Basic Business Systems entered the internet backup market about four years ago. At that time most companies relied on magnetic tape to backup their data and home users either didn’t backup at all or just burned important files to CDs on a regular basis. Our experience has been that tape backups can be very unreliable for a number of reasons. Probably the biggest problem with tapes is that someone has to put them in the tape drive every day. We found that in some cases people didn’t realize they should be doing that or just became complacent and eventually forgot about it. The other big issue was reliability. Tapes have a finite life and because they have to move to work they and the tape drives are subject to wear and contamination. Backups should be checked every day to ensure that they were successful and they really should be tested regularly to verify that the data can actually be restored. On more than one occasion we were called in to help a company that had a drive fail only to find out that their backups were either very old or non-existent.
Internet backups have helped address most of the challenges we faced, but also presented a few new ones of their own. The first step to simplifying and increasing the reliability of backups was to remove the human factor for our clients. Internet backups, or remote backups, store the data on a remote server that is always available eliminating the need to change something such as a tape. By hosting a number of clients on a single server we were able to build in redundancy that would not have been cost effective for any one client. This meant that there was clearly a need to encrypt the data to protect it from being accessed by someone other than the owner. Even transporting the data across the Internet would require encryption to protect it from being read while in transit. Our approach was to set everything up then allow our clients to set their own password to generate the encryption key. The encryption key was then used at the source to modify the data to an undecipherable state to be transported and stored on the remote server. In the event that they needed to restore data, the encrypted files would be copied back to the client’s server and unencrypted using the same key. Although remote backups are substantially more reliable than tape, they are not infallible. They do have an advantage over many backup solutions in that they can notify someone if there is a problem. This could be anything from a corrupt file to an internet connection failure.
For most people, the speed of their Internet connection has increased substantially over the past few years. Even with the new technologies and lower costs it can still take many days to backup an entire file server to the Internet. It is not difficult to backup the server to a portable hard disk and ship it to the backup host in many cases, but you would still be faced with getting all of that data back locally in the event of a major failure. My recommendation would be to keep a copy of the server backup in a safe location which can be restored as needed, then updated with current data from the online backup. For home users, it may make more sense to keep important files like family photos on CDs or DVDs in a safe deposit box and only backup current data to the Internet. This makes sure that your backup is as current as possible while keeping the cost more manageable.
Even if you feel that Internet backup is not for you, please check your tapes!
Recent Comments