Honeycomb - IT Support

Scenario 1
You come to work and discover that all of your IT equipment has been stolen. No probs, you have backups, then you realise they were stolen as well. Hello bankruptcy. This scenario is the same for fire or any disaster where your building is destroyed.

Scenario 2
You have a computer crash. No probs, you have backups. You go to restore and find that the CD or USB Hard Drive (HD) doesn't work or the files are corrupt or you backed up something else completely or the backups haven't worked for 3 months.

We've seen these sorts of things many times.

Proper Backups
If you have data that is essential, then you must have a number of backups, with at least one copy kept off site. We recommend a minimum of 4 x USB HD for most businesses and if your data is super critical or you have the money, use a tape system with 10 or more tapes.

Step 1
Decide how much data you have to backup, then multiply this by 4 and that is the amount of space, at a minimum, that you want to have on your backup media, whether it be USB HD or Tapes. CD's or DVD's are generally OK for important documents for Home Users, but don't have enough space for most businesses. For servers, make sure you backup the entire server, including the "System State" for Windows Servers (you can exclude Temp storage areas). If you do this and you have a crash, you can usually get the OS loaded with any installed applications in a couple of hours. Sometimes this can take days if you don't do full backups.

Step 2
Decide on your budget. If you have lots of money or super critical data, use Tape Drives with 10 or more tapes to ensure that you have every chance of recovering data. For the more budget conscious, use 4 x USB HD. These are anywhere from about $120 to $500 each depending on the size. Yes you can get away with 2 x USB HD, but the more you have, the less chance of a problem recovering data.

Step 3
Decide on your backup rotation. Often backing up all of your data will take more than 12 hours, so backups can be running through the day, which slows your systems down drastically. The way around this is to do a Full Backup of all your data on a Friday night, letting it run over the weekend and just backup any new or changed files (called a Differential Backup, we don't recommend Incremental Backups unless you have huge amounts of data) during the week. If you only have a small amount of data, you can do a Full Backup every night and only use 2 x USB HD, but most businesses have too much data to use this system.

Step 4
Think again about the nature of your data. Is it critical, what would happen if it was all lost? Do you want to be able to recover files from more than two weeks ago in case you accidentally delete or write over a single file or folder? Using 4 x USB HD with a Full and Differential method, you should be able to recover any file during the last two weeks, as long as it wasn't deleted or written over on the same day. Make that decision again on what you are prepared to spend on backups.

Step 5
Decide on your backup software. Windows XP Professional and Server versions have a program called "NTBackup" which is installed by default. This has the advantage of being able to back up "open" files and the entire OS. "Open" files are the files that some application or process has open. Some programs place a "lock" on their files which prevents you from backing them up using something like the Windows "copy" command. A lot of the Windows system files are "locked" all the time, so if your PC or Server crashes, you can't restore the server quickly, you have to reinstall everything and set everything up from scratch, which can take days. NTBackup allows you to back up everything, so recovery should only take a couple of hours or so, plus the time to restore all the files. You may hear people talk about "Ghost". Ghosting can be a good option, but tends to be a little more complicated and NTBackup is free and already on your PC or Server (unless you have XP Home, in which case you have to specifically install NTBackup). Windows 7 and Vista has it's own Backup Center which can be scheduled to backup the entire PC. Options if you really only want to backup certain files, which you might like to do on PC's rather than a server, include using NTBackup via mapped drives, "copy" and "xcopy", all of which are built in to Windows. A more advance utility is called robocopy. You can download this from Microsoft as part of the Server resource kit. We recommend NTBackup, which you can access by clicking on "Start" then "Run" then typing "ntbackup" and hitting enter. Note: the "Run" menu isn't always visible, lookup the help centre on your PC to find out how to make it visible or go to "Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Backup". We don't recommend paying for backup software unless you are a large business.

Step 6
Buy everything and set it up. NTBackup has it's own help menu, so you can have a dig around in that to get a better understanding of how it works. Here is a basic method, start NTBackup and follow the prompts. When you get to what to backup, select "Let me choose what to back up". On the next screen, expand "My Computer" and select the drives that you want to back up. You can drill down a bit and exclude things if you like, but generally you want to backup everything, except CD or DVD drives and USB HD's. Make sure you tick the box that says "System State" as this backs up all the Windows files and allows you to restore the computer to the way it was. Click "next" and fill in the details, then "next" again, but DO NOT click "Finish". Here you want to click the "Advanced" button. Select "Normal" and "next", generally you don't need to verify the backup, but if you want to be extra sure it has worked, tick this box, choose "Replace the existing back ups" and leave the bottom box unticked. Click "next" and then choose "Later". Here you want to follow your nose, but make sure you click the "Set Schedule" button and set this backup to run every second Friday. You might as well call the "Job Name" "Full1". You will have to type in a username and password that has permissions to back everything up. Once completed, you need to do this again and choose the alternative every second Friday, so that one USB HD will backup on one Friday and the other USB HD will backup on the next Friday and they alternate for ever more. Call this Job Name "Full2". Now you need to do all this again, but choose "Differential" instead of "Normal" for the backup type and schedule this to run Monday and Wednesday nights. Call this Job Name "Diff1". Now do it all one more time and set this lot of Differential backups to run on Tuesday and Thursday nights and call this Job Name "Diff2".

Step 7
Finished. If only that were true! You need to check the backups every day to make sure they have run OK and to pick a few files at random and make sure you can restore them. You need to do an occasional restore, say once every 3 months, to double check that files are backing up OK and, most importantly, can be restored.

Step 8
Now we're finished. If only that were true! You need to make sure that you have at least one of the Full Backups offsite in case of a major disaster. If you have a good memory, only bring to work the backups you actually need for that night. Most people forget this, so generally just having one of the Full Backups offsite is the best solution. Bear in mind that if you have a major disaster and your at work backups are stolen or destroyed, you will only be able to restore whatever is on the offsite backup and only IF the backups have worked properly.

Summary
There is quite a lot more to backups if you really want to get involved and do them properly, but the above should solve 99% of your problems if your data is not super critical. If it is super critical, call us or someone else to come and work through a backup solution for you. People often baulk at the cost of doing backups, but we have never, ever seen anyone baulk at the cost of buying hardware equipment AFTER they have had a disaster, as the cost of the disaster has always been many times more than the cost of backup hardware.