Main Menu

Free IT Survey

Please fill in your contact details.

 

Useful Links

Backup and Disaster Recovery


Introduction

Backup and Disaster Recovery is a large subject that is part of the larger subject of Business Continuity Planning which covers all aspects of your business.  For any company that uses IT to manage or run any part of their business it is essential that systems are put into place to make sure that your business is not damaged by the loss of essential data and the section effects of data loss on your business will give you a better understanding of the consequences of not having any systems in place.

The starting point for any business is to make sure that essential data is backed up and there are a number of ways to do this.  The backup technologies section on this page provides you with information about the various types of backup available and the pro’s and con’s of each.  A business that has a backup of their data will always be able to rebuild their business but the time frame will be dependent on the type of problem in the first place.

For companies that have a backup of their data but no other DR solution the normal time period for getting a server back up and running following a situation that renders it completely unavailable (such as theft) is about 5 days (can be longer if the required parts cannot be sourced on the first day of the disaster) and even then this does not take into account the normal teething problems relating to the installation of a new server.

The reality is that without a DR plan to protect your server and other key PC’s within your business you will be looking at 1 to 2 weeks to get your business back to the same level of IT availability as you had before the disaster.

The key issues that need to be considered are:-

For companies that can live with this time frame then having a backup of your data is sufficient but for anyone that is unable to live with these time scales it is essential to put a DR solution in place.

Having established that you need some form or DR solution above and beyond your standard backup the next consideration is how long you can afford to be down for.

The ideal situation is to have Zero downtime but to achieve this you need to spend a lot of money on your existing setup and then also have a second site with high speed links between the two at which point there is no problem designing a system around enterprise grade products such as Doubletake or VMware that will provide you with a near zero down time solution.  For most SME’s this type of solution is outside of their budgets or simply not viable and thus you need to be looking at an alternative solution.

top

Backup and Disaster Recovery solutions offered by Hands-On Computers

Hands-On Computers have spent a good deal of effort researching and testing various products on the market that can be used to decrease the amount of time required to recover from a major IT problem and now have 3 main solutions that when coupled with our Managed Disaster Recovery Service will reduce user down time to anything from 20 minutes to a day.

The key to all our solutions is being able to take an image of the server which includes all of the data and all of the system files in a format that can then be restored back in its entirety to the same hardware or in the case of the hardware being unusable to another device.

Option 1 applies to anyone that has an SBS 2008 server installed as the backup that comes with this, works on the basis of taking an image of the server onto external hard drives which is then automatically updated with incremental changes at various points throughout the day.

Pro’s

Cons

Option 2 is based on Storage Crafts Shadow Protect software which is installed onto the system that needs to be protected and then does incremental backups throughout the day onto external hard drives.  This product is very similar to the SBS 2008 solution but can be added to any server or desktop PC and thus provides a far more flexible solution with a greater level of control and reporting as it is a dedicated solution and as such could also be purchased by customers with SBS 2008 as an upgraded solution.

Pros

Cons

Option 3 is a hardware and software based all in one solution that provides a near enterprise class DR solution for a fraction of the cost thus is without a doubt the solution we would recommend if the budget is available.  The product is supplied by a company called A-server www.a-server.com direct to a registered Managed Service Providers such as ourselves who then implement and manage the product for their customers.

For further information on the product range and pricing please view the following PDF document: - A-Server BUDR appliance

top

Effects of data loss on your business

Nearly all companies rely upon information that is stored on their computers whether it be letters, spreadsheets or emails which in turn puts your business at risk in the event that this information is lost.

To put this into context if you search the web you can find various statistics relating to the effect of a disaster on a business and to save you searching, below is a few of the more disturbing ones:

The above statistics highlight what can happen if you lose everything and have no form of backup. In reality if you have a backup then it will always be possible to restore your data and get your business back on track given the right amount of time effort and money.

The list below shows some or all of the effects a disaster can have on your business:-

top

Backup technologies

Tapes

For many years the Tape was the recommended option as it was portable, reasonably robust and the tapes themselves were not expensive.  The tape can no longer be classed as a current technology and except in certain very specific situations you should not be looking at tapes as a new solution and when your existing tape drive fails it would be time to look at one of the other options shown in this section.

Optical media such as CD's/DVD's/blue ray etc.

Optical disks are ideal for taking a point in time backup of a piece of data but they require far more human interaction than a tape which will often lead to backups being forgotten. CD's can store about 700Mb with DVD's storing about 4GB of data which these days is not normally enough to back up all of the information held on a company’s network so in reality the only option would be to opt for blue ray which can store up to 50GB of data which is still not really enough and is comparatively expensive per GB.  As with tapes optical media has its place but is not recommended as your main backup solution.

External hard drives

This covers anything from a USB memory stick to any form of external hard drives.  External hard drives are the replacement for tapes as they are portable, have a low cost per Giga Byte, have fast access speeds (making it much quicker to backup and restore files) and can be moved between any machines unlike tapes that need to have the correct drive to plug into.  In short if you are looking for a basic backup solution then an external drive is the answer.

Network attached hard drives

Network Attached Storage (NAS) boxes have the same speed and compatibility benefits of an external hard drive but they are not designed to be particularly portable as they are intended to be left connected to the network all the time.  To provide an all round backup solution you would need to make sure that you backup the NAS box on a regular basis so that you always have an offsite copy of your data and this could be down with either an external hard drive or with an offsite backup solution.

A lot of NAS box’s will come with some form of software that provides you with additional benefits and a good example of this is the A-Server BuDR solution that we offer as this is a NAS box which also has imaging and virtualisation software built in so that in the event of a server going down an up to date copy of the server can be mounted within 20 minutes giving a very low level of downtime for your business which when coupled with offsite backup gives you a near enterprise level of Backup and Disaster Recovery solution in one appliance that doesn’t require any intervention from the customer.

Offsite backup

Offsite backup is where you transfer a copy of your data over the internet to a storage server held at another location and as such it is one of the easiest ways to protect your data as it doesn’t require any user intervention and can be easily managed and monitored.

The key downside to offsite backup are the recurring monthly fees for the service and the storage that you use and thus it is often a good idea to mix this with other forms of backup so that for example your accounts information is backed up on a daily basis using offsite with other less business critical files being backed up onto external hard drives.

Other concerns relate to the amount of time it can take to backup/restore large amounts of data over a broadband connection and the time it can take to have the data delivered back to you from the storage site as upon being asked they will need to copy the data and then courier it to you which may or may not be an issue depending on your planned recovery time scale.

The golden rule

Once you have a backup system you absolutely have to check it on a daily basis as we have so often seen situations where a customer contacts us and asks us to restore a file from last week only to find that the backup has not run properly for a month. The alternative to this is to take out a managed service with us as we are able to provide monitoring which will remove the need for you or your staff to take responsibility for this and will allow us to check on a daily basis that all is OK with your backup and many other aspects of your network.

Timeline for recovering from a complete loss of server access without a DR solution in place

If we take the example of your server being stolen simply having a backup is not going to help as there is no machine to restore the data onto. This is a scenario that we have had to deal with before and is also the one that is most likely to come up as any natural disaster is likely to have the same effect of rendering the server unavailable to restore to.

When asked how long it would take us to get a customer back up and running in the event of a server theft we quote about 5 days to achieve 90% of the pre disaster efficiency with the final (non critical) issues being teethed out over the next couple of weeks as they arise. This figure is broken down as follows:

Day one we receive a call at 9am informing us that the server has been stolen following which someone will come out to site as soon as possible to assess the situation. During the meeting we will discuss the options and then set about gathering the required installation disks and paper work. This is often a problem if everything has not been pre sorted out and will often hold us up and make the job more difficult.
The next stage is to order the parts for the new server which we can generally source next day but due to availability will often mean that we need to opt for alternative equipment which is likely to be more expensive as you can’t opt for something less powerful than you had.

Even with a pre 10am delivery time we can’t start building until the following day and it is then going to take us 4 or more hours to build and install the server (we can’t speed up the time it takes for software to install and it takes a lot of time to install all of the service packs and updates that are required before you can move onto the next part of the install).

In effect what this means is that from getting the call to the point of being able to start restoring data you are looking at two days. At the beginning of the 3rd day we should be in a position to deliver the server to the office and configure each machine onto the new server. At this point if we don't have full records of how the original server was setup then it is unlikely that we will have matched the new server settings exactly which means that each machine is going to have to be configure to the server from scratch which is going to waste more time. Depending on the number of machines at the office we should have them all configured to the new server by the end of day 3 and would expect to have most of the general data restored. Towards the end of day 3 and into day 4 we would configure email to send and receive new emails and we would then restore all of the old email. The rest of day 4 and 5 would be taken up with snagging the normal issues that arise with the installation of a new server.

If you were to put a figure on the cost to your business per day for having no access to your data and emails you could then roughly calculate a total cost impact of losing your server.

As an example if we worked out that the cost per day in lost revenue and staff charges was £5000 then the first 3 days would effectively be 100% loss giving a total of £15000 and days 4 and 5 would be interrupted and could thus equate to another £5000 of loss giving a total of £20000.

By implementing one of the DR solutions that we offer you can avoid all this and even with the lower cost solutions paired with our managed DR service you can get this time frame down to under a day or just 20 minutes in the case of the A-server solution.

top