The Real Cost of
Do-It-Yourself Backups
and Why Online Backup
is Better
This white paper discloses
the real costs to a small business for performing proper data backups in-house
using portable hard drives, then compares this with the costs and benefits of
using an Online Backup Service instead.
The example used is a
"typical" small company without a dedicated IT person, backing up a single
Windows 2003 Server using the generally recommended procedure of rotating
multiple USB-attached portable hard drives offsite.
by Rob Cosgrove, CEO
Remote Backup Systems,
Inc.
(901) 388-5988
http://remote-backup.com
Every business owner knows the
importance of running proper data backups. Until recently the only inexpensive
way to do backups in-house was with tapes or CDs. This was a time-consuming
process usually relegated to an employee who was poorly trained for the task,
hated doing it, and didn't do it correctly or regularly. This is especially
true in small companies with no IT staff.
As a result, most small
businesses do not do proper backups. Many companies have failed because of the
loss of their data from a fire or flood, a hardware failure, a virus, or just a
simple mistake like erasing the wrong folder.
If you have a proper, up to
date backup of your critical data, it may be only a matter of hours (or even
minutes) before your business can be back up and operational after a data loss.
If you don't have a backup, or your backup is too old, statistics show that
your business might never recover.
This article discusses the
real costs of running backups, and how you can save hundreds of dollars per
month while improving your backup procedure to the level of much larger
companies with large IT staffs. You can make sure your vital business data
survives even the worst catastrophe.
In these tough times, it's
natural to try to conserve money by reducing expenses. Companies often consider
bringing outsourced work back into the enterprise to reduce costs.
This article will explain in
detail why it is more expensive and less desirable to perform your own backups
than it is to outsource them to an Online Backup Service.
First, a few definitions:
Recovery Time Objective
(RTO) - The Recovery Time Objective is the maximum acceptable amount of time
between your request to recover a file, and its recovery. For example, if you
can wait at most, two hours for a file to be recovered, your RTO is two hours.
The lower the RTO, the more your backups will cost.
Recovery Point Objective
(RPO) - The Recovery Point Objective is the maximum amount of data that you are
willing to lose, in time. For example, if you are willing to manually re-enter at
most, one day's work without a substantial loss to your business, your RPO is
24 hours. The RPO determines how often you need to make backups. The lower the
RPO, the more your backups will cost.
File Retention Policy (FRP)
- The File Retention Policy specifies how long you will retain backup copies of
your files, and under which conditions they will be rotated (deleted and
replaced with newer copies). The longer you keep files, the more your backups
will cost.
Downtime Objective - The
Downtime Objective is the maximum acceptable amount of time that your business,
or part of it, can cease operations without substantial loss. The lower your
downtime objective, the more your backups will cost.
In the real world, RTO, RPO,
and FRP will be different for different types of data. Some data is far more
important than the rest. For example, you might not be able to afford an
interruption of more than 15 minutes in your Online Store, but you can wait
until tomorrow to recover a sales presentation.
For this example we'll set a
Recovery Time Objective of two hours (you want your data back no more than two
hours after you ask for it), and a Recovery Point Objective of 24 hours (you
want the most recent version of a backed-up file to be no older than 24 hours).
So, we need to back up your files once a day.
Our File Retention Policy is
90 days simple FIFO, saving every version of a file, retaining the most recent
version forever. This FRP will back up every version of a file that changes
once a day, for a maximum of 90 backup copies. As each file version reaches 90
days old, it is erased. After 90 days, a single archival copy will be retained,
which will be maintained as the latest version.
We will be backing up a
small server running MS Windows 2003 Server. We will back up QuickBooks files,
MS Word files, Exchange, and MS Office files, totaling 20 gigabytes. Of the 20
gigabytes, only about 350 megabytes changes daily.
Do-It-Yourself Backups Using Hard Drives
Before doing backups you
will need to design a backup methodology taking into account your RTO, RPO, and
FRP for different file sets. Select the software and hardware you need to
support your backups. Design a protocol for verifying and testing backups.
Design and document procedures for backup and restore operations. Designate an
employee to do the backups, and a backup to that employee, and train them both.
All companies are different,
and all companies have different file sets. There is no software or user's
manual that can help you design a proper backup strategy for your specific
company. You will need to hire a consultant to help with this.
Proper on-site backups must
be done manually. This usually means that they are done during business hours,
when the network is in use and files are in unstable conditions. Some files
will not be backed up because they are in use and locked.
Some applications rely on
many files being backed up simultaneously to retain their relational state.
While these applications are in use, their file sets are in constant change,
therefore unstable and difficult to back up.
With some backup software it
is necessary to stop applications so their file sets will be stable for backup.
If done during business hours, this results in expensive downtime. You will
need to know which applications should be stopped for backup, and set up a
method to make sure nobody on the network is using them during backup time.
To do onsite backups, you'll
need some hardware. There are two options: Tape drives and portable USB hard
drives. (We need to back up 20GB, so CDs and DVDs are too small.)
Tape Drives:
Tape drives are on their way out of fashion. They are costly, slow, expensive
to maintain, unreliable, insecure, and unsupported by many backup software
utilities. Here's a breakdown of the cost to set up a tape backup system for
your server (This assumes you already have a SCSI controller card):
- HP StorageWorks DAT 72 SCSI
Internal Tape Drive - $550
- DAT72 tapes (21) - $214
- Installation and Setup - $200
- Software - $199
Total Cost to install a tape
backup system: $1,163
USB Hard Drives: USB hard drives are getting smaller, cheaper, and more reliable. As of
this writing, 4 January 2009, the least expensive portable USB hard drive we
could find online was $60 for 160GB. Since we only have 20GB to back up, you
could also use 32GB USB Flash Drives, which cost about the same.
The only way to get the same
quality of file retention using USB drives as you can get with Online Backup is
to buy 91 hard drives for $5460. But, let's assume that your FRP and Downtime
Objective can be flexible enough to cut that cost to just 11 drives for $660,
and $199 for software, for a total of $859 to get started doing your own
backups.
These drives are going to
last about two years, hopefully. So we need to amortize their cost over 24
months at about $28 / month.
Proper backups require that
you remove the backup from the premises so that if a disaster happens to the
main location (like a fire or flood), the backup is safe. You can then restore
to a new computer at another location. So, you will be transporting USB drives
to and from your office every day.
Label the drives as follows:
Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Month 1, Month 2, Month 3, Permanent.
We assumed your business runs 5 days a week.
On the first Monday, do a
backup to the drive labeled "Day 1." Then on the second day, use the drive
labeled "Drive 2," and so on until Thursday. On Friday, do a backup to the drive
labeled "Week 1."
On the second Monday, start
over again with the drive labeled "Day 1," and go until Thursday with "Day 4."
On Friday, use the drive labeled "Week 2."
On the last Friday of the
fourth week, use the drive labeled "Month 1." You should now have used a drive
for each week in the previous month, and each day in the previous week, and one
drive for the month.
Use this same procedure for
the next two months to use up the rest of your drives, and on the 90th
day, do a backup to the "Permanent" drive. This should give you a few versions
(but not all of them) of most of your files, for the past 90 days.
Every time you want to do a
backup, you will use this procedure:
- Plug the drive into the Server's USB port, and
into a power outlet.
- Verify that the Server has properly recognized
the USB device and has assigned it the proper drive letter. The assigned
drive letter must be the same for every backup.
- Start the backup software. Hopefully you will be
able to find software that will back up ALL of your data, verify it, and
make sure it gets on the USB drive properly, and that it will do all of
this in time for you to get to your kids' soccer practice.
However, most backup
software won't properly handle Exchange or QuickBooks. So, in addition to
running the general purpose backup software, you will also have to do the
following:
- Run the Exchange backup using NTBackup, which comes with Windows.
Don't forget to cycle the logs. This will take about 24 minutes.
- Call Accounting and ask everyone to get out of
QuickBooks. It has to be run in single-user mode to do a backup. Run
QuickBooks (you'll need an additional license to run it on the Server) and
do a backup. Call Accounting and tell them they can have QuickBooks back.
Your backup is now
completed. Let's assume the person who does your backups is properly trained,
does the backups every day without fail, and spends 45 minutes to do a backup.
Let's assume that person makes $15 an hour in salary. At that rate, it costs
$11.25 per day to do backups - $225 per month.
You also have some lost
productivity to take into account because Accounting, Sales, and Shipping all
lost the use of their software for about 20 minutes a day.
Now that your backup is
finished, you should take it out of the building and store it securely
somewhere else. What's the use of a backup if it is left in the same building
as the original data? If the building burns, all your backups will go up in
flames, too.
So, the next step is to
remove the USB drive from the building. Should the person who does the backups
take the drives home and store them there? That's the easiest thing to do, but
certainly the least secure.
Further, if your business is
required to comply with data protection and privacy regulations like HIPAA,
SOX, or GLB, it might be just plain illegal to remove this USB drive from the
building, since the data on it are not encrypted.
Now you have a little hard drive that fits in the
palm of your hand, containing the very heart of your company. Right here, in a
handy little easy-to-read, easy-to-lose, easy-to-steal package is everything
your company runs on - accounting, customer lists, vendor lists, and quotes.
Anyone can easily plug it into any computer and gain access to all that
information.
The best way to store drives
is in a secure facility like a bank safety deposit box. So, someone should take
this drive to the safety deposit box and pick up the next drive that will be
used for tomorrow's backup.
Both drives will be
transported in an employee's automobile, which may make several stops along the
way, and might become the target of a theft.
If you are paying your
employee for drive time and mileage, you can conservatively add another $7 /
day to your cost of doing backups. That's $140 per month.
Let's add the cost of the
safety deposit box. That's about $400/year for one big enough for these drives,
so add another $34 per month to your cost of doing backups.
Let's total all this up.
Drives: $24; Employee time (in office) $225; Employee travel time $140; Safety
deposit box $34. We're now up to $423 / month for doing your own backups using
USB drives, not accounting for loss of productivity in other departments for 20
minutes or so every day.
So far, so good? Not by a
long shot. While we have managed to get data backed up and taken off site, we
have not yet verified, tested, or restored the backups.
Let's not kid ourselves.
Your $15/hour employee has not been trained to verify, test, or restore
backups, has he? So, if you are going to follow proper backup procedure, you'll
have to hire a consultant to come in and do it. This will cost about $300, and
needs to be done every three months, bringing your monthly cost up to $523
/month.
RESTORING FROM DISK DRIVES
We're assuming that your
backups have been done properly, so when we need to restore data, it is there
on the backup disks. However, the difficulty of maintaining the daily regimen,
the lack of oversight, and the reliance on manual processes makes this a
dubious assumption in most cases.
Let's not further kid
ourselves. You will not be able to restore data from your hard drives without
outside assistance. There is no "automatic" restore utility. There's no
software that's going to ask you simple questions, then tell you which drive to
mount, and easily go find exactly the data you want, and rebuild it for you.
You're going to have to call
in a consultant who understands your process, and who can manually find and
restore your data. Typically this means restoring from several drives in the
proper sequence, building a stable restore set, then testing it, and doing this
over and over until it is correct.
This kind of restore process
can take hours and even days, and can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars,
and can result in downtime far beyond your original downtime objective.
You can cut the amount of
time that the restore process takes by having backups done by a professional
instead of by your $15/hour employee. However, doing so will increase your
costs dramatically.
If you need just a single
file restored, for example, a copy of last month's budget, you may not be able
to get it quickly or cheaply.
Problems with Do-It-Yourself Backups
- Do-it-yourself backups are far more expensive
than it seems they are - as much as $523/month for a 90 day backup plan.
- Data on the backup drives are not encrypted, and
can be easily read by anyone who steals the drive. The drives are small
and easy to steal. Regulatory compliance issues my not allow unencrypted
data to be taken off premises.
- Verification and testing of backups is next to
impossible.
- Proper backups must be done at least once a day.
The difficulty of the process, and the trouble it causes for the
enterprise, makes it easy to skip a day or two.
- The person responsible for backups is often a
low-level employee with little or no experience in Information Technology.
He can easily fail to recognize a problem with the backups, assuming they
are being done properly when in fact, they are failing.
- The employee responsible for backups often has
no backup. So, if he is on vacation or out sick, backups may not be done.
- Restoring data is cumbersome and not intuitive.
Most companies hire an outside consultant when data needs to be restored.
Restoring a single file, or a small group of files, is an expensive and
time-consuming process.
- The procedure described here of running backups
using USB hard drives works well on only one computer. It will not back up
your laptops, and is very difficult to scale up to multiple servers and
workstations.
Advantages of Online Backups
- Online Backups are usually much less expensive
than do-it-yourself backups - as much as 75% cheaper.
- There's no hardware to buy.
- Online Backups do not require an expert employee
to monitor them or run them. They are run by a very smart computer program
that does all the work, even when nobody is there.
- Online Backups are done automatically by
software. Nobody needs to remember to do them.
- Online Backups are done regularly, on schedule.
If, for some reason, the schedule is missed, you will get an email.
- Online Backups are usually scheduled to run at
night when offices are closed, and file systems are stable. This makes
sure that all files are backed up.
- Because Online Backups happen at night, there's
no downtime to worry about.
- Online Backup software backs up ALL the proper
files. There's no need to run several types of backup software to back up
different types of files.
- Online Backups are sent offsite. There's no need
to carry or store portable hard drives.
- Online Backups are encrypted before
transmission, and are stored in encrypted form on the backup servers. So,
they are compliant with privacy and data security regulations.
- Because data are encrypted with a password known
only to you, nobody except you - not even the Backup Service Provider -
has access to your information. Nobody can steal your data.
- Your data files are stored in professional,
high-tech data centers with all the proper security, like cameras, alarm
systems, armed guards, biometric entry systems, and high-tech fire
suppression. Far better than a safety deposit box.
- Online Backups are properly versioned for
point-in-time restores. Multiple copies are kept.
- Online Backups are automatically verified.
- Online Backups are quick and easy to test.
- Restores can be done in minutes by the end user
by simply picking files from a list, or running a Wizard. Restores can
often be done from anywhere on the Internet using just a web browser.
- Online Backups operate 24/7/365 without the need
for consultants or end user intervention. Restores can be done any time -
weekends, holidays, and nights.
- There's no need to worry about running out of
drive space, or replacing old drives. The Backup Service Provider handles
all that.
- Online Backups run on ALL computers in your
company - not just the file servers. Even laptops that are not connected
to the office network full-time can be backed up.
- You receive emailed reports after every backup.
You can use these reports to help audit your business practices and to
keep track of your backups. If your backups encounter any kind of
problems, you will get an email describing the problem.
Rob Cosgrove
is the founder of the Online Backup industry. He wrote the first commercial
Online Backup software in 1985, which has led the industry since it went on
sale in 1986. Rob founded Remote Backup Systems, Inc., which provides software
and services to the majority of online backup service providers on the planet
today. RBS is the quickest and most cost effective way to start a successful
online backup service. Affordable packages start at 25 clients. For more
information phone (901) 388-5988, http://remote-backup.com, or sales@remote-backup.com
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