Under the Desktop: Facing Your Worst-Case Scenario

David Morgenstern

Following last week’s terrible news of death and destruction, our emotions may overwhelm our creativity, or move us to put our lives on hold for a while. But even as we struggle to recover our balance, businesses directly affected by the World Trade Center and Pentagon disasters are getting back to work. Perhaps we can learn from their example.
After watching the images of steel-and-glass towers collapsing, it seems unfathomable that any business housed in the World Trade Center could ever return to business. And yet many are, albeit in a different location. Putting aside the emotional impact for one moment (as if we ever could) there’s the sheer logistics of such an effort. Computers and servers storing vital information were destroyed or caked with thick dust. How could businesses access their data? How to rebuild?
The answers can be found in pre-planning and backing up.
Make Like a Boy Scout
Although the individuals killed in the attacks could in no way anticipate what would happen to them, one lesson we can take away from recent events is the value of planning, specifically planning for bad things to happen. This process — the planning or more importantly the pre-planning — is dubbed Disaster Recovery. It’s a whole specialized discipline for operations and IS management, complete with its own journal.
Disaster recovery seeks to determine every possible hazard to a business and then create a plan to deal with the situation. In the San Francisco Bay Area such contingency plans might include earthquakes and tsunamis. Such planning requires an analysis of each part of a business and how it might be affected by a particular disaster scenario. The resulting study and its recommendations (yet another budgetary item in tight times) must then be sold to upper-level management.
Such planning can break a seemingly overwhelming mess into a manageable project with a prioritized timeline. For example, while dealing with the emotional burden of the event itself, a company once housed in the World Trade Center must gather survivors, find a way to get work done without the missing staff, open a new office, purchase equipment, and connect with clients, the Internet, and any corporate WAN. Of course, data protection and restoration is an integral part of this plan.
Out of Site, Out of Mind
Most small-business owners such as those who work in creative professions will likely deem a full-scale disaster recovery plan to be overkill at best. The more practical alternative is to insure computer hardware and increase protection for critical data files via off-site backup.
First comes insurance. Make sure your household or office insurance covers damage and theft to computer hardware and peripherals. Some policies may have unrealistic restrictions and limitations. A popular insurance agency that specializes in coverage for computers is Safeware Inc.
Back Up, Go Forward
On the remote backup front, start with the following question: What data files would you need if you had to restart your business after a disaster? Certainly, your accounting files and invoices, correspondence, e-mail logs, and contact databases are irreplaceable. In addition, your Web site and digital portfolio are vital to future work. And no doubt a folder with your latest works in progress would be great to have.
All these files could add up to quite a package. Size is no problem for regular on-site backup to a hard drive or other removable storage medium, but moving large files across the Internet is a different story. Your connection speed will make a difference in the number and size of files you will be able to back up remotely. While the bandwidth of broadband connections can enable remote backup of large files, your upload speed is always much slower than downstream performance.
Several vendors offer a complete remote backup solution, including Blackjack.com for Mac users and @Backup for Windows. The data is compressed and encrypted before the software sends it over the Internet.
Both services offer sliding fee scales for personal and business accounts. Blackjack’s business plan costs $17.50 a month for up to 200MB of compressed data, which the company said is equivalent to 450MB. However, that compression rate must be based on text data, rather than image files, which usually are pre-compressed. Additional capacity costs from 6 cents to 2.5 cents per megabyte, depending on the amount required (like commercial printing, more costs less per piece).
A do-it-yourself approach is also available with Internet-savvy backup software and an FTP (file transfer protocol) server of your choice. Like the solutions above, the backup software compresses the data before sending it over the Internet, but also tracks incremental changes to files.
For example, the familiar $79 Retrospect Express Backup software from longtime Mac developer Dantz Development Corp. lets owners send a backup set of data to an FTP server. While Retrospect is offered for both Mac and Windows, the Internet backup capability is currently unavailable in the Windows version. Dantz has certified digital.forest’s Recover-iT) FTP service, which according to the company uses redundant servers and is itself backed up daily. A 250MB account costs $19.95 a month.
Windows users can get the same FTP backup capability with the Island CodeWorks Internet Backup software, from Canadian developer Island CodeWorks. The $25 shareware software supports multiple backup sets and scheduling.
Remember, remote backup over the Internet is no replacement for a regular backup. One protects against the everyday disasters, while the other lets us recover from the big one — from the one we hope will never come.
Creative professionals may be weary of the many and varied mantras about backup. As the medieval rabbinic sage Ibn Gabirol counseled: “If the ear is stuffed, what use is the warning bell.” Still, developing a remote backup strategy and then acting on that plan could make or break your business.