Recovery plan: online backup and electronic vaulting provide significant advantages for managing a club's database.

The ferocious path of Hurricane Katrina left the Pass Christian Isles Golf Club in Mississippi devastated in its wake. But even amidst the severe damage, one thing remained intact--the club's data, courtesy of electronic vaulting provided by eSilo, a company based in Jupiter, FL. "They're using their account again, (though) not back at the original facility," explained Brian Wheeler, director of sales for eSilo.

The recent prevalence of natural disasters, along with the ever-looming threat of terrorism, has made data backup and recovery a particularly significant part of any company's operation, and clubs are no exception.

"A club, like any business enterprise, is data dependent," said Bob Stoddard, president and CEO of AmeriVauh Corp., headquartered in Waltham, MA. "Whether it's membership lists or food beverage records or e-mails, data is critical today--and business should do a good job of backup and recovery. Whether you use our (electronic) solution or a manual tape solution, just do something and do a good job of it, regardless of the methodology you use."

Stoddard cites the three most important elements of a successful backup system:

1. Backing up every single day, in a disciplined, unfailing manner.

2. Getting the data off-site.

3. Making sure the recovery aspect of the system works quickly and easily.

Increasingly, management is looking beyond traditional tape systems to meet these needs. "Tape is a very manual and cumbersome process involving many time-consuming, tedious steps," explained Christine Eyre, director of corporate marketing for LiveVault in Marlborough, MA. "And if one step fails, the entire process flails."

A tape system is also vulnerable to human error. "Frankly, most people aren't doing a great job of (performing daily backups)," Stoddard said. "In a club you might have a part-time IT person, or perhaps a receptionist or accountant, and it's not really this person's job to do data backups. If he or she is an accountant, then billing members is his or her priority--not learning computer technology."

And how about forgetting to backup now and then after a long day? Well, it happens. Because everybody's human.

Additionally, a tape system has to be managed by someone on-site. "At some places, it requires more work than at others," Wheeler said, who also points out that equipment has life cycles that mandate expenditures down the line. "They're buying a new server a couple of years later, and they have to buy a new tape system and a new series of tapes." But the most important issue isn't cost, he said--it's reliability. "Protection Is what it's all about. If you lose data, the cost of recouping it as well as down time and the impact on your reputation are much greater than the monetary layout for hardware."

Another challenge with a tape system: What do you do with the tape after you've created your backup? "If you make a copy, and you leave that copy on top of your computer, and the sprinkler system goes off, then both copies are damaged;' Eyre said. "That's a very risky proposition." Similarly, you could put the tape in your car and attempt to take it home--but what if your car is stolen? "Tape is the same process they've been using for 30 years. It's time for a new era."

The Wonder of Electronic Vaulting

That new era brings forth online storage and electronic vaulting, made possible by the lower prices of the discs, and the availability of bandwidth. This new approach has several important advantages over tape.

First, online backup is automatic. The LiveVault system is "set it and forget it," said Eyre. "You store online, you back up online, and it gets transported immediately to a secure, remote location. You don't have to do anything--that's the joy of online backup."

She continued, "Tape you do at night, basically once a day. Some companies have systems that are so large they don't finish the backup by the time work starts the next day."

With an electronic system, data is backed up at a set time every night, and the information goes off-site instantly via the Internet. "We (install) software on the server, we set it up with the club that it's going to run at 11 o'clock at night and back up these three types of files," Stoddard said. "You can pick and chose, you don't have to back up the whole world. Some people say, 'just backup the whole wall because everything's important to me.' Others will say, 'I want the accounting file, the customer list.' You can select." Once you set up the system, "it's on automatic pilot," he added. "You don't have to worry about it. Every morning we send (clients) an e-mail saying, 'Hey, you had a good backup last night, it fired up at 11:02 PM, have a nice day.' So there's confirmation that it really did work."

"With clubs being in business seven days a week, with many of them not having full-time IT people on staff, this is a way for them to protect their files automatically," Wheeler said. It also allows them to keep archived data longer. "If you had a corrupt file or a problem within their data, it's easier to go back one, two, three weeks in order to restore that particular file in good format; (electronic vaulting) gives them the flexibility to do so. It also allows (a company's database) to grow. There's no limit to the growth of it, and at no time do they need additional hardware. There's no upgrading or updating of a tape system. The format is software-based and automatically off-site, and it's also redundant. It goes into more than one location--there's a backup for their backup."

Where to Start

Transferring over to an electronic system is easy, those surveyed said. Essentially, the end user installs the software and sets up a schedule, which allows them to select what data directories they want to protect. For a club, this might include payroll records, financial records, or even club photos. "It's a one-time set-up (for) the schedule, and after that the whole process averages 20 minutes from beginning to end," Wheeler said.

"We send you an e-mail, you use a Web interface, it looks like your Word file system," Eyre said about her company's procedure. "It lists all your servers and your files, you click and it gets backed up, and the same process works for recovery--'I want to restore this file, to this place,' click and you're done."

Additionally, once the system is up and running, the only thing that gets backed up are the bytes that change," Eyre added.

Wheeler notes that the process is the same for all companies. For instance, eSilo backs up data for CMAA. "The association has an in-house IT person, so they use our software to be able to protect all of their data files," he said. "They have a lot of data, much more so than the average club, but it's the same process. They have a schedule that runs on a nightly basis in the Washington, D.C. headquarters."

Since most tape systems only keep a 10-day archive, Wheeler recommends that a client keep their tape system running concurrently with an electronic system for that amount of time, i.e., let the tape archives just become outdated, and then quit backing up on tape. Or not. "In the role of data protection and storage, there's never too much redundancy," he said. "I never tell someone they've got to stop (using the system they had before)"

Easy Recovery

The ability to recover data in a problem situation is, after all, why you back up to begin with. "It's really all about the recovery," Eyre said. And this is another area where online/electronic systems have significant advantages.

"You want to look at ease of use," Wheeler said. "Does the software work, is it easy to use, what does it take to bring back my data? The whole reason you back it up is for the day you have any type of loss, large or small."

For a smaller loss of just a portion of data, recovery can be accomplished via bandwidth. But for a site disaster that wipes out everything, recovery via bandwidth would probably take too long, advises Eyre. "You'd have a network attached storage space, we'd put it on a system and ship it out to you overnight."

How much does this all cost? Eyre says tape and electronic systems are hard to compare because they're so different. "It's apples and oranges," she explained. "We do it as a service that just completely takes it off your hands. Tape, you have to buy the tape drives, the tapes themselves, software, a maintenance contract on the software, and then you're doing all the work yourself. It's capital expenditure when you buy a tape system and then there's the cost of the labor and maintenance. So it's a capital expenditure as opposed to a service, where you pay an amount per month, based on the amount of data on your machine."

Wheeler adds that electronic systems are more cost-effective because there's no hardware to purchase, "and you don't have any consumable items. Most people don't realize that with tapes, you have to (keep buying them) and they're not cheap."

What To Look Out For

What are the most important issues to consider when switching over to electronic backup? First, make sure you have enough bandwidth. Eyre explains that you can't do the necessary initial backup via dial-up. "That's a disqualifier for us," she noted. However, "bandwidth is becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous, a lot of people are in buildings that are already wired for it."

Second, make sure you're signing up with a reputable company. "Because online backup space is kind of new, it's important to know who you're doing business with," Stoddard said. "Unfortunately, with the Internet today, somebody could be running (their business) from their dining room table. We've done this for seven years, we've got over 500 customers, millions of dollars of equipment, backup generators."

Additionally, "you want to look at where they're going to store the data," Wheeler emphasized. "Is it in a safe and secure environment? Where is it located? How are the files encrypted? Privacy is a big thing with any organization." He adds that it's important to make sure your backup service follows all federal regulations for privacy acts and other laws, and also to understand how their redundancy system works--"what their backup plan is," Wheeler said.

Is electronic backup circa 2005 a perfect world? In the world of high-tech, nothing is ever perfect, Wheeler said. "There's always something coming up on the horizon that's faster, bigger, better." But he adds that current systems are very efficient and have a solid platform. "It's what big corporations have been doing for years," he said. "But now, smaller organizations are able to have the same level of protection without the staff and the cost and the infrastructure to do it."