The Consultants Backup Strategy Part 2

Happy Friday everyone. On Tuesday I brought you part 1 of The Consultants Backup Strategy. We discussed Personal backup solutions. Today we are going to talk about office computer backups.

Let’s start with some facts.
According to Carbonite – “97% of laptops that are stolen are never returned.” Mozy states “Every week 140,000 hard drives crash in the United States.” Those are some horrible odds that your laptop will be stolen, or your hard drive will crash. Backing up should be second nature by now – especially in an office setting.

No matter if you are a small 3 person company, or a 100 Fortune 500 company – backing up is essential. So how do you deal with office computers?
Let’s find out…

If your office doesn’t have a fileserver you can pretty much treat each computer as you would a personal backup, with a HD and some sort of offsite backup. In those rare cases, you also might want to think about having a fileserver just to make your life a little easier…but that’s another topic.

For those with an OS X based fileserver 10.5 and 10.6 have a really nice built in feature that allows you to have a sharepoint act as a Time Machine location for computers on your network. Let’s break this down a little. A sharepoint is a location on your server (usually a folder) that is accessible by users on the network. The server administrator sets permissions as to who can read and/or write to that particular folder. When you as a user connect to your fileserver this is the place where all your data is stored. This allows for multiple people in your organization to share files efficiently. Now in 10.5 (and even better in 10.6) server – Apple included the ability to set one of these sharepoints to be a folder where a client computer’s Time Machine can back up to over the Apple File Protocol.

On the server – just follow these steps:
1. Open Server Admin
2. Click Filesharing
3. Show your sharepoints
4. Click the option to “Enable as Time Machine backup destination”
5. Make sure AFP is turned on.

Once this is configured properly the client computer should see the share point as a possible destination. Now there are upsides and downsides to using this technology. The upside is that all the users, while in the network will backup automatically every hour. The downside is the initial backup could take a while, depending on the speed of your network and how much data needs to be backed up. Transferring 100GB of data on a 100mbit pipeline can take like 2 full days. Time Machine is smart enough, however that if the backup process gets interrupted it will just pick up where it left off.

For more advanced server administrators, you can use Terminal to change how Time Machine runs – so you don’t use up so much of your in network bandwidth having so many computers backing up at once.

There are other backup applications that work well over a network as well. Retrospect server for example. From my experience, the Windows (gasp!) version works better than the Mac version. The Windows version of Retrospect server can connect to Macs running the Retrospect Client software – making it a great program to use when you have a mixed environment.

Now all of this is still just keeping a local backup of users data. If there is a fire or a flood in the server room all of the clients backups are lost and gone. If this does happen, you are just playing the odd’s with hoping that the clients computer doesn’t go down also. So what do you?

Option 1 – Removable tape drives. This is more for server grade backups – so we’ll go into more details in part 3 of this post – but the basic run down is that you back your data up onto multiple tapes and take the tapes out of the office on a regular basis. Got 5 tapes no problem, got 48 tapes – could be a problem. But we’ll talk more about this later.

Option 2 – Offsite backup. Depending on data requirements, and the size of your office (preferably offices under 15) you can back up not only to a local server but provide each client with some sort of offsite backup. Administrators should definitely do this if the client machine is a laptop that’s often taken offsite. Using services that we’ve mentioned before, Mozy, Carbonite, or Virtua Computers Offsite Backup (disclaimer, I own Virtua Computers) – can backup the clients data when the client isn’t around for the networked server to back them up. Both Mozy and Virtua Computers Offsite Backup applications are designed with bandwidth throttling (I couldn’t find this information out on Carbonites website). Bandwidth throttling really comes in handy for laptop users on the go. They can backup on their WiFi or on a 3G connect card and have control on how much bandwidth is used. So while backups might be slower at least they are backed up. For desktop computers, using either of these services to backup time machine data could be implemented (though not suggested), so a scheduled backup at night should be done to back up just the most important data (as all the office information should be on the fileserver anyway).

Depending on how much data is being backed up, some mix of these options given should be used. It’s always best to spend a little more per month backing up all the company secrets than it will be trying to recover the company secrets from a hard drive that’s been burned in a fire, or run over by a truck (don’t laugh it happens WAY too often!).

Next Tuesday we’ll be back with part 3 of The Consultants Backup Strategy discuss servers.