Everyone has heard of Murphy’s Law (“whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”). What most people don’t know is that Murphy was a Data Backup Administrator. Files are accidentally deleted. Equipment gets stolen. Pipes burst and floods occur. Fire destroys. Hardware fails. Various degrees of disaster are inevitable and your business depends upon your ability to quickly and gracefully “bounce back”.

All too often, system backups are given insufficient focus in a business network, because the backup part in and of itself isn’t terribly important, is it? Your system doesn’t need backups to function. It’s only when you need to restore that the backup becomes critically important. I’m keenly aware of this since I regularly acquire new clients after their business is significantly damaged by a failure to restore an important piece of data. As a result, confidence in their IT systems (and IT provider) is shattered. According to IDC (a leading market research firm), less than 40% of all small to medium size businesses properly and regularly backup their data. It’s not just small businesses that experience these failures. I know of one very large publicly traded company that recently experienced a major failure of a storage area network (SAN), where they were unable to restore some crucial data from backup. The company should survive the calamity, but the business impact was significant. There are many businesses that have completely failed and closed their doors after a major data loss.

If you take nothing else away from this article, I urge you to make it a priority to review the status of your backup system with your technology people. As a lawyer, technology may “not be your area”. However, if you are a partner or owner of your firm, this is one area I believe you should take a personal interest to review. You may discover a risk area that you can correct, or at the very least, you can do your part to help ensure your technical people have proper focus on this critical area.

To help your evaluation, I’d like to describe the two most common backup approaches. File backups are the traditional method where there is a backup process typically scheduled to run every evening to make backup copies of all or part of the files in the system. Over the past decade or so, image backups, which take snapshots of your entire disk, have gained popularity. The two backup approaches are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to backup via both mechanisms, but it is more common to use one approach or the other.

The two primary advantages of image backups over file backups are:

1. Image backups can be used for what’s known as a “bare metal” restore. In the case of a complete server failure, you can rapidly use the image copy to bring the server “back to life”. With a file based backup, you would typically need to first reload the server operating system, then reload and reconfigure all of the application software (including the backup application so your server can read the backups). Only after all of this is accomplished, can you use the file backup to restore the information. So, a restore operation that might take days to restore from file backup, can often be performed in hours off of image backup.
2. Image backups, particularly incremental backups, are typically very fast and consume fewer system resources than file backups, allowing for many image snapshot backups to be taken throughout the day. Therefore, you have more points in time where data can be recovered. Many systems will perform hourly image backups.

One advantage of file backup is that it offers finer control over what is and is not backed up. For example, you may identify certain data as relatively unimportant and explicitly exclude it from the backup. You cannot easily do this with image backups. Since image backups are inherently a complete disk image, they must back up the entire disk. This makes image backups safer because you know you are backing up the entire disk. However, it is possible to reduce the cost of file backups by selecting only specific files you feel are important to backup and excluding other files. I strongly recommend that if you do have data being excluded from your backup that you know exactly which files are being excluded and approve the exclusions. This is an important business decision to review now, not after discovering that some important file is lost forever. I know that this subject is fairly technical, but it’s very important for partners and owners to understand this at a business level. The business ramifications of technical decisions surrounding your backups are substantial. The appropriate solution must be determined in response to cost/benefit and your risk tolerance. Too often, there is insufficient management oversight on backups and decisions end up being made on the basis of what is most comfortable and convenient, not what’s best for the firm. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at dkinsey@totalnetworks.com, I’d be happy to give you any additional pointers and tips that might be useful.