There’s been an odd few times when I’ve been asked for an ‘IT’ related New Year’s Resolution. I’m not sure what this says more about; me or the people asking, but there it is. The answer is always the same as it will be here. If you do anything ‘new’ in 2012 to look after your computers just make sure they’re backed up. Just for fun (yes, I said fun) let us expand this concept a little further and see what we can do to improve things.

First of all, you do back up don’t you? Yes, yes, of course, silly of me to ask and I definitely didn’t see you cross your fingers behind your back just now. Actually, given the people I’m writing this for, our beloved partners, I actually do expect you are backing up everything important and don’t need some so-and-so like me lecturing you on the most basic law of IT management. Still, bear with me…

The actual process of backing up has changed dramatically over the past few years. The main culprit has been the rise of the ‘cloud’ (or as us old get-off-our-lawn IT types would have it, ‘Networks’). Now the public have started to cotton on to cloud computing, products and services have started to appear that can take a lot of pain out of the backup process. Remember tapes? Spanned ZIP files on CD-ROMS? Many of you probably still come across the odd Exabyte tape now and again.

Well, they’re all going the way of the Dodo thanks to high-speed Internet access and the cheap availability of hard disk drives.Backing up into the cloud gives us a key advantage to backing up in a single location: Physical-level redundancy. Simply put, if your office burns down and you’ve been backing up into the cloud, your data is safe. Also, you’re not restricted by size and lag (the time between data being created and a backup existing) is minimal. After all, you’d feel a bit silly if you had been backing up religiously to a pile of DVDs next to your PC only to have the burglar grab them as well as the machine.

There’s another thing to consider as well, downtime. So you may have a good off-site backup, but if a drive fails how long before your business is up and running again. Some service back everything up but if you want gigabytes of data back, it has to be couriered to you. There are simple ways of dealing with this.

Here’s some suggestions that can help you improve your backups and redundancy in 2012:

Get a Drobo
One of my favourite things, a Drobo. Built by some boffins in the US, Drobos are RAID systems that do not use RAID. They do the same job but are designed to circumvent many of the common problems associated with RAID. My Drobo is the basic model and can take four hard disks. They can be any size up to 4TB each and, best of all, do not have to match in any way, they just need to be SATA. The Drobo box presents the combined size of the drives, with about 20% reserved for redundancy, as a external USB or Firewire drive. It looks after all the ‘RAID’ side of things. One drive can fail with no data loss or interruption of service. If you have a spare to hand, just pop the naughty drive out (yes, it’s hot-swap) and replace. A few hours later redundancy is back online.

Get Two Drobos
A Drobo is not a backup solution, it’s a redundancy solution. If you want to avoid accidental deletions, get a second Drobo and backup one to the other. You’ve now got doubled redundancy and good solid backup.

Got a Mac? Use Time Machine
I’m starting to lose track of the amount of hand-clasped-other-mouth moments Time Machine has got me out of. Time Machine backups up changes on your Mac to an external hard disk or most network-connected storage devices on an hourly basis. Using a rather groovy interface you can then ‘rewind’ any directory on your system to any point since backups began. It’s backup you don’t need to remember to do.

Get On-line Off-site Backup
Online backup providers have now well and truly entered the Web 2.0 age. Prices have come crashing down and there’s no upfront investment required. At home I use Backblaze. It’s about £4 a month for unlimited (yes, no catch) backup over the Internet. I chose them because they offer end-to-end encryption so no-one at Backblaze can ever read your files. So, if their systems are ever compromised, I don’t need to worry. Every night, all the day’s changes are streamed up to their data centres while I sleep. The initial run took three weeks to complete but it was running quietly in the background, so I neither knew nor cared. Also check out Mozy, Carbonite and Livedrive.

Dropbox
A techie’s favourite. Completely free for up to 2GB of storage, Dropbox silently syncs a directory on your computer with the cloud. You can share this folder with others, which gives up multiple backup and Dropbox will retain 30 day’s worth of changes for you, so you’re protected against deletions as well. Uploads happen as soon as you change or add anything so you’re pretty much always protected. What’s not to love? I have a 50GB account for all my critical stuff.

Backup Your Emails
You didn’t think we would miss a chance for a little self-promotion, would you? Of course, the easiest way to have a live backup of all your emails is our very own MessageBunker. Either have us log into your email server as an IMAP client and take a copy of everything or have your server ‘push’ email to use via our recently improved journalling options. Either way, you’ll always have a backup of your inbox without bothering with messy PST files. All you need to read any email is access to a web browser and if we have access we can push restores back directly into your mailbox.

Use Gateway To Bring Redundancy To Email
The number one comment we get regarding our email-filtering Gateway service relates to the added bonus having an SMTP feed backup. Those who have their own email servers in their offices often rely on an ADSL line for connectivity. Should there be a problem with the line, incoming emails will hit a brick wall and your customers or suppliers may get rejection emails from their own servers (‘bounces’). If you’re using our service to filter spam and viruses you also get a neat ‘queue’ built-in. Should your SMTP server suddenly stop accepting emails, we will keep accepting them and hold them in a queue. During downtime, you can use our webmail client to access the queue as if it where a normal email account. We’ll store email for as long as it takes for your server to come back on-line and then we’ll push the email down to you. You won’t miss a thing.

Don’t Backup to USB Keys or DVDs
Well, don’t make it your *only* backup. DVDs and USB keys are not considered archival quality. In other words, they can go wrong. Don’t make this your only form of backup. In fact, don’t rely on any single form of media for backup, you may find one day it’s no longer available (e.g. Jaz drives). Also, both forms are easily portable and therefore more easily lost or stolen.

Whatever You’re Doing, Test It
Rule number one (so why it’s at the end I’ve no idea). Whatever your strategy is, make sure you regularly ‘pretend’ to lose something and try and get it back. I could bore you stiff with the amount of stories I’ve heard of people backing up to broken tape drives only to realise when it’s too late.

Have a great Christmas,

PJ