backup Archives - Page 7 of 7

Is Your Backup Software Prepared for Catastrophic Data Loss

Backup and Recoverybackup, data loss, RecoveryOphtek, LLC

Dec 2014

How much do you value your data? Catastrophic data loss is not just about business continuity but also about validating backup software and data recovery.

We’re going to be taking a look at how you can best prepare your backups for most scenarios which could lead to catastrophic data loss.

Everything from your financial records, employee information to departmental files, or worst still, your entire system, as all at stake!

Building up the picture

What would happen if a disaster occurs taking with it all the data that was stored?

Anything from hard drives crashing to building fires, flooding, earthquakes, theft or any event that could cause data loss, can hit your business very hard, like a ton of bricks.

Alternatively, a break-in could happen and your data ends up stolen. What if a work laptop is lost, out in the public domain and gone forever, possibly winding up on an auction on EBay?

Would you risk losing months, or even years of precious data that will cause loss of earnings, potential data leaks or embarrassment?

These are only some examples of worst case scenarios. It could happen to anyone.

Being Prepared

The good news is that you can prevent such catastrophes with 4 steps to checking the backups you have put in place long ago:

Verify Backups. Your system administrator will usually manage this. If you’re one yourself, simply check that they are verified and running as scheduled through whichever backup software solution you use.
Restore and test backups. You’ll want to be sure to restore your backups and test your data regularly, checking to see if everything would work smoothly without any backup media corruption.
Offsite / Cloud backup. Having an offsite or Cloud mirror copy of your existing system, which ideally, is backed up on a daily basis. If all data were to be inaccessible at your physical site, you’ll be able to seamlessly restore your most critical data and get the business up and running.
Recovery plan. This may be the last step, but is far from being the least important.

The recovery plan should contain emergency contact numbers of who to contact. For instance, of relevant IT admins, your offline disaster recovery center, the company director and any specific staff to keep them in the know.
Ideally a recovery plan can be presented as a hardcopy/document, as well as, a document hosted over the cloud, and distributed to all IT admin staff, plus a manager or director (to be extra cautious) is essential.
You may go as far as providing a copy to your Disaster recovery test centre or your offsite provider, as discussed in point 3.

Internal procedures will vary from business to business, so design one to meet suit your system setup.

Amidst the panic and chaos, you or your System Admin will be presented with 101 things to do. A documented Recovery plan will help you be organised and speed things up nicely. Say if your designated disaster recovery administrator happened to be away in a catastrophe, then at least a procedure is in place for another admin to follow.

Be Prepared for Anything

Like they say, prevention is better than a cure. You’ll never know when a disaster can occur, so be sure to review all the above steps and apply it to you disaster recovery plan today. If you have one in place, it’ll never go amiss to revise, improve and update it.

To put together a disaster recovery plan or backup systems to protect your business, contact your local IT professionals.

How Reliable is your Hard Drive?

Uncategorizedbackup, hard drives, storageOphtek, LLC

Nov 2014

Your hard drive contains irreplaceable data, pictures and personal info. A new Backblaze study gives us insight on the most reliable hard drives out there.

We’ve compiled a summary based on Backblaze’s new findings on hard drive reliability, covering the brands that tend to fail the most and how often it has been reported.

Backblaze, a backup service provider, has data centers that hold more than 100 petabytes of data on over 34,000 drives, impressive right? They’ve done all the hard work in testing a wide range of hard drives, some of which have failed and others that have remained in full working order.

They began documenting their study in January 2014 and have since updated their observations.

Here is a summary of what you need to know:

The worst failing drives have been the 3 TB Western Digital and the 3 TB Seagate. This has been tested from 3,846 Seagate hard drives with an average age of 1.9 years and an initial 9% annual failure rate, which is now up to 15%. From the 776 Western Digital hard disks tested, the report shows that they have averaged 0.5 years in lifespan and had an annual failure rate of 4%, which has increased to 7%.
Interestingly, the HGST drives (previously branded as Hitachi) have been the most reliable brand with their annual failure rate averaging around 1% out of over 1600 tested hard drives in the datacenter.
Despite Seagate and Western Digital having a poor reliability record compared to the HGST drives, the reliability on these two problematic brands have continued to perform better with the Seagate 1.5TB and 4TB sized drives, along with the 1 TB Western Digital drives.
Western Digital and Seagate’s 3 TB drives continue to be the worst performers. One assumption could be that these drives may buckle easily under a datacenter environment. Another possibility could be due to a difference in how they run within a drive farming setup (using enterprise drives) as opposed to removing them from external USB hubs.
From their extensive testing, Backblaze noted that the standard external USB drives, such as Seagate’s 3TB (priced at around $100 for consumers), performed just slightly better than enterprise drives which are over double the price!
There’s also a big difference between different hard drive models and their failure rates. Seagate’s Barracuda range has two different 3 TB drives, with Barracuda XT performing nearly three times as well as the struggling Barracuda 7200.14 model, with a 15.7% annual fail rate.
The same goes for Seagate’s 1.5 TB drives, such as the Barracuda LP, performing significantly better as a hard drive with an annual failure rate of 9.6% compared to the Barracuda 7200.11, which has a 25% fail rate.

Overall conclusion

When it comes to looking for a reliable hard drive, especially those that are of 1.5 TB and 3 TB capacities, we have a clear winner and that is the HGST brand. One thing is clear; there’s no hard disk that is ever 100% fail proof, even the HGST drives have been noted to fail at times. The highest HGST annual fail rate of 1.4%, from over a thousand tested hard disks, is still a very impressive record.

Regardless of your hard drive brand, model and style, it is extremely important to replicate and backup your data on a regular basis, as you never know when a hard drive will fail.

We hope that Seagate and Western Digital improve their current 1.5 and 3 TB drives and pay attention to this continued study. Although most drives will come with a 3 year warranty, in the event of a hard disk failing, this shouldn’t be much of a financial setback to their customers.

For more information on storage for your office or home based business, contact your local IT professionals.

Which Backup Software You Should Be Using

Office IT, Office Networkbackup, cloud backup, local backupOphtek, LLC

Sep 2014

Backups are critical for every home or office computer. Whether you have servers, PCs or just one laptop, here’s how to pick the right backup software.

If you’ve never experienced losing a picture, document or important client file up to now, consider yourself lucky. Data loss on computers happen for many reasons. The hard drive or operating system could crash, the laptop or computer may be stolen or it may just be an accidental deletion or move. The bottom line is these things are an inevitable part of technology and the better prepared you are with a backup the less down time you will experience.

Let’s review the types of backups and how you can determine which is right for your home or office IT environment.

1. Local file backups

Local backups capture only user files. Programs, software and the Operating System are not backed up.

Local file backups means copying files from your computer to either an external hard drive, or to a computer on your network. The backups are essentially local to your office or home.

When you should use local backups

Every scenario can benefit from local file backups. Since the backup is local and nearby, recovering files and information is quick and easy. Setting up local backups is also very inexpensive as most software that does local backup is free. It is recommended to have local backups when you don’t have cloud based backups. Prices range from $0 to $50.

Local backup options

2. Cloud backups

Cloud backups capture user files and store them on another company's computer over the internet

Cloud backups only backup files. Programs, software and the Operating System are not backed up.

Cloud based backups keep your data and files backed up on another company’s servers over the internet. Most major cloud backup providers provide encryption and 2-factor authentication for added security. With the increase in competition, prices for cloud backup have also dropped dramatically and in some cases can be free. Prices range from $4-$30/month

When you should use cloud backups

If you have a laptop and are constantly moving between different locations, a cloud based backup would be the best choice. As long as you have an internet connection, your data is being backed up.

Cloud backup options

3. Image backups

Image based backups capture everything on the system.

Image based backups capture files, data as well as programs, software and the Operating System.

Image based backup programs take a snapshot of your entire computer. The main benefit is if you have catastrophic data loss like theft or a fire in the building, the backup image can be loaded on to another computer and you can continue working without having to wait for a new computer with all of your programs. Prices range from $250-$4000.

When you should use image backups

It’s best to use image based backups on mission critical computers such as a server that holds all of your client data, or a laptop that has very important files on it. Image based backup software tends to be more expensive, however the price is worth the avoided business downtime.

Image backup options

So which is the right choice?

At a minimum every individual or business should be running a local or cloud based backup. The low cost and portability of cloud based backups makes it the obvious choice at a minimum. However if you have a server in your home or office, it’s important to consider image based backups as a safety net against business downtime.

For more backup solutions or advice on how to protect your business, contact your local IT professionals.

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