Backup plans: a step-by-step guide to protect your data.

The need to back up your data cannot be overstated. Downtime means financial loss to your business. Every minute your information resources are unavailable stifles your employees' productivity, damages your reputation and gives your competition an advantage in the marketplace.

Here's a guide to help you adopt a business continuity plan:

Best backup practices

1. Have a written backup policy. It should tell you what is being backed up, how often backups are occurring and who is in charge of performing and monitoring backups.

2. If you do a lot of data entry, consider backing up your database daily or in some cases several times throughout the day.

3. Decide how much work you are willing to risk losing and set the frequency of backups accordingly.

4. Store a recent copy of your data off-site to insure against site-specific disaster such as fire, break-in or flood.

5. It's usually not necessary to back up the complete contents of each drive; most of that space is taken up in the operating system and program files, which can be reloaded from a master backup.

6. Test your backups before you need them. Make sure your backup has read-back verification. Try restoring a few files.

Choosing your backup hardware

1. Determine how much data you need to back up. Look at each machine on your network. How big is each user's documents folder? How much data do you keep in your primary shared folder? Add up the totals for all your machines or multiply the average by number of machines.

2. Choose a backup device that is at least twice the total amount of data you need to back up. This will give you room for growth.

3. Consider the speed of the drive and its interface to your computer or file server. If you have a large amount of data to back up, having a big storage device isn't much good if you can't write data to it quickly. The three most common ways to connect a backup drive are SCSI, IDE and Firewire.

Backup solutions

Zip drives--As an alternative to floppy disks, zip drives could hold more than 1.44 MB floppy. They typically back up between 100MB to 2GB.

CD-write--When burning a CD-ROM, the user selects the files to be backed up through a simple interface, inserts a blank or rewritable CD (CD-Rs) into the drive and clicks a button to burn a CD. The downside is that as CD-ROM drive speeds increase, it can be difficult to read newer CD-Rs in older CD-ROM drives. CDs can hold up to 700MB each.

Tape drives--A tape backup drive coupled with tape cartridges is still the most popular method for backup. It is capable of storing large amounts of data (10GB and up) and is a good storage medium for archival purposes. For companies with very large files, however, tape backup and restore can be too slow and poses a risk since each tape cartridge is a single point of failure. Using multiple drives in a jukebox or library configuration can stretch speed and capacity limitations.

Disk-to-disk backup--Backup appliances that use relatively inexpensive ATA-based disk arrays as the storage medium. They offer faster backup and restores at a cost per gigabyte that is competitive with high-end multiple tape subsystems. The best applications for disk-to-disk backup would be for departmental file servers, application servers and network-attached storage appliances where rapid data backup and restoration is vital. These systems can be used in conjunction with tape systems for easy offsite data archival, or used as pairs linked to a wide area network for the same reason.

Types of backup

Full backup--A copy of all the files. A full backup is the safest you can perform because it contains copy of all the files on a selected disk drive(s). The drawback to performing such backup is that it can be a drawn-out task depending on the size of files, especially if you are backing up on to a tape drive.

Incremental backup--A copy of all the files that have changed since the last full backup. When doing an incremental backup, you need to maintain two sets of backups--a full backup, which you might do once every other week, and an incremental, which you could do daily or every other day. Doing incremental backup does not take the time or storage that a full backup takes.

RELATED ARTICLE: Technology success story: MGM Grand Detroit Casino.

The Information Station, a bank of personal computers housing an interactive employee Intranet/Internet, gives all 2,600 employees of MGM Grand Detroit Casino 24-hour access to employment information and basic human resources services.

With a simple click of the mouse, every employee has the ability to request time off, access payroll and tax information, update personal data, authorize updates to paycheck direct deposits, check the status of a 401(k) account, receive corporate announcements and messages, and apply for jobs at other facilities owned by parent company MGM MIRAGE.

The user-friendly system is a particular boon to the majority of the casino's employees who did not formerly have access to a personal computer at work.

"I like the fact that I don't have to bother my supervisor with questions regarding available vacation time. I can check my available vacation time on my pay stub at the Information Station and enter my request for time off at the same place," says Erica Carter, motor coach coordinator.

During the initial launch in November 2001, employees who obtained an Information Station password were entered into a raffle to win a Dell personal computer. More than 2,300 MGM Grand Detroit employees signed up during the four-day period, giving the Detroit facility the most successful launch among eight MGM MIRAGE properties.

The information Station, located in the employee dining room, is also a big hit with managers who formerly approved vacation time using triplicate paper forms. In fact, casino operators report that the system has saved "piles of paper" since its launch.

MGM Grand submitted its information Station in the Detroit Regional Chamber's first annual Best Practices awards competition.

Do you have a business success story you'd like to share with the Detroiter? E-mail: [e-mail] with details.

Tony Scicluna is director of sales at Rave Computer Association Inc. in Sterling Heights, a Silver-level member of the Detroit Regional Chamber.