New Trends in Backup: Is Your Disaster Recovery Plan Keeping Up?

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• October 2008 Issue
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From the Oct. 2008 Issue

For many years, every accounting firm’s disaster recovery plans have involved using tape backup systems as the cornerstone for data recovery in the event of a disaster, and many are still doing so. Over the past four years, however, many things have changed in the disaster recovery area including the name. Disaster recovery is now called business continuity.

What is Business Continuity?
Business continuity is the new term for disaster recovery, which expands our disaster recovery plans to include any type of business interruption. Business continuity ensures that a company continues to operate or returns to operation as quickly as possible after an event that disrupts the normal operations of the business. Business continuity not only includes disaster recovery plans but also addresses issues that may not be a disaster such as power outages, employee death or injury, snow emergencies, or building issues unrelated to an act of nature. Business continuity plans are designed to address these issues as well as the larger disasters that are the result of an act of nature. Do you have a business continuity plan? If not, now is a great time to start working on one.

A good business continuity plan is developed by providing guidelines of what people should do in the event something happens that is covered by the plan. The components that make up the business continuity plan will either be step-by-step instructions or general guidelines that allow for interpretation based on the circumstances. Generally, the guidelines will be used for major events where the situation is changing rapidly and employees working on the situation have to use judgment when making decisions. The step-by-step items will cover more routine tasks that need to be done in a certain order, or procedures that need to be followed in an exact methodology.

What’s New in Backup?
Now that we have an idea about business continuity plans, we should look at the large number of new developments in backup technology, which are a significant component in any business continuity plan for data protection. Disk-based backup, server-based backup and online backup are starting to replace tape backup as the primary means of creating backups for business continuity.

Redundancy is another concept that has become a part of backup solutions to ensure successful business continuity. The availability of other options at a reasonable cost, such as those mentioned here, makes it easy to implement two backup solutions. The software used for backup (Backup Exec and ARCserve) have been developed to support multiple types of backup devices. With all these new options, we are easily able to build in redundancy to our business continuity plans.

Disk-Based Backup
Disk-based backup works by using portable or removable hard drives to make backups of the servers and data on our networks. By using these devices combined with ARCserve or Backup Exec, the backups are created on these portable disk drives. Using multiple portable disk devices, a rotation can be created and at least one backup can be taken off site. The backup data stored on disk is less prone to problems and errors. Tape backup can have defects in the tape or deteriorate over time and is more likely to suffer a failure versus a disk-based backup. This does not mean that disk-based backup will be problem free, but the medium is much more stable than tape and the data written to the disk will remain on the disk longer than tape.

The other benefit of disk-based backup is that capacities are larger than tape-based systems. The recent increase in portable disk drive sizes to over two terabytes of storage significantly exceeds tape capacities. Only autoloaders can match the capacities of portable disk drives. This allows for multiple rotation backups on a single unit. This capability provides many new options for backup that did not exist four years ago.

Server-Based Backup
Server-based backup is using a server with large disk capacity to backup data on the other servers and workstations in the network. The data on this server is then copied to portable disks or tape for storage offsite. This solution allows for server-to-server replication. Using a second server located at an offsite location and specialized software to replicate the data from one server to another over the Internet allows you to copy the data from the backup server to the offsite server. The server replication option works well for those firms with multiple offices.

The benefit of using server-based backup accrues to those firms who have large amounts of data. The speed of the backup is enhanced because server-based disk drives are much faster than tape or portable disks. In addition, the disk sizes on the server are much larger than what is currently available on portable drives. Server-based backup also allows for the copy process to take place during the day when the other servers are being used for productive work.