, time, and money will directly impact how closely a company will reach these goals. We don’t live in a perfect world and not everything can be planned. It’s important to remember technology is not a cure-all, but with the right amount of preparation and helpful tools, a company can rest relatively well, knowing their bottom line is protected.

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How a 1-800-HOSTING Geek Maintains His Backups

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