Backing Up the RWrite Way

In an economy driven society, the first rule of thumb for any business should be to retain the clients they have and get as many new clients as possible.  Without client retention, failure is assured and Chapter 13 is just around the next corner.  When a client signs a contract with you or submits a Purchase Order for your products, they are relying upon your good faith.  They are assuming a few things:  That you will provide the goods and/or services they have contracted for, that you will provide those goods/and or services in a timely manner, and that you will keep their information confidential.  Maintaining accurate client records and ensuring they are properly warehoused in a secure environment is a critical need businesses must consider when thinking about client retention.  

Consider what would happen to your organization should your systems crash and all your data disappear.  Do you have an offsite storage facility?  An internal backup system?  Even old fashioned paper records to refer to? Without any form of data backup, let’s face it, unless you’ve only got a handful of clients and no more than two handfuls of orders, your business is down the tubes.   We are a data-driven society used to having everything at our fingertips within seconds and if you can’t support your clients that way, you lose!  So what do you do?
First, you need to take a look at your back-up requirements. 

• How large is your current system and how much do you need to save? 
• Do you just need the data or do you have internal systems to back up as well? 
• And do you need to back up your entire database or just some crucial elements of it such as your client, vendor, invoice and billing records? The more gigabytes you need, the more costly the backup process. 

After determining the size of your system, you can then determine the backup medium to use. 

• Will it be as easy as just loading a CD-Rom into the disc drive?
• Will you need to go to an external hard drive storage option?  Keep in mind when using CD’s and DVD’s that if you need to append to the data you must use the RW or RAM format.  A CD-R, for example, only allows you to record once and will not let you record over it.  

You will also need to decide where to store you backup data. 

• Do you store it on-site in a fireproof safe?
• D you store it in a separate building and retrieve as needed?

There are several backup methods to choose from ranging from free like some Windows or MAC utilities that come with your PC or extremely expensive like using an online storage facility and paying monthly based on storage size.  In most cases, the PC utilities do just fine.  If you opt to save your entire database, depending on size it may take a long time so this should generally be done after your employees go home and the system can be shut down for the night.  After the first full system save is done, you have the option on the succeeding nights of doing the full save again or doing two other types of backups called deferential and incremental backups.  Many of the larger companies with significant amounts of data do a full backup only weekly and then use one of the other two during the week. 

With a deferential backup, you only save the changes since the last FULL backup.  So if your full backups are done on Friday nights, then Saturday night’s backup includes Saturday’s changes. Sunday’s backup includes Saturday and Sunday’s changes.  Monday’s backup includes Saturday, Sunday and Monday’s changes and so on until the end of the week on Friday you have two backups:  One is the full save from the prior Friday and one is all of the changes from that week.  Should your system have gone down at any point in the week, you would combine the Friday file with the other one and restore your saved data.

With an incremental backup, you save only that day’s changes.  Using the example above, you still does the full system save on Friday?  On Saturday you only save Saturday’s data to disc.  On Sunday you only save Sunday’s data to disc.  On Monday you only save Monday’s data to disc and so on until the end of the week when you have 7 discs:  One is the full save from Friday and 6 are the nightly saves from each of the other days of the week.  Should you have to restore your system at any day of the week, you would have to combine the Friday disc with ALL of the discs up to the date you lost your data.

As you can see, while time-consuming, doing a full system backup each night is the easiest way to backup your data but may not always be the most feasible.  And the incremental nightly backups take the least amount of time but if your system went down on a Wednesday night you would have the cumbersome task of having to combine 6 different files together to restore your system.  In the same scenario with the deferential backup, you would only have to combine two files.  And with a deferential backup, your nightly saves may get incrementally longer during the week but are still never anywhere near as long as the full weekly backup. 

Is backing up your system difficult?  No, not really.  It only seems that way when you first get all of the information.  But when considering the alternative, losing your customer base and your business, it is worth any effort you have to put out.  Good luck and happy storage!

West Bay Media

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