Here is a startling statistic, courtesy of research company IDC: 40 per cent of small and mid-sized businesses never back up their data. Here's another that puts the first one in perspective: 70 per cent of small businesses go belly up within a year of suffering a major loss of data.
Walter Merkas wouldn't dream of being so cavalier with his company's intellectual property. The chief executive officer of EnabledSuccess Inc., a software company in Ottawa, says his 10-employee firm had a regular routine of backing up files to a server. "We thought we were well protected."
- What sort of data backup precautions do you take? Answer the poll question at Globetechnology.com
Mr. Merkas found out otherwise when a colleague's computer crashed — for good. It turned out the external hard drive that temporarily stored files wasn't plugged into the backup server. Perhaps the jack had been yanked out during cleaning or maybe someone had just forgotten to plug it back in after borrowing the portable drive.
Regardless, almost three months worth of data was gone.
"We assumed that our backup was going off every night, but we had no controls," Mr. Merkas says. "There's no alarm to say that your backup isn't working."
The meltdown caused the company to switch to online backup, a fast-growing alternative to traditional archiving practices. Instead of storing files internally on backup media such as tapes, CDs or external drives, businesses sign up for a software service that automatically copies files and sends them to remote servers via the Internet. If a fire, flood or swarm of locusts besieges your business, your files remain safe and up to date. Same goes for more mundane threats such as computer viruses or laptop thieves.
There are dozens of online backup providers in the nascent industry, ranging from websites that offer a set amount of storage space for free to subscription services that charge by the gigabyte or sell monthly or annual contracts. Some solutions back up continuously, updating any changed file; some store multiple versions of files; and most are simple enough to install without the need for an IT specialist.
Storage giant Iron Mountain Digital has online products, as do small startups such as Utah-based Berkeley Systems, which made news recently when General Electric Co. signed it to a multimillion-dollar contract to perform online backups on more than 300,000 of its computers around the world.
That a company the size of GE would allow its corporate information to travel over the Net — even secured by Berkeley's strong encryption — to reside in a tiny outfit's facilities suggests the technology's benefits and cost advantages are finally winning over corporate IT. The shift online is also driven by disenchantment with conventional backup options.
Tape, long the preferred medium for archival storage, is susceptible to degradation and hard to search. CDs and external drives, the preferred choices of small and mid-sized businesses, need to be physically taken offsite by employees, who may lose or misplace them.
Perhaps the most compelling selling point is that online software allows companies to easily back up individual desktops. John Clancy, executive vice-president of Iron Mountain Digital, says that 60 per cent of corporate data resides on laptops, desktops and in remote offices, outside the layers of traditional security.
"Online backup that happens automatically and continuously takes responsibility for backing up out of individual users' hands and puts it back in reliable tech hands," he says.
Steve Rodin, president of Toronto-based Storagepipe Solutions, a six-year-old online backup company, says signing up for his service is like getting a techie dedicated to protecting your data without having to pay a full-time salary.
"There's more interest in having specialists do the data backup now," he says. "The importance of disaster recovery and offsite data protection have become more top of mind after 9/11, Katrina and the East Coast blackout."
But it doesn't take a natural disaster to wipe out your corporate databases. More than 30 per cent of PC users report having lost all their files at some point to events beyond their control. Most of the time the causes are mechanical, such as a failed drive, but human error and theft account for as much as half the cases.
Even more worrying are studies that show backup data can't be fully recovered in as many as half the cases. "Many backups fail and companies don't realize they failed," Mr. Rodin says.
"They think they're safe but they're not. That's why we emphasize recovery, not backups."
One of Storagepipe's customers decided to test the reliability of the previous outfit that stored its backup tapes. Twice within six months the storage company could not locate the requested tape, Mr. Rodin says.
Mr. Merkas of EnabledSuccess decided to go with Berkeley's Mozy software after reading about it online. He got to test his new system sooner than he'd expected — within a month of signing up, not only was an important file lost, but the company needed to restore a particular version of it. Mozy passed the test.
Still, nothing is foolproof. Servers crash — even at storage companies — and with the proliferation of online backup providers some are bound to go under, possibly taking your data with them. And, of course, there are always those locusts to worry about.
