Here are some more information for Arcserve Disaster:

Our computers have become almost indispensable ministry tools. What would you do if the worst happened and you had to function without your computers? Would your ministry survive?

This article is the first in a 3-part series on how to protect your ministry from serious computer-related loss. This time we're going to focus on protecting your critical data with effective backups. In the next two installments, we'll cover the basics of network security and finally what you should know about software license compliance.

Ineffective data backups really do have the potential to hurt your ministry. Here are some frightening statistics:

31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control.

60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster.

Armed with the right knowledge, you can protect yourself and avoid becoming another statistic.

Back Up Your Data!

Most people would agree that computer data is one of their most valuable organizational assets. What would you do if all your donor and accounting files were suddenly gone forever because a hard drive on your server crashed? This could also happen through disgruntled employees, accidental deletion, corruption in one of your software programs or even because of an attack from an outside hacker. The first line of defense in protecting your ministry data is to perform regular backups.

What exactly is a backup? It's when you make a copy of your important data and keep it in a safe place, so you can restore that data if it ever becomes necessary later. The most common method of backing up data is to use a tape drive and backup tapes. I'll have some important recommendations for you later in this article, but the critical thing to understand is that you MUST do something...any kind of data backup is better than none at all. If you ignore your data, it just might go away!

Back to the Future

Remember the 1985 movie "Back to the Future"? Just like the character in that film used a sports car to travel back in time, you can take your ministry back in time, too. Instead of keeping just one backup copy of your data, you should set up a system that keeps copies of your data for set time intervals (every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year, etc.). Use a different tape or disk for each backup you make and then label them by date, and you will soon have a library of archived data backups you can restore from as needed.

Why go through all that trouble? Well, suppose you find out that a very important Excel spreadsheet is now corrupted and you can't open it. You haven't used it for several months, and your backup strategy has been to keep writing over the same tapes every week. Chances are all the backups of that Excel file are probably corrupted, too! But what if you would've used a different strategy and kept an archive of your backups for each month of the previous year? You could then easily go back in time to the month when you knew the Excel file was still working and restore that copy...the issue would be quickly & easily resolved. Time travel can be pretty useful sometimes!

How to Make Effective Data Backups

If you have multiple computers networked in your office, keeping all your data in a single location (like a file server) and backing that up every night is the recommended way to perform backups. I would also recommend using a 20-tape rotation, which gives you the ability to "go back in time" up to a whole year (in various intervals) to restore important files.

You should also keep the most recent copy of your backup off-site (i.e., at another location away from your office). This is critical because if your building burned to the ground, your data backups would be destroyed right along with it. With a recent off-site copy, you could restore what you need on new equipment and get back to the business of ministry quickly.

I recommend using enterprise-quality backup software to perform your data backups. Good software, like Veritas Backup Exec and Computer Associates BrightStor ArcServe will schedule everything for you, run automatically and keep logs of everything that does and doesn't get backed up. These programs can also notify you by email (or some other method) when a backup is finished, if it was successful and whether or not you need to address anything. Aside from a little ongoing monitoring, everything can be automated. All you have to do is remember to change tapes every day.

If you're a home office or small office user without the resources to do tape backups, a ZIP drive, an external hard drive, a CD/DVD burner or even one of those cool little USB jump drives that fit on a key ring would all be options to consider. There are also services that let you do online backups over the Internet for a monthly fee. These are good options, as long as the amount of data isn't too large. Some services you can check into include Remote Data Backups, U.S. Data Trust's LiveVault Online Backup Service and iBackup.

Another Form of Insurance

Backups are really like another form of insurance. What kind of problems would you have if your ministry data was wiped out? Could it be replaced at any price? With a relatively small initial investment in equipment and some ongoing monitoring and maintenance, you can practically guarantee that your critical data will be available when you need it.

Protecting your data by effective backups is only part of the solution. Next time we'll talk about some simple steps you can take to protect your network against hackers, viruses, disgruntled employees and other potential vulnerabilities.

Donnie Schexnayder is a ministry technology expert. He holds industry certifications from Microsoft and CompTIA and has over 10 years experience in supporting churches and Christian ministries with technology. With a mixture of passion and expertise, Donnie helps ministries advance their mission of bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth by using cutting-edge technology. Donnie lives with his wife and 2 children in Colorado Springs, CO.

Eternitek: Advancing Christian Ministries Through Technology

http://www.eternitek.com

info@eternitek.com

Backup Policies and Disaster Recovery

For any business large or small there needs to be some sort of backup system to protect your information. Information can be anything from contact information to record keeping to actually information based products. Backing up information and preparing for a disaster can be done in many different ways but as long as you reach the same goal of protecting your information.

You can use a variety of programs to backup information, from the windows backup utility, to 3rd party software, to open source or free utilities, to even on line services now for very cheap. But a few things should be consistent across the board about creating a backup plan.

1. Backups should be done consistently
2. Backups should be done at the very least everyday
3. Full backups should be done at least once a month if not every week
4. The backup plan should be reviewed frequently to make sure that every important is still being backed up
5. Test restores should be preformed frequently to find any problems in your backup program before it is to late.

Now as for a retention plan, one of the biggest things that companies do is keep their backups on a tape in the server or in the server room. If you are not using an on line backup system a copy of your backup should be taken to an off site location at least once a month. This way should a natural disaster happen you still have a backup of your files that at worst will be a month old. This method also gives you the opportunity to recover a file that has been missing but has gone unnoticed for up to a month.

Now there are four different types of backups, full backup, incremental backup, differential backup, and continuous backup. To understand how all of these different types of backups work you need to know about the archive bit. The archive bit is a setting on all files that will tell backup software whether it has been changed or not. Whenever a file is change the archive bit is set.

Full backups are just that they backup everything regardless of whether is has changed or not and it will clear the archive bit from all the files. Incremental backups will first make a full backup which will clear the archive bit and then everyday it will check all files for the archive bit. Any files that now have the archive bit set, meaning they have been change, will be backed up and the archive bit will be cleared. So with an incremental backup if you need to restore a folder that is on tape you will need the full backup tape and every incremental tape since then to restore.

Differential backups are similar except they don’t reset the archive bit, first a full backup is taken and all the archive bits are cleared. Then every day a differential backup is run where if the archive bit has been set the file is then backed up but the archive bit is NOT cleared. So through out the week the differential backup will be backing up more and more files until we do a full backup again. The advantage of a differential backup is that if we need to restore a folder we will only need the full backup tape and the last differential tape that was done to restore and entire folder.

For smaller businesses I would recommend going to an on line backup system because it will totally alleviate most of the headache in purchasing backup software and configuring it yourself. IDrive is one of these on line backup companies that allows you to download their client program and then use their continuous backup system. IDrive will also give you 2 gigs of free space, so if what you are backing up is less then 2 gigs you can get the service for free. KeepIt.com is yet another one of these systems that provides on line backup so you don’t have to worry about changing tapes or moving information to an off site location. On line backups do it all for you.

For larger enterprise businesses I would recommend some form of tape backup such as BriteStor from ArcServe which provides a very flexible backup software along with a tape drive that can store more data than you would ever want and with no monthly charge. But programs such as BiteStor require quite a bit of setup time from an IT specialist and quite a bit of maintenance to make sure

About the Author

Mike Walton, founder of http://www.mikenetpc.com has been in the technolgogy field for 8+ years and has worked with many companies developing backup and recovery policies including online backup.
IDrive
KeepIt.com

CA Receives Top 'Product of the Year' and 'Partner of the Year' Honors from Programmer's Paradise
CA, Inc. today announced it was named Partner of the Year for the second straight year by leading IT reseller Programmer's Paradise.  Also for the second straight year, CA ERwin® Modeling Suite earned the vendor's highest Riding the Crest® award for best-selling Product of the Year, while CA ARCserve® Backup, CA Threat Manager, and CA eHealth® Performance Manager won in seven other product ...

Thanks for visiting!