Data Backup Considerations - the first step

We all know that loosing data can be devastating. The need for having consistent and reliable backups is pretty obvious. But getting to that stage can be more confusing.
Since we here at Sundog are in the process of creating a backup plan, I figured I’d share with you our steps along the way in hopes that it might provide some insight to you and your business.

• Total size - if you backed up everything, how much space would you need? Keep in mind that in a true disaster recovery case, you might want to have an off-site copy of your data that gets cycled with your normal on-site backups every other week or so. This means you’d actually need up to double what your first size estimate is.
• Importance - How important is the data to the company? I recommend setting up a 5 or 10 point scale and scoring each server, PC, and/or user’s data on the level of importance. For instance, Suzy’s documents on her laptop probably aren’t as important as say the files on the accounting server.
• Security - speaking of accounting, it would be a good idea to label or note what data needs to be kept confidential. This would come into effect if you’re looking at using some online file sharing space or even how you would store the off-site data. One might consider keeping accounting and other sensitive data backups on external hard drives in a safe off-site (or even on-site for that matter).
• Frequency of change - how often does the data on a particular machine change? This will help in determining how often you need to back it up. If the documents shared off of the file server only change once every 2 weeks, then you would only need to back it up every two weeks. Most backup software out there will allow for incremental backups - which means that once it has a full backup of the data, it will compare the current files to the files it has backed up before and will only backup the new and changed files since that backup. Incremental backups are great but a full backup should still be taken again every once in a while to help speed along recovery in case of a disaster.
• Recovery time - how long can we wait for the data to be recovered in case of a disaster? This question will help you determine what kind of backup medium would be best to use. If you wouldn’t need the data anytime soon, you could use an online service to backup and restore the data over your internet connection, or you could invest in a tape backup device and tapes. If you need faster restore times, external USB or Firewire hard drives should be considered. If you need it immediately and loosing it would cause major business downtime, you should make sure the server itself has its own redundancy that it can recover from (mirrored or other RAID configurations that can allow for one or two hard drives failing) and then also have the external hard drives around for the extreme cases.

Depending on the size of your business, gathering this data could take a few hours to a few months, but knowing it is the best way to be able to plan for disaster recovery plan and also planning a budget for your backup hardware/software.