Backups – offline or online?
Our industry – the “IT industry” – is always looking for the next “next big thing” to sell.
Everyone got email in the late 90’s, then usefully fast internet acess in the early 2000’s, and now email everywhere has improved from lightweight consumer services (Hotmail, Gmail) to reliable and secure managed corporate mobile email.
This leaves marketing departments wondering “what can we sell next?” and one of the answers in our market sector is “online backup”.
The idea is appealing at first glance – use your broadband internet connection to run an automatic backup off to a data centre somewhere on the internet and hey presto, no need to worry about changing backup tapes ever again.
We don’t like to rain on someone else’s parade, but we’re not convinced it’s as simple as that when you look at time, cost, and quality.
Take time first – on a standard broadband connection the upload speed is perhaps one-fifth of the download speed, making it a slow process to get your data “up the pipe” to the data centre. We can get round that by running a full backup only once at installation time, and configuring the system to take a daily backup of only the data that has changed that day.
What we need to watch for are any databases (business applications and probably also your email message store) because these are usually very large files which change every day and must be backed up every day. To put numbers on it (always follow the numbers!) it can take all weekend to upload 3GB of data; we typically see clients with message stores of 10GB to 15GB which should be backed up daily; it just isn’t going to fly.
Online backup can be seen as “cheap” because you don’t need to buy a backup tape drive, backup and cleaning tapes, and the automation software. Following the numbers again, crudely I admit, an online backup service giving an automated backup to 200GB of data space on a secure server can cost £300 per month. We have architect and surveyor clients with only 10 or 15 staff who have more data than 200GB.
A good quality tape drive of 200GB to 400GB capacity including 20 backup tapes, a cleaning tape, backup automation software and our time to install, configure, and train you in operating the system will cost between £2,500 and £3,500. If you have a Waverley Lane Service Agreement we will monitor the success of your backup every day and physically test the system monthly or quarterly depending on the Agreement. Not such a bad deal compared to £3,600 a year to push your data slowly into a data centre.
And finally, quality – you need to know that you can get your data back when the manure hits the fan. We have one client, a one-person business working from home, who used to use a well-known online backup service of his own choosing. His laptop, with all his data on it, ate its hard disk and our client quite correctly replaced the disk and restored his system from his online backup service. It worked very well – he got all his data and his computer configuration back again perfectly – but it took two days. Can your business work with two days’ downtime for a network server?
These are all technical and financial issues I’ve raised, but you also need to think about your broader business requirements. Is it appropriate to have your sensitive information in a data centre which could be in a different legal jurisdiction with different disclosure legislation? Do your professional indemnity insurers have data backup compliance requirements to be met before they will cover you for loss of data and consequential losses?
All points to ponder before signing up for easy, cheap, and fast online backup.
PS – all that’s missing, besides “easy”, “cheap”, and “fast” are “fresh” and “organic”, but I couldn’t find a way to work them into this post…
This is an excellent post Archie. There are certainly pros and cons for both arguments. With the right offsite backup company there can certainly be benefits for users, but there are just too many downsides for backing up an SBS server using this technology.
As you rightly stated, databases are the main issue and there just isn’t currently a way of backing up that amount of changing data easily…
I must however add that in the defence of such technologies, they certainly do have their place. An offsite backup solution is ideal for laptops within an organisation where users are out and about a lot. This means that as users roam and make changes to files they can be backed up to a store whilst on the move. Once back in the office and files are placed back on to the network the standard server backup procudure will take over.
Take Iron Mountain Digital as an example. They utilise a number of technologies namely ‘SendOnce’, ‘Delta Block’ and ‘Data Compression’. These technologies work together to minimise the amount of data being transferred up the pipe hence aiding in that all too painful slow backup.
All that said, it most important that a company uses the right technologies in the right ways that work for them, however I agree that backups should be run to tape and keeping a copy offsite (sock drawer at home) or in a fire safe is the way to do it. And although cost is always a consideration, loosing all your company’s data could cost you your company… put a price on that… if you can!