Software products for automating back-up can help
overcome the difficulty of persuading end-users to copy their work
to back-up media and keep it somewhere safe.
The choice of methods and media used to back up desktop PCs has
expanded in recent years.
The traditional dominance of magnetic tape is being challenged
by everything from CDs and memory sticks to central back-up managed
across a network.
Services companies are offering to take the whole business off
users' hands - as long as they are happy sending their data for
back-up via the internet.
Software products for automating back-up have emerged to beat a
long-standing difficulty inherent in traditional approaches:
persuading end-users to copy their work to back-up media and keep
it somewhere separate and safe.
Robin Burke, global research vice-president at analyst firm
Gartner, said users rarely spend much time or effort on a
comprehensive desktop back-up strategy.
"It is a low-key area - and I suspect a lot is ad hoc and not
organised by IT professionals," he said.
Major software and hardware suppliers - including Microsoft,
Cisco, Computer Associates, Symantec and EMCÊ- are trying to get IT
to take control, with products that automate back-up for end-users
or enable management from a datacentre, or both.
Computer Associates principal consultant Nigel Tozer said,
"Unless someone has suffered data loss it is unlikely they will use
any hardware provided, and even if they do, complacency will always
creep back in."
Tozer recommended that money spent on back-up equipment, such as
CD and DVD writers, or USB devices for individuals, is far better
invested in an automatic system that requires no action from
end-users to keep them protected.
Back-up from disc to disc is taking hold here; typically only
data that has changed is backed up and only one copy of duplicated
data, such as e-mails sent to several people, is held. This is
sometimes referred to as single-instance storage.
Even so, Microsoft encourages users of its System Centre Data
Protection Manager - a server application that optimises disc-based
back-up and recovery - to back up again to tape and store the tape
at another site in case of a natural disaster.
In addition data backed up to disc can periodically be sent
across a network to a datacentre. An extension of this approach is
wide area file services (Wafs), which are being promoted by Cisco
and others.
Wafs take all data away from a remote desktop installation, such
as a branch office, and keep it centrally maintained at a
datacentre, where IT specialists include it in their professionally
managed back-up procedures.
One area to watch out for is the type of protocol used by the
application.
Ian Bond, systems architect at Cisco, said, "Running file
services over even a very high speed wide area network has not
really been feasible before because systems such as Word are very
chatty and assume you are working over a local area network.
"It takes about 700 serial transactions just to open a Word
file. That is OK over a Lan but it means poor performance over a
Wan, where speeds are far slower."
The Wafs system has been developed to overcome this performance
hit. It is designed to help IT directors achieve the goal of
consolidating servers and storage. It can also be used to get IT
under central control of specialists, Bond said, adding that
back-up management was not the first aim but it has emerged as a
significant benefit.
"With Wafs we put technology in the remote office and in the
datacentre. It can be an appliance with no disc or software to
maintain, or it might be a module to plug into a branch router.
"It manages the communication but stops 80% of the chatter,
while maintaining the integrity of the conversation and the data.
There is no change to the application and the service is
transparent to the users."
Wafs cost a few thousand pounds of initial capital spending per
office, but Bond said that is usually paid back in well under a
year, especially if the full potential beyond just back-up is
exploited.
Research firm Yankee Group estimated that without Wafs the
capital spending of a branch office with a mid-range file server
and other servers would be about £30,000.
As part of this, a back-up device and software might cost well
over £4,000, and then there was the cost of staff time for backing
up, if the people remembered and were disciplined enough to do it
properly.
The idea of leaving back-up to IT specialists is also a selling
point for internet services, especially if connection and
transmission are set up to be automatic, at set times for office
staff or when a mobile worker links to the internet.
Burke said online services benefit organisations with mobile
staff, and again underlined the need for an automated process. "If
it is not automated, forget it: it will not be used," he said.
A laptop being used in a hotel room, like a PC on a desk, holds
some of an organisation's most valuable information, because it is
the very latest.
Thinking Safe is a new company offering a service to tackle
remote back-up for mobile workers. The company is unusual in that
it also offers its software for sale so that organisations can run
the service themselves from their own datacentres.
Ed Jones, a back-up and disaster recovery specialist, said, "A
file that is out and about on a laptop is most at risk in its first
week of life, because people tend not to save information onto the
network until they are ready to share it.
"Recently systems run by service providers or implemented as
software have given the ability to manage the back-up of the very
latest 1% or 2% of a company's data, even if it is on a laptop in a
hotel room."
Thinking Safe users include international IT services group
LogicaCMG and GB Airways, which has 1,250 staff across 35 offices
accessing 400Gbytes of data.
Online services take their own medicine. Thinking Safe, for
example, offers users a back-up device in their own offices, with
mirrored discs, plus mirrored discs on its own system, plus a link
from there across the internet to another site.
Online service costs vary considerably, from less than £10 a
month for 1Gbyte and to anything from £40 to more than £700 a month
for 100Gbytes, depending on factors such as the level of
automation, the provision of 24-hour helplines, bandwidth charges,
data compression, encryption and guarantees.
Online services and Wafs are relatively new, and if end-users
are left to their own devices on back-up they still tend to stick
to traditional approaches, at least for now, according to removable
disc and tape manufacturers, which continue to enjoy boom times.
Sony is finding 10% annual growth in demand for its tape systems in
the mid-range market, for example.
"We are coming across Wafs in big corporations but it takes
people time to adapt to something new, and they often prefer local
distributed back-up in any case," said Will Trotman, product
manager for Sony's Advanced Intelligent Tape.
He said tape development was continuing, and life length and
reliability were still increasing. Tests of Sony's latest tapes
showed a life of up to 30 years, although 10 to 20 years was more
realistic, and less than that if a lot of rewriting was being
done.
A 20Gbyte Sony tape costs £15, and a drive is £280. This
compares with £35 for a 35Gbyte removable disc from Iomega, for
example, and £229 for a disc drive.
"The trend is towards the removable disc, and prices will fall
but at present for long-term archiving - for example, of e-mails -
tape has advantages, not least the fact that it is cheaper," said
Burke.
"The growth of data and regulation compliance issues that demand
we keep more and more of it mean we cannot continue to throw disc
arrays at it: we have to archive it off."
Spare capacity on PCs could be used for back-up, with the right
software, said Jones. "Desktop machines typically have an 80Gbyte
drive, and if you have 400 of them that is a lot of space, and
probably most of it is not being used. You have the capability here
to build a back-up and recovery environment without buying extra
hardware."
At the other end of the market Burke saw DVDs emerging as
back-up, especially for home PC users and possibly in business.
DVDs are cheaper than discs but capacity is less than 5Gbytes,
although double-sided DVDs are appearing.
Burke found memory sticks useful for personal back-up when
travelling: the memory device can be kept separate from the laptop,
and if the machine is lost or stolen the data is still available.
But such devices are not realistic for long-term archiving.
There are debates about the relative durability of tape and
disc, about management issues, such as the need to load and unload
and label the media, and about disc random access compared with the
serial recording and access of tape.
The latter can become an issue if tape is used in back-up
systems that only write changes to the back-up media rather than
complete files, because if a file has to be restored its components
could be in different places.
But how often is a back-up system called on? Statistics are hard
to come by. Jones had one customer with 400 users at one site doing
10-15 restores a week, mainly of single files.
Theft is another area of concern. Derek Lloyd, managing director
of PC World Business, which runs an online service, said, "Research
shows that more than 2,000 laptops are stolen or lost in the UK
every day, and a hard drive crashes somewhere every 15 seconds. One
in five of all computers will suffer a fatal hard drive crash
during their lifetime.
"It is estimated that 43% of companies that suffer large-scale
data loss never reopen, and another 29% close within two years. The
risks are enormous, and businesses need to take data back-up
seriously."
People often delete something, either intentionally or
accidentally, and then want it back. Or users just cannot find a
file and go for a restore.
Whether it is to protect against data theft, a disc crash or
accidental deletion of a document, backing up desktop and mobile
PCs is essential.
Fortunately, online back-up services, and developments in
back-up media and software makes the process of backing up company
data on these devices a lot easier.