The Importance of Data Backup

If your business were to become victim to a disaster, would you be able to continue serving your customers? As businesses on the east coast continue to mop up after a series of tragic storms, Branko Miletic takes us through all you need to arm your business.

Data backups. It’s a topic that may seem boring or blatantly obvious, but it is mind-boggling how often companies don’t perform this business-critical function correctly. And disk or server crashes do happen—regularly and nearly always without warning. So why do most businesses entrust their business continuity to hardware of unknown quality, a part-time employee or the junior admin person? Perhaps it is a case of out of sight, out of mind, but in reality it is akin to playing Russian roulette with a company, its client base, and its future.

So what is backup? Technically speaking, a backup is a copy of one or more storage spaces and logs that the database server maintains. The backup copy is usually written to a secondary storage medium such as disk, magnetic tape, optical disk, or another hard drive. Due to a considerable overlap in technology, backups and backup systems are frequently confused with archives and fault-tolerant systems. Backups differ from archives in the sense that archives are the primary copy of data and backups are a secondary copy of data. Backups are typically that last line of defence against data loss, and consequently the least granular and convenient to use. Since a backup system contains at least one copy of all data worth saving, the data storage requirements are considerable.

But, according to many businesses, backup is something they rarely think about until, of course, the catastrophic happens and they lose all their data. According to Alcy Infinity from Timesavers International, the catastrophe most businesses experience is not fire, flood or earthquake, but rather something much more insidious—malware. "The chance of a business burning down tomorrow is very small. The chance of a business suffering a malware attack (viruses, worms, Trojans, Spyware, keyloggers, etc) is very high and increases every week.

The corruption of computer data can have huge consequences, as it could be hard to detect and fix. Only a minority of attacks are detected. Out of those, only a very small minority are reported. Out of those, only a minority are explained. And out of those, only a minority have a fix on hand," he says.

Any backup strategy starts with a concept of a data repository. The backup data needs to be stored somehow and probably should be organised to a degree. It can be as simple as a sheet of paper with a list of all backup tapes and the dates they were written, or a more sophisticated set-up with a computerised index, catalogue or relational database.

According to Chris Barton, the ANZ regional manager for IT data backup company SonicWALL, when it comes to most small-to-medium businesses, there is usually no-one in the company who is an IT specialist, and when it comes to doing backups "this is usually a sub-function of someone else’s role".