Easter + World Back Up Day - Wooo - Whoooo!!

In honor of World Back Up Day and Easter, we shall re-run a salient article written recently on the subject...

DEFINITION

Before we delve into the type of backups you should be doing, let’s peel the onion on the word “disaster” and see what really constitutes the event, or if you will forgive the pun, "Let's backup a moment..." 

Now typically when we think of disaster, we are playing news clips of Hurricane “Sandy” or “Andrew”; hence, thwarting high winds, massive flooding, and fires, seem hopeless and overwhelming to the point our minds say, “Why bother, sounds like we would have bigger issues to deal with.”  In fact, most of the companies out there have unofficially adopted a “wait and see” policy, i.e., they think it’s probably better to wait and see if it happens and then eat the cost if necessary, and besides, that will never happen to us. If we are to be completely honest here, they are probably correct.  According to most research, e.g., Aberdeen Group (2011), only 5% of small and 9% of mid-sized business reported data loss from a natural disaster.  Now if that was your only concern, then this paper is over and you can rest easily.

OTHER DEFINITIONS

Now that we are being truthful here, let’s break down what really constitutes a disaster,

something close to home.  We are sure that the reader could add more.  So if we take a more realistic view of what could be termed a disaster and get away from the acts of nature argument, we may have something that is not only more tangible, but more likely as well.

 In recent survey’s IT professionals were asked what other sources outside Nature constitutes a disaster.  Of these here are the most prominent, i.e., hovers in the 30% arena.

·       Accidental Deletion

·       Employee caused

·       System failure

·       Viral/malware

·       Application failure

So with these definitions, one can not only appreciate the business need to address them, but can actually take measured steps to remedy them.

REAL REASONS

Let’s table the doom perspective and look at some real positive and profitable reasons why backup and disaster recovery plans can be part of your everyday professional career.

IT’S REALLY RECOVERY

Many view backup and disaster recovery as two separate entities, one being tactical and the later being strategic.  The first is the day to day backups, and the second being more a physical location and steps of getting their from here.  We would like to pose a wild idea that they are one and the same.  Regardless of how you define it, a disaster has degrees of complexity and challenges, it’s not black and white.  Hence, isn’t this what we are talking about?  Degrees of response to match the degrees of mishap.

With that, we are really looking at the same mechanism to drive all levels of recovery.  Yes recovery, backup is a misnomer, for it’s only half, if even that, the solution.   There are too many illustrations of why backup is a poor name, for anyone can tell you, a backup is worthless if you can’t restore it.  We could go on with the arguments of tapes vs. digital and why tapes if not refreshed, degrade and eventually become worthless, but we will spare you that pain.

SPRING CLEANING, IT’S A GOOD THING…

So with your Recovery system, one must first establish what is important to be part of the fail safe system?  This means an exercise to efficiently address the disparate systems, data, and hardware that houses your important data.  This exercise may even allow you to shed light on consolidation, prioritization, and localizing data and applications, and even streamlining your process and procedures to access them. It’s the spring cleaning you always wanted to do, with a real business need to do it.

The ability to protect more data and applications is more crucial today than ever, since the distinction between what’s critical and what’s not is getting more and more complicated.

IDC research states, Email messaging, desktop applications, and Web sites—usually not considered “mission-critical” aspects of IT infrastructure—often act as critical junctions for other, remote business-critical applications and servers. As a result, these seemingly less crucial IT assets could potentially become “single points of failure” for crucial applications if organizations do not provide backup systems or DR plans for them.

EFFICIENCY

Something that should be clarified, efficiency isn't just rapid access, but it also can be preventative.  Suppose you are on a unlicensed antiquated system that if ever dies, will take everything with it.  Building a hot spare of the system can provide the piece of mind that you always wanted. In fact, in the process you can even enhance the hardware so the application back up becomes the primary with more memory, faster drives, and peripheral enhancements that weren’t available in the original. 

SAVING MONEY

Having automated backup technology in place, not only assists and drives your Disaster Plan, but save operational time and money just in the process.

IDC research found that IT staff time associated with backup and recovery procedures could be reduced by 85% to 90% when automation and new technologies were applied.

MAKES MONEY

Normally this would be a touch one to quantify; however, Aberdeen’s study did all the heavy lifting.  Aberdeen divided their respondents into three groups, based on the success of their disaster recovery plans. For example,

Best-in-Class companies were defined as those having disaster recovery programs that recorded fewer than 1 downtime event over the last 12 months, required less than 1 hour to recover 90% of their functionality after each event, and met 95% of their company’s data availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs) over the last 12 months.  Here is the table:

Back Up Technology Today

Now that we have the "why", let's look at the "how"...  There are two streams of thought in today's back up technology, Delta Blocking and Binary Patching.  Oh ya, tapes, well if you are using tapes, not only are you spending waaaayyyy too much for your services, you're rolling the dice on whether the data shall be there.

Delta Blocking

In essence, the delta blocking process breaks down into equal sized blocks and computes each block's checksum, and then compares the checksum of each block from a modified file with the saved checksum of corresponding block from its previous version. Whenever the process finds a difference, it extracts a copy of the changed block into a delta file. The size of the delta file (cumulative size of these changed blocks plus location information) is usually less than the size of the original file. Backing up the generated delta file reduces the total backup size and corresponding transmission time.

Binary Patching

A binary patching process compares two different versions of the same file byte by byte and

only extracts the changed bytes instead of blocks into a new file that is compressed into what is known as a patch file. The patch file is often 85% to 99.9% smaller than the original file which the patch was extracted from.  Since two versions of the same file have to be compared at the user site, the previous version of the changed file has to be saved before any change is committed, which consumes more local disk space than delta blocking process that only stores checksums from the previous version of the considered file. The high efficiency of binary patching makes it possible to backup data even from slow dialup connections. Binary patching technology has been widely used by many hardware and software companies to distribute their software updates.  However, has proven to be significantly slower for backups.

And the Winner is...

Looking at the charts, your choice is clear – if storage space is at a premium, then binary patching is your choice; however, if time is of a concern, roughly 1/3 of the time, then delta blocking is a concern.  Basically, blocking is the way to go for organization that are Mid-size to large with mounds of data to backup and binary for smaller businesses that are concerned about storage space. However, storage is cheap, your time is valuable, so for our money... Blocking wins...

Source(s)

• http://continuityfocus.com/offsite-backup-and-disaster-recovery
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyc577kka3k

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

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About Rick Ricker

An IT professional with over 21 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.

For more information, contact Rick at (800) 399-6085