Computer Pains

It has been over two weeks since my last posting. I have a pretty good excuse that I think most of you will understand. I am a computer professional and I use my computer all day, every day. Early last week my main workstation froze a couple of times. This was highly unsual as my computer is usually reliable. Then later in the week it locked up a few more times and eventually did a spontaneous rebooot. Then I know I had a big problem. By Friday afternoon, my computer would only run for 5-10 minutes at a time before it would lock up.

I have quite a bit of experience at repairing computers, hardware and software. On Saturday, I went through a series of trouble shooting steps and determined that the problem was with the hardware and most likely in the voltage regulator for the cpu on the motherboard. By then my computer would boot, but only run for a few seconds.

Rather than trying to fix this old computer, I got a new one. The new computer is running a 64-bit version of Windows Vista. Fortunately, I was able to restore all of my files from backups. I have been back up and running since Sunday night, but Vista is a new experience for me. I think I like Vista, but I it is taking me twice as long to do everything. Not because Vista is slow, but because I am spending a lot of time hunting for things that have moved, changed names, or otherwise hid themselves from my immediate reach.

I don't change computers very often. I consider it about as much fun as moving to a different house or office. I know that the end result may be better, but I would rather not go through the process. When my computer started showing signs of trouble, the one thing I didn't have to worry about is losing data. My data is safely and securely backed up using an online backup system. The pain of moving to the new computer was significant, and continues to slow me down. I am almost back to 100% now. If I had lost my data, the pain would linger for many months.

A Game of Chance With Your Data

I was talking to a business associate, Ian, who works for a software company in the UK. Ian tells me that many of his customers don't adequately backup their computer data on a regular basis. In many cases, they only think about backing up their data after they have lost their data. Ian might have thought this had something to do with British people or their culture, but I informed him that Americans do the same thing. I constantly remind my friends, family, and colleagues that they need to backup their computer files, photos, mp3's... They usually agree, and then proceed about their business with the intentions of backing up their computers when they get around to it. Most people procrastinate until they lose their data, then they scramble for help.

People who have worked with computers for as long as I have know that a hard disk drive is not permanent storage for your data. Every drive will eventually die and the data that it once contained will be gone, unless of course you have a backup copy. For those of you who don't fully understand this yet, consider the following. Google, owner of over 100,000 hard drives, posted results of a failure analysis of their drives in February 2007. They found that approximately 6% of new hard drives fail within 1 year and after 2 years the failure rates increase significantly. Knowing that your brand new computer might be one of the 6 out of 100 that will fail, wouldn't you think it would be a good idea to make backup copies of your data? If your computer is not brand new, and a couple of years old, then maybe 10 or 15 out of 100 are going to fail.

Google's drives were located in professionally managed data centers with environmental controls and conditioned power. Your home or office computer is vulnerable to more problems due to power fluctuations, accidents and environmental conditions. Your laptop computer is much more vulnerable due to it's mobility. Your computer's hard drive is much more likely to fail than you might think. For a 2-3 year old computer in a typical home office, with a few accidental power losses, an occasional bump from a vacuum cleaner, and some dust and carpet fibers clogging up the air flow, the chances of failure may be more like 40-50% in a given year.

Hard drive failures aren't the only cause of lost data. You have plenty of other opportunities to lose data, including human error, and malicious software. If you somehow avoid being on the wrong end of the hard drive failure statistics, then you can consider yourself lucky. If you don't make mistakes, and you are extremely diligent about your virus and spyware protection, then you can also avoid the losses that are not related to hard drive failures. If you are actually so smart that you can steer clear of all of the causes of data loss, then you are smart enough to consistently and frequently backup your data, and you are not taking any big chances with your data.

How I Became a Fan of Online Backup

A few years ago I was responsible for IT at a medium sized company. I used Computer Associate's Brightstor Arcserve software and a Cybernetics AIT tape library for data backup. I am a fanatic about backing up data. I have been in the IT and computer business for over 25 years and have seen just about every kind of hardware and software failure you can imagine. I am absolutely certain that every single disk drive will fail at some time, and usually without warning. And I don't take any comfort that new drives are going to last a while. I have had several brand spanking new drives fail within weeks after purchase.

My Arcserve software and tape library system usually rocked along for weeks at a time without any major glitches. The backup jobs would kick-off on schedule. Tapes would get mounted automatically by the library, and stored in a slot after the backup. The system was about as reliable as any I had ever used before, but it still needed to be checked daily. We could never assume that a backup job ran successfully without checking the results. Jobs would occasionally hang because of some problem backing up a file, or a tape wasn't available, or some other unexpected situation. Bottom-line; the fully automatic system required daily checkups and human attention at least once a week or so.

One other major concern; the tape library was located in the server room at the office in the same rack as the servers. While we had multiple copies of all important data, we didn't have the data in multiple locations. A fire at the office could destroy our servers and our backup data at the same time. This was not a good situation and I knew it. Fortunately our company also operated a hosted Internet application and we leased space in a first class Internet colocation facility. Rather than setup a manual procedures to pull tapes and have an offsite vaulting company pick them up daily, I decided to make backup copies of certain critical data onto a server at the colocation facility. And I also did the reverse; copied critical data from the colo facility to our office server room. To make everything secure; I encrypted the files with AES before copying them. And to save time and bandwidth; I zipped the files.

Now, in addition to having to monitor Arcserve and the tape library system. I had to monitor the offsite file copy scripts. Our business grew, more servers, more data, more backups, more scripts... This monitoring, fixing, and keeping things on track was getting to be a real pain in the rear. If I got lazy for a few days, some data would certainly not get backed up or copied offsite. Eventually, the tape library started to give me problems. SCSI errors, mechanical problems, blah, blah, blah. If you have ever managed such a system then you know what I am talking about.

After a particularly difficult series of problems and unreliability in the entire backup system, hardware and software; along comes a maintenance renewal bill from CA. It was time to reassess this entire data backup plan. It didn't take long to make a decision to scrap Arcserve and the tape system. The system of scripts to compress and copy the data offsite was satisfactory and the tape backups were not providing enough benefit to justify the time and effort required to maintain them.

The increased reliance on the scripts led me to the next challenge. How could I make these scripts more reliable, easier to maintain, and easier to monitor? Searching the Internet, I found all kinds of solutions involving rsync, an open source utility that has been around for many years. I downloaded the source and built an executable for Windows. Then I downloaded the necessary UNIX utilities that rsync required. Eventually, I had a pilot project running with rsync. Not bad, but still not as easy to maintain and monitor as I wanted.

More searching and I discovered that for a modest monthly fee, I could subscribe to an online backup service and solve all of my backup problems in a matter of hours. A simple utility is downloaded, and then about 5 minutes of configuring (selecting which files to backup, and how long to retain them), and I was done. I get emails everyday telling me if my backups were successful or failed. This is absolutely a no-brainer. This stuff works like a charm, my data is automatically compressed, encrypted, sent offsite and monitored. Life is good!

Since this is not a product review site, I will not name the particular online backup service that I used in this article. I have tried a few of them and found that most are good and a few are problematic. I will dedicate a series of postings in the future to my reviews and assessments of several online backup systems. The good, the bad, and the ugly! Until, then I highly recommend that you take the time to try a few of them yourself and find one that meets your needs. Most offer some type of evaluation or trial account and it doesn't take long to find out if they work as advertised or not. One last piece of advice, test the restore functionality before you decide which online backup service to use.