Messaging News - February 2009 - (Page 28)

I t’s that time of year when our thoughts of New Year’s resolutions are just beginning to fade. So let me remind you of one resolution you should probably keep. Do have backups of your irreplaceable data? Are those backups recent enough that you would not loose anything serious? If the answer to either of these questions is yes then congratulations, you are solidly in the minority. Could you restore or work from those backups and not loose more than a couple of hours of work? If so, then you are in great shape, but hopefully I’ll still have something for you in this article. I will talk about online backup and storage services that serve as excellent complements to disk-based storage. The Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF) ratings of hard disks are largely disconnected from reality. Common street wisdom says you are lucky if your drive makes it 30 days past its warranty period. As many have said, the question of data loss is when, not if. Once you assume that data loss is inevitable, then backups are clearly essential—unless you are prepared to sacrifice your email, On Message with Ben Gross The Need for Simple Backup Solutions for Complicated Data photographs, bookmarks, draft letters and other data to the great data cemetery in sky. The problem of course is that our data and thus our backups have gotten far more complicated in recent years. Increasingly, portions of our data and even the backup themselves are stored in the cloud—data and services that reside in a collection online services, network drives, virtual servers and places we often just refer to as online. These days, I suspect most of us have complicated data, some of it is stored on home desktops or laptops, some on work machines, some of it online in the cloud, some backed up and some not. We may have multiple copies of sections of data and yet we may not have any copies of other data. Complicated data lends itself to complicated backup solutions. We often have good intentions about complicated solutions, like New Year’s resolutions, most of which we never quite get around to. Online Backup Services Online backup services are a viable option for many people to backup at least a portion of their critical data. 28 MESSAGING NEWS FEBRUARY 2009 They are relatively inexpensive, commonly about $50 USD a year for 50 Gigs of data and are a good compliment to other backup options. I currently do not recommend using an online service as your sole backup option unless you have less than 10 GB total as larger collections may take a week or more to upload, depending on your broadband connection, and many days to recover a large portion of the data. I do recommend keeping multiple backups and multiple types of backups at least a clone and an incremental backup, just to insure against accidental failure of the backup itself. Most collections of emails and word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentation decks are of relatively modest size and thus simple and fast to backup. Music and photos take substantially more space with video being even larger. Current online services are less ideal for very large collections. Another issue is that while many services can make backups to a local disk, they do not backup the entire disk and thus there is no way to do a bare metal recovery. You will still want to keep a clone of your hard disk to dramatically reduce the amount of down time in case of a disk failure.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - February 2009

Messaging News - February 2009 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes Options Grow for Virtualized Environments Messaging Predictions for 2009 Moving Into the Cloud IBM Comes Out Swinging Next in Messaging News Learning to Do More with Less: An RSA Conference 2009 Preview “On Message” with Ben Gross The Web Has Shifted. Is Your Network Ready? Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - February 2009

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