Securing your data

The majority of us heavily rely on our computers to do our work. It does not take long for a very large amount of valuable data to accumulate in your computer. The stored data takes many different forms -email (possibly many years worth), a contact information database, a mailing list, letters you have written, reports, electronic drawings, graphics that you have created etc. 

Now ask yourself this question: If you lost all of this information today due to some catastrophe - a hard drive failure, theft, fire,  flood, etc., what would happen to my business? Are you prepared for such a disaster? Answer this question honestly. The material below is aimed at those users who answer no to the question above.

Assess the risk

Remember Murphy's Law - whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. You need to assess the risks in the list above. Assuming that your business premises are reasonably secure against theft, the most significant event is likely to be loss of all your data due to hard disk drive failure.

Hard disk failure

Computer disks are very reliable but the disk can 'crash' - i.e. suffer irreparable mechanical damage and everything on it lost. One estimate is that this is likely once every couple of years of normal use. The likelihood of this happening may be minimized by performing routine disk maintenance (running programs such as Scandisk), but the chance of a crash is always a possibility. There are companies who offer a service recovering data from 'crashed' hard disks, but they offer no guarantees and their services are expensive.

Clearly, you need to protect your data, because as sure as day follows night, some day you will lose data. Knowing this, it makes sense to back up all data contained in your computer(s) (and Internet web servers) in cases where you have a web site of your own.  The notes that follow offer some suggestions as to how this may be efficiently done.

Step 1. Purchase some type of backup device

If you don't have a back up device that will back up all data on your computer then you need to purchase one. A backup device is an essential tool for serious computer users, not a luxury. This backup device can be a floppy disk if you have very little data (say 1Mb), an Iomega ZIP drive if you have 100 Mb of data, a tape drive or a CD-ROM 'burner' etc. if you have large quantities of data. 

Zip drives are very cost effective backup devices.

Our advice is to purchase a device with enough capacity to back up the whole of your data in one step with no disk or tape swapping. If the device does not have this capability, experience has shown that users will not back up!

Step 2. Make backup a very simple process

Many users scatter the data that they create in many different folders in their hard disk. Their email may be in the WINNT folder (in a file called outlook.pst), CAD drawings in Program Files>AutoCAD 2000, Word files in the 'My Documents' folder etc. This 'scattering' of data makes backup a complicated and unwieldy process. It follows that you need to aggregate all your data in one place, creating a 'tree' structure of folders to contain all the work that you create.

We recommend creating a data folder called DATA. In this DATA folder, create sub folders for the data created by all the programs you use. Within these subfolders, place all the data files you use. Drag all the information that is important to you into appropriate folders. 

Once you have done this, make sure that when using any application that creates valuable work (be it Word, Excel or Email etc.) that you save your work to the appropriate folder under the 'Data' master folder. 

It is possible using an 'Options' tool in most applications to arrange for the application to save its files in a nominated folder so make sure that you set Word, Excel etc. in the way.

The figure below shows one possible arrangement of sub folders in a data folder. This arrangement was created for a community liaison officer working for a University office. Your arrangement of folders will be very different, but they should all descend from the data folder. 

Backing up our data now becomes a simple 'one-step' process. All we have to do is copy the Data folder and all of its sub-folders to the backup device. 

Make sure that you label the disks with the correct date and time of the backup.

Step 3. Back up

Now that the appropriate data structure is in place, perform the backup. Store the first set of back up disks in safe place, certainly off site, away from the office.

Step 4. Set up a regular backup schedule. 

Most modern operating systems offer an opportunity to run programs at regular intervals. The figure below shows the tool available in Windows 98. 

You might use this tool to copy your Data folder (and sub-folders) to a drive on another computer on your network every night at 3 am or schedule the backup program that came with your tape drive to run every night. A home user might simply have the scheduler run a simple DOS batch file which copies all data to a ZIP disk drive once a week e.g.

Rem Batch file to backup my data. Leave in C:\

CD \Data

XCOPY *.* G: /s 'copy all files including those in sub-folders to drive G: (the ZIP drive) 

Recovering data

If your hard disk crashes, all you need do is take the CD-ROM containing your operating system (Windows 95, 98, 2000 etc.) to your computer store to install a new hard disk (you will probably get a bonus because the capacity is likely to be 5 times that of the old disk for the same money). 

Re-install programs that you use by going back to the original installation CD-ROM's. There is no need to worry about backing up programs (applications). Programs take up a lot of space and backing them up will take a lot of time and disk storage. Just remember, backup is all about protecting the data files. As an added bonus, you computer is very likely to run much faster than before. Modern hard disks are very quick and the restore process will pace all data files in contiguous blocks where they can be loaded much faster.

Using programs such as ghost to make a snapshot of an entire hard disk is in our view unnecessary. While these programs are invaluable for system administrators trying to standardize setups on computers within a company, they are not for the average user as the important data forms a relatively small part of the total disk storage.

Conclusion

Happiness is an up-to-date set of backup tapes kept in a cupboard at home, not in the office!