A Perspective On Image Backups

I think it would be fair to say that the typical computer owner doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about backing up their computer. Since a lot of people look to me for advice on IT and computing topics, I try to spread the word about the need to backup those computers. Everyone agrees, some are already doing something, and a few already have it covered. Advising a friend or business associate to backup their computer rarely prompts them to take immediate action. It is not uncommon for someone to wait until they have a data disaster before they get in gear and start actually doing some effective backups.

Once someone loses valuable data, they are highly motivated (for a while) to backup their data. They usually go overboard and try to do too much. One great example is a software developer named Ed, who lost his hard drive last week. Fortunately he was backing up his work, as most computer professionals do. After Ed installed a new hard drive into the computer, he spent the better part of a day installing software, restoring data, and configuring his system to get it back to a state where he could continue working on his project. He called me with some questions about disk imaging software. After spending so much time getting his OS and development tools installed, he decided that he wanted to make images of his disk so that he could quickly and easily recover from the next such event. This question about disk imaging comes up frequently.

My past experience has been that you would rarely actually restore a disk image. In most circumstances I don't use images and I will explain why. There have been several occasions where I have had complete disk images available and I have chosen not to use them. One reason is because when I am replacing a hard drive, I like to take the opportunity to clean up the configuration and space. I prefer to reinstall any necessary software, sometimes upgrading to latest versions. If the computer has been running for any length of time, there are always remnants of old software and data that are no longer needed. The general idea is that I like to start from scratch and build up the new drive with clean installs and data. Another huge factor to consider when thinking about restoring from a disk image is that you must be restoring to the exact same hardware configuration. In numerous cases, I have elected to replace the entire computer rather than a single drive, which renders the image backup useless in most cases.

There are certainly some cases where image backups are excellent tools for recovery from disk failures. Disk image backups can help you recover faster from a hard disk drive failure than rebuilding from scratch as I often do. If you have determined that you really need the ability to restore an entire image, then I highly recommend that you find an image utility that creates images that can be updated without the need to make a completely new image every time. Symantec's Ghost product is one that I have used in the past with good success. There are other good products and some even create bootable media. These are good products and they can be a lifesaver when you really need them. However, your disk image backups are not the only backup solution you will need. You will also need file backups for the cases where a disk image restore can not be used.

Data Backup and Recovery: Growing Data Storage Requirements Create Backup Problems (Part II)

In my previous post, Data Backup and Recovery: Growing Data Storage Requirements Create Backup Problems (Part I), I wrote about how home computer owners were experiencing increased data storage requirements that create data backup problems. Businesses of all sizes face the same delima. Large businesses usually have IT departments that have processes for acquiring storage products and managing them as well. It's the medium-size and small businesses that tend to overlook the cost of maintaining and backing up new databases and data storage as they grow and implement new business applications.

When I was the IT director for Technology Builders, Inc. (TBI), we restricted the size of our employee's email storage to about 50Mb each. The limit had nothing to do with the cost of the server or the disk storage, instead it had everything to do with our ability to backup the Exchange Server Information Store. The backup problem was more than just media. We were constrained by our backup window as well as the number of tapes and the offsite transportation and storage. The backup jobs had to be complete before 7 AM so that the tapes could be placed in a container and picked up by our offsite storage provider. I often got an ear-full from sales people and sales engineers who couldn't understand why I wouldn't just order a couple of bigger hard-drives and increase their mailbox limits. They thought I was just restricting them because I didn't think they really needed more mailbox space. Actually there was some truth to that premise, because I know from experience that it doesn't matter how much space you allocate, people will fill it up and want more. However, what they failed to get a grasp of was the total cost of a faster tape backup system, more tapes, more offsite storage space and the ongoing maintenance of the backup system as well as the media. These costs made the cost of a few bigger disk drives look minuscule.

I am now trying to balance data storage needs for Orasi Software, Inc. We have a growing employee base and a number of technical employees that want to store everything online from multiple versions of software installation media, to virtual machine images. As I was ranting about in my previous post, we keep finding new way to consume disk space and the new ways seem to be exponentially more consuming every year. These virtual machine images can be huge! At Orasi, we are way past tape storage as a backup media and we use online backup, in some cases moving copies of data between multiple locations for offsite storage. No tapes! No tape library hardware! That's a good thing, but online backup is not a good solution for backing up 16GB virtual machine images.

There is no way I am going back to the tapes. Just like I backup my MP3 collection to a portable hard drive at home; I am going to use some portable hard drives to make occasional backups of some of the less-than-critical storage hogs at Orasi. Online backup will continue to be the solution for business critical data where we need current versions offsite for business continuity purposes.

Growing Data Storage Requirements Create Backup Problems (Part I)

I once paid nearly a thousand dollars for a 520 Mb disk drive. That's right, megabytes not gigabytes. At the time, a half a gig of storage was a lot of space. Today, you can't even buy a computer will less than about 80 gigabytes of disk space. Last week, I bought a 750 GB server class drive for less than $300. Back when I spent a grand on half a gig, it was inconceivable that anyone could have or use over a few gigs of storage on a computer. Now you easily eat up a hundred gigs with a few software products, some digital photos, mp3's and a few movies.

We are storing more different kinds of stuff on our computers than ever before. It used to be documents, then pictures, then music, now movies. Notice how each of those new things takes up exponentially more disk space. A 20 gig hard drive of a few years back would store hundreds of thousands of spreadsheets and documents with room to spare. The same hard drive would store maybe 10,000 high resolution photos or about 3000 typical songs in mp3 format. You can probably get one or two full length movies on the same hard drive. Hence, the demand for more space.

Getting a bigger hard drive is the easy part of the solution, which leads to the bigger problem: How are you going to backup all of that stuff? Apparently a lot of people, maybe most people, don't think about that. I think about it because I know from past experience that anything stored on a hard drive can disappear in a split second due to any one of a number of causes. When I price out a hard disk drive for one of my computers, I factor in some additional cost. At a minimum, I double the cost because I need a second hard drive to backup the first hard drive. The cost is actually more than double because the second hard drive needs to be portable, which is a little more expensive than your typical internal hard disk drive. In my case, I usually add in cost for a mirrored or raid set and then include the cost of the backup disk or service on top of that.

And, let's not for get offsite backup. Copying those files out to a second disk is a huge step towards protecting your data from common causes of data loss. Face the fact; making a simple backup copy to a second hard disk drive only offers limited protection. First of all, most people slack up and let the time between backups grow longer and longer until they have a problem and they don't have a current backup. And the second hard drive offers almost no protection against a disaster such as a fire, flood, or even theft.

So when you are running out of disk storage space, don't just think about the cost of a new terabyte drive. You must also consider how you are going to protect the data. The level of protection depends on what you are going to store on the drive and how much pain will be caused if the data is lost. The absolute minimum protection is a second hard drive with frequent backups. The best protection is a current copy stored offsite, which can be a problem for huge amounts of data.

I don't know about you, but most of what I save on the computer is very valuable to me. That includes business data, family photographs and my mp3 collection. Losing any of that is completely unacceptable to me. I use online backup for my documents and photographs. The MP3's and a few movies get copied to an external hard drive stored at the office. I can get away with that because my Mp3 collection doesn't grow much and I really don't have any movies that I care that much about. But everyone's situation is different. Think about your data and how much protection you need. Implement the appropriate measures as if your data depends on it, because it does!

Happy Thanksgiving

Backing Up the \Users Folder in Vista

Microsoft has taken a step towards making computers more friendly for non-computer professionals with the Windows Vista operating systems. While Vista may seem a little confusing to many of us who have years of experience with computers, it is actually better for the average person because Microsoft has hidden some of the complexities that were present in earlier versions of Windows. Most common functions are presented in natural language that is easily understood by non-computer people.

One of the areas where things have changed is the file system. The concept of drive letters and directories has all but disappeared. Now someone like me, and probably you since you are reading this blog, wants to know where things are stored and how the information is structured. I don't know about you, but I am not satisfied just saving my files in the "documents" folder. My grandmother is happy to just click save and be done with it, but I want to know what drive my stuff is on. I want to know what drive and what folders to backup.

I have a computer in my house that everyone in the family uses. That includes my wife, three children, and occasionally myself. I use an online backup system to automatically backup my primary work computer every night and store the files offsite. I also use online backup for the family computer. I had to do some poking around to figure out where Windows Vista stores user files. They are actually all neatly stored under a /Users folder. This is similar to the old "Documents and Settings" folder that we all know about on XP. It first appears that just backing up the \Users folder would do the job, and it will. But, selecting the \Users folder is actually troublesome because Microsoft has some hidden symbolic links in the \Users folder. Symbolic links are special files that actually represent other folders or files that reside in completely different locations. The problem is that the \Users contains a hidden system folder named All Users, which is actually a symbolic link to \ProgramData. \ProgramData mostly contains data that wouldn't usually be backed up, but the real problem is that the All Users folder, which is just a link, doesn't have permissions that would allow any normal process to access it. This same problem surfaces again with other links that are down in the \Users folders within the actual data folders.

I have scrapped the idea of just backing up the \Users folder. I don't mind backing up some extra temporary data that is located under \Users, but I haven't quite figured out the best way to handle the permissions problems. The best solution that I have found so far, is to select each user's documents folder with in the \Users folder.

Restoring Backup Files to Windows Vista

I have now been running on Windows Vista for couple of weeks. Overall, I am fairly happy with the new system. However, I am still fumbling around to find things because Microsoft has moved things around. It may be for the better, but I find myself wondering what was wrong with the old way familiar ways of doing things. I still haven't found out how to change the windows file explorer (if they still call it that) setting so that I can see the complete file names, including extensions. In general, the way that you navigate through the files on a Vista computer is different. Ever since I got my first PC, I have been accustom to using drives and folders. Windows XP started the "My" stuff; My Documents, My Pictures, My Music... These were all alias names for folders that were buried somewhere down in "Documents and Settings". Windows Vista has taken this to a whole new level. They have dropped the "My" stuff and now you just have "Documents", "Computer", "Music", "Games"... I think this is probably a good thing for non-computer people, but it confuses those of us who want to know where everything is. I am not going to attempt to educate you on Windows Vista, but I do want to point one important difference related to restoring data from backups.

After I got my Vista system up and running, the first thing I wanted to do was restore my documents from my online backup service. I logged into my backup service, located my files under "Documents and Settings". By default, the system wants to restore files to their original locations. This is what backup systems usually do. However, Windows Vista doesn't have a "Documents and Settings" folder on the C: drive like Windows XP did. I could have let the restore create the "Documents and Settings" folder and restore all of the files just where it originally found them. Actually, that would be a bad idea. Windows Vista uses a "Users" folder for the same purpose as the old "Documents and Settings" folder. I directed my backup software to restore my files to the "Users" folder and under my account, and shazaam! my documents show up under "Documents" in Windows Vista.

I have had several people ask me about using their backup data to transfer their files to a new computer. I actually like this practice because it is a good test of the backup system. It is always a good idea to test your restore capability. After going through this exercise a couple of times, I have decided that when moving from Windows XP to Windows Vista, it is better to use the "Transfer files and settings" wizard to move your files. The wizard will not only move your files, but it will move them to the new equivalent location on the new computer.

Once you get Windows Vista up and running, you should install your backup software and make a new backup of your new computer with the files in there new locations. This will make it much easier to restore them later if needed. And if you didn't use your backup system to restore your files to your new computer, you should plan to test your restore capability soon after converting to the new computer.