Watching your back (up): prevent your data from disappearing.

The year 2004 was terrible year for many organizations. It's not just that the economy was lousy. In many areas of the country, especially in the southeast, Mother Nature was on a real rampage.

The hurricane season was one of the worst on record. Many Florida nonprofits suffered terrible losses in assets, office space, and most importantly, irretrievable data including donor lists, pledges, and accounting records.

You've heard it all many times before--back up your important data. Still, a lot of nonprofits have put, and continue to put, their critical data at risk because they lack a coherent backup plan and system, assuming that they even perform backup at all.

Stick to the plan

Some offices hook up an external hard disk drive or optical drive to one or more PCs and figure that they are covered. Automatic backup applications, such as the ones that come with CMP Products, Iomega, Western Digital, Maxtor, and Seagate external hard drives, can automatically write files to the external hard drive whenever they change.

Unfortunately, that simply isn't enough. If that hard drive is damaged, or even worse, destroyed, so is your backup strategy. Hundreds, or possibly even thousands, of businesses and organizations found out this terrible fact of life the hard way this year.

A backup plan is just that, a comprehensive and well-thought-out plan. To be effective, it needs to encompass three distinct areas of concern--hardware, software, and data protection. All three of these areas of concern are important, and poor planning and implementation in any one of them can throw your backup plan into disarray.

The hardware connection

Hardware is an important component of a backup plan. Hardware is not only the device that you will physically back up files and programs to, but the whole system that you use to perform your data processing chores. The advent of small computers has changed things dramatically from the days of mainframes and minicomputers. Data centers built around larger computers almost always contained well-maintained equipment attached to power conditioning components.

While the hardware has gotten smaller and more affordable, the same basic premise remains true. Your data, whether it is mailing lists, donor records, or financial records, is mission-critical. You need to run these applications on the most up-to-date equipment that your budget will allow. This also means spending the money for reliability, rather than purchasing the least expensive personal computer (PC) that you think might do the job.

Computers are a lot more resistant to power fluctuations, but having your computer go down in the middle of data entry because of a power failure can still occasionally damage hardware like your hard disk drive, and the data stored on it.

Again, a mission-critical PC and application really need to have the power backed up as well. This is accomplished by an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), which will continue to provide enough power to finish what you are doing, and shut down the system in an orderly manner which preserves the hardware and data.

UPS systems run from very inexpensive models, up to room-filling consoles. Don't go too inexpensive. Figure on spending between $100 and $200 on a model that will provide plenty of power for your PC, its display, and any external peripherals that you have attached. Think about a separate UPS just for the cable modem for our Internet connection to assure that a power failure doesn't interrupt any file transfers in progress.

Choosing the actual backup device requires some thought. You need something that will store much, if not all, of your important data on as few pieces of media as possible. The reason for this is simple--if you can back up to only a single piece of media, you won't have to keep interrupting your other tasks to check on the status of the backup.

High-capacity media and devices fall into three main types. The oldest, and probably most popular at least in terms of installed units is tape. Tape has the advantage of having a very large data capacity, and the media itself is pretty commonly available.

The most frequently used type of tape backup devices are 4mm DAT (digital audio tape) drives using the DSS (digital data storage) format. These can store up to 36GB of data on a tape. Tape drives and media are available from HE Sony, and several other vendors. DAT/DSS is pretty slow for large backups; it can take upwards of 4 hours to write a complete 36GB tape. At the same time, many other backup solutions are almost as slow.

One solution that's a bit faster is optical storage. Large capacity optical drives have been around for a number of years and are popular in the backup market. The latest are built around blue laser technology.

Typical lasers used in CD and DVD burners use frequencies in the Red part of the visible spectrum. Blue has a shorter wavelength, so data written with a blue laser can be written closer together, yielding a lot more data capacity on a disc.

The Kano Technologies (www.kanotechnologies.com) Blue-Way drive provides 23GB of storage on a rewritable cartridge. These cartridges cost about $50 each at the moment, so it's not the least expensive approach. The external model of Kano's Blue-Wav drive costs $2,995, and includes a SCSI interface card that needs to be installed inside the PC. Additional cards can be purchased if you want to move the drive from PC to PC. A test unit also included a copy of Dantz Retrospect, an excellent backup software package.

If you can reliably fit your most critical files into a bit smaller space, consider a DVD recordable drive, also commonly referred to as a DVD burner. The newest models can use double-layer DVD write-once and rewritable media, which have a capacity of up to 8.5GB. These burners are pretty fast. You can write an 8GB disc in about 45 minutes. And, they are very affordable. An internal LiteOn or Benq double-layer drive can be purchased for as little as $70.

With more than one PC to back up, you are probably better off with an external model. Micro Solutions (www.micro-solutions.com) has two models of external double-layer burners. The lighter and smaller "Bantam" is more expensive, at $249, while the slightly larger and heavier Model 224202 is faster when burning a CD, and costs $179. Both models simply plug into a USB port on your PC or laptop, and include software for backing up files and burning CDs and DVDs.

Software is another key

One area that frequently doesn't get enough thought is the software that will be used for backup. You can certainly use whatever CD/DVD creation application was included with the particular hardware that you purchase. This is not always the best course of action.

You need to think of what will happen in the event that you actually need to restore the backup after a disaster. You may not be able to get a hold of the original software and hardware. So, the data on the backup media needs to be in a format that can be used whether or not you have this original application.

One way to address this is to simply copy the relevant files to the backup media. You should also have a copy of the original application install CDs, the registration key, and any updates at your backup storage location. This way, the application can be reinstalled on a completely different PC if needed, and the files simply drag-and-dropped to the proper location.

Drive imaging software such as Symantec's Norton Ghost, which makes an exact copy of your hard disk drive, is another approach. One problem in using this type of software for backup is that you may not be able to restore the image to an exact hardware duplicate of the system it was imaged on, which can cause a lot of problems in accessing the restored image.

If you know what you are doing, you can access specific files and applications on the image, but it's often not a simple "put the disc in the drive and hit enter" process.

Backup software such as Dantz Retrospect (www.dantz.com) is yet another approach, and for many users, the best one. This type of application often creates a "restore" or "recovery" disc or disc set that can simply be placed in the drive of a PC (the original or a replacement system) and launched to start the recovery process.

In choosing an application to use, make sure that you select one for which you can easily find a replacement disc. While that application that you downloaded from the Internet may do everything you want and need, what happens if disaster strikes, and you can't find the developer's URL to get a replacement?

When bad things happen to good data, you need the ability to go to a local computer store or office supply store and purchase another copy of the original backup application right off the shelves.

Planning for disaster

The last part of the triad, though certainly not the least important, is the backup and recovery plan itself. How often will you back up each user's files, and specifically, what files and programs will you back up? Does it make sense to duplicate these mission-critical applications and data on a central network server or workstation, and perform all backup operations to and from this central location?

Many nonprofit managers who thought that they had things covered found out differently when they returned to a wrecked office to find their backup media damaged, destroyed, or possibly even swept away. This points out the last thing you need to consider--where and how will you store your backups?

There are formal services that promise to safeguard your backup media in "secure" locations. These sometimes also include disaster recovery services, and can be quite expensive. Of course, they are worth every penny that they charge if you ever find yourself needing to actually use their services.

If your budget is a bit more restrictive, there's a guerrilla approach you might find useful. Simply contact an associate or friend in another location that's geographically far enough away so that it's unlikely that the same natural disaster could affect you both.

Once every few days, weekly, or at some other predetermined time, create a second backup set of media and express mail, or even priority mail this set to them.

They can store your backup media in a secure place and exchange their backup set with you for similar storage at your location. In the event of a problem, this backup set can be expressed for next-day or even same-day delivery. If you are using expensive high-capacity rewritable media, you can reuse each other's current backup set when a new set is received.

None of the approaches offered in this column are difficult to implement. The time to get them done, though, is now, before you need them. Even if you have to go out and buy new hardware and software, including a UPS, external DVD burner, and a software package, the sum total should be under $500. That's a lot less than what the alternative could cost your organization.

Ted Needleman is the former associate publisher and editor-in-chief of Accounting Technology magazine. He is now a technology consultant and writer based in Stony Point, N. Y. His email address is [e-mail]