Mass Data Protection & Recovery

Hi Gang, I’m back… Some people have recently said that backing up 100GB is too expensive. I have two things to say to that:

1. How do you define too expensive?  If you lose that data, or are only able to recover bits and pieces of it - which may be worse than losing it all, how much will that cost you? Don’t forget to calculate lost productivity, missed billing opportunities, the hard cost of tech services personnel…
2. Why would you think that only one solution is viable?  Do you keep all of you important financial papers in your safe deposit box at the bank?  You probably only keep the most important stuff there - you can implement the same strategy with NDP.  Protect only the OS, accounting and critical files.  For most of us that will only cost about $50 per month.  Not too expensive to keep your business going when the s*** hits the fan.

There are those who backup - and those who will.

Later,
John

Hey everyone!

I thought I’d go over a couple neat things you may or may not know you could do with the LiveVault Data Backup service.

Imagine this: You have a report due tomorrow which needs to be submitted to another office across the country. You’ve been working all day — you start to feel aches all over as the clock strikes 11pm. As you type the final paragraph and hit the Save button, you get a message that you’ve lost connection to your server. The server has crashed. What would you do?

Anyone who uses LiveVault knows that it’s known for its reliabiltiy in securely restoring your server back to its functional state in a time-efficient manner, but how will you get that report out by tomorrow? Well, this is where the first of the two features comes in: Restoration to another computer. If you log into the LiveVault web portal and choose restore, the only option is to restore to your server. To work around this, you can download the LiveVault Agent on another computer and register it. Now when you choose to restore to another computer, you should see that computer on the places you are able to restore to. Just choose that report you were working on and you’ll have the most recent version of your document on your desktop.

Another nice feature I’d like to bring up is the ability to back up files that constantly change. Just to clarify, LiveVault already backs up files as the data within that file changes. Though, what if the file name changes? For example, a Quickbooks company file in which the last date changed is part of the name: “05.20.09 CompanyData.qbw.” When LiveVault looks for 05.20.09 CompanyData.qbw, it won’t find it the next day because the name changed to 05.21.09 CompanyData.qbw. The best way to always have your data backed up regardless of name is to create a folder and set LiveVault to back that folder up. This way, it will back up all of the files within the folder regardless of name and keep your data safe and off-site.

Well, I hope this information helped in some way. For those of you who aren’t sure about LiveVault or don’t have any disaster plan in place, check out www.nationaldataprotect.com and give our 30-day free trial a shot! Have a great evening guys!

Sincerely,

Ryan

Hi Everyone!

An important part of protecting your data should include a method to actually destroy the data.  Imagine this scenario:

You back up your data daily to a tape and rotate the tapes every two weeks, allowing you to have one week’s worth of tapes off-site.  So far so good.  After a few cycles you retire the tape set and replace it with a new set so you can be sure that you don’t run into the typical mechanical failures associated with tapes.  Now you throw out the old tape set and go home to relax.

It seems good to this point, but there is a potentially huge headache for you.  We skipped destroying the data before the media was discarded.  Your data can now potentially be read (especially if you didn’t encrypt it) by anyone with a tape drive - and don’t convince yourself that nobody wants to see your data.  While the information contained in your backups may not be directly usable, resourceful data thieves may be able to use it to get at more financially rewarding (to them) information.

Basically the point is: Destroy your discarded backup data - you never know who will see it!!!

All my best - John

I’m back! I had an interesting issue occur today that I thought could help you all out.

When you need to recover data that is synchronized between multiple data stores or database types, you have to make sure (in general) that you recover all the data to the same point in time.

For instance, we have a client who runs a Microsoft SQL server that has data which is in sync with Intuit Quickbooks.  It took a while to figure out why the custom application was failing, but when we narrowed it down to the mismatched data - the client admitted to us that they restored the QB file alone.  The solution was simple - restore both to the same point in time and we were good to go.

The lesson here is to document the recovery requirements from an application and operations perspective, don’t just rely on having all your data backed up.

Recently, I’ve been asked about various methods of backup and why perform one versus another.  To make it a little more clear, I’d like to explain why a strategy of layered protection can be the most effective way to guarantee your ability to restore the data you need relatively quickly.

The first layer (and arguably the most important) is to make sure your data is sent off-site.  Keeping your data at least 50 miles away from your main location will protect you from failures that involve environmental factors such as severe weather, blackout / brownout, building failures (cooling, electrical, etc…) and even flooding and fire.

The second layer is to keep your data on a locally accessible device that will allow you to quickly recover from local hardware failures.  This protects you from server hardware failures such as drive crashes, fried motherboards and even slips of the finger.

Finally, the third layer is to include file versioning.  Considering that several kinds of malware can attach themselves to your files (executable and non-executable) and be subsequently backed-up, you want to be able to roll back your files to a point before the infection.

When you implement a recovery solution that includes all of these features, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where you can’t restore the data you need.

Check http://www.NationalDataProtect.com for your total Backup & recovery solutions!