Backup Articles » Basics http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog All you need to know about data backup Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:29:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Backup considerations for Microsoft SharePoint http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/backup-considerations-for-microsoft-sharepoint/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/backup-considerations-for-microsoft-sharepoint/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:27:53 +0000 George http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=578

SharePoint is a content sharing and collaboration platform. It provides document sharing, team discussion and document-based workflow. SharePoint is highly customizable and each customization depends on the business environment. Although, there are loads of free templates from Microsoft that add further functionality to SharePoint, businesses can write their own code to add specific functionality related to their business needs. In addition, there are whole products that can be installed on top of SharePoint such as, Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Project Server 2007.

SharePoint requires that the backend database is Microsoft’s SQL Server. Worth noting, a couple of database limitations which are; SharePoint does not support a generic database interface, such as, Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and you can encounter database size restrictions with previous versions of SQL server editions. Remember that the configuration and user data is all stored in the backend database. Considerations should be made whether to separate the backend database from the application platform as SharePoint is quite heavy on resources.

As the system grows its gets further customized and the need for an effective backup strategy becomes indispensible. I hope it is clear enough as to understand the importance of backing up your SharePoint environment. The Native backup solution is out of question! The major setbacks of this utility are its inexistent functionality of selecting different levels of items or folders for backup or restore operations. Without granularity of backup, an administrator needs to restore the whole database to be able to recover a deleted file. However, in the latest edition of SharePoint there is a Recycle bin where one can retrieve a deleted document.

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To overcome such limitations, I suggest you invest in a third-party backup solution that at least provides the following functionality:

  1. Tight integrated with Active Directory
  2. Data integrity – that is, no data is ignored during backups/restores such as, meta data
  3. Backup granularity and classification capabilities
  4. Has adequate scheduling capabilities

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]]> http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/backup-considerations-for-microsoft-sharepoint/feed/ 0 What is Cloud Computing? http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/what-is-cloud-computing/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/what-is-cloud-computing/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:16:05 +0000 George http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=576 Cloud computing can be anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Cloud services are categorized as, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service or Software as a Service. While, the name cloud, is the symbol used to represent the Internet in various technical and non-technical documents. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a pay-per-use service where a cloud-computing provider offers storage space, network equipment, and virtual servers as consumable resources. Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a platform for the development, deployment and hosting of applications where the final product is delivered to the users via the Web. Software as a Service (SaaS) is when providers provide applications to customers via the Internet as Web services.

Private cloud is an in-house cloud computing solution that is limited to the internal users of an organization. It is more secure and can be later connected with external providers. Public cloud is any commercial cloud computing service provider that offers storage and computing power over the Internet. Hybrid cloud is a cloud model that combines the advantages of public and private cloud computing environments.
Many remote online data backup service providers use public cloud providers as their backend infrastructure. Hence, backed up data is stored at the backend and that is why the backup service provider setup needs to be secure and reliable!

Amazon as one of the first organizations to provide cloud-computing services has become one of the major players. Their setup known as Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows customers to install and run applications on virtual machines (VMs). New VMs are instantiated from a library of images developed by various customers and Amazon themselves. Users can build and customize their own Amazon Machine Images. Running VMs are called running instances and you pay for the amount of computing power per hour and the in/out traffic generated (bandwidth used) while you are billed on monthly basis. Amazon EC2 provides a secure connection with public/private keys and firewall capabilities. Other database and performance/scalability services are provided such as, Simple DB and load balancing functions. Apart from EC2, Amazon has been providing a cloud storage service that provides scalable, unlimited online storage known as S3 that can provide caching functionality across the globe.

Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. The main services consists of the Azure operating system, the SQL Azure database the AppFabric application connectivity service. Although, Microsoft are relatively new to cloud computing, their marketing strength is showing its force even in this area. They have a strong partnership program with its customers and resellers and this will help them become of the main players soon. Their main advantage is that they are offering their vast suite of products as cloud services plus while, on the other hand, they are offering users to run Azure in their own data centers with the Windows Azure platform appliance. Today, Microsoft cloud computing charges are very competitive with respect to other providers.

The long time hosting provider RackSpace are also in the arena! RackSpace Cloud known as Mosso includes a storage and a server infrastructure service while they still offer the traditional hosting services. RackSpace advantage may be their excellent support services when compared to other providers. RackSpace fellow competitors The Planet (Orbit) have a similar cloud setup whereas they claim that their prices are below that of a fully allocated dedicated server. While, this may be true for virtual servers, one has to work out bandwidth costs as in certain situations where a web server consumes a constant amount of bandwidth it might be cheaper to run your web applications on a dedicated server with an agreed dedicated bandwidth! The list of providers is getting bigger and bigger with names like GoGrid, HP Private Cloud, etc…

Google’s App Engine is a platform for web developers and Web hosting applications and you are charged for storage, bandwidth and CPU power. It is limited to a couple of programming languages.

The Cloud Security Alliance is making a great effort towards cloud computing security. To promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud computing, and provide education on the uses of Cloud Computing to help secure all other forms of computing.

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]]> http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/what-is-cloud-computing/feed/ 0 When Green Is Bad http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/when-green-is-bad/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/when-green-is-bad/#comments Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:16:46 +0000 chribonn http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=559 A few days ago I received a phone call from a person asking for my services to help him recover data from a failed hard disk. I asked the caller whether he had internet access—sometimes the failed disk takes with it the only available computer. The caller explained that he had internet access and that the patient was a removable disk. I pointed the client to our online questionnaire and asked him to fill in the form. A few minutes later the form arrived.

In a nut shell, the disk was a 120GB 3.5” 7200rpm IDE Maxtor drive, two years old. It was housed within an aluminium external drive case. It was hooked up to a standalone Windows XP computer. It was spinning, no unusual noises such as clicks or retry access sounds. The file directory could be read. The client had last successfully placed data on the medium less than 15 days before.

I immediately got a hunch about what the problem was. As long as the word “green” didn’t factor in our conversation a chance of success remained. About 30 minutes later the client arrived at our office with the problem disk. I plugged the disk into one of our recovery units, powered it up and a few seconds later was looking at its contents. All file names were in green rather than the usual black font. This meant that the files had been encrypted using Windows XP’s Encrypted File System (EFS). EFS provides a file system level of encryption that allows files to be transparently encrypted from attackers who gain physical access to the computer.  EFS first made its debut in Windows 2000.

I asked the client whether he had reinstalled or replaced the computer on which he had last successfully accessed the data. He replied that this was an old computer and he had donated the machine to his church about 10 days before. I got a negative reply when I asked whether he had ever backed up this computer or made a copy of its encryption keys and certificates.

Have you ever watched a TV program of a high alert situation? That’s what happened next; I explained to the client that his only chance of getting back the data on that drive was if the computer he had donated was still intact. We looked up the church’s phone number and once found (God bless search engines) the client dialled the number. About half a dozen rings someone picked up at the other end. I won’t bore you with the conversation; when the client hung up we had all the details of the person who had volunteered to format the machine and install it from scratch. The second phone call was answered by this person’s mother. She told us that he had brought a computer home a few days ago. From this lead we got the mobile phone of the person my client was so desperately trying to contact.

The client managed to get hold of our make or break person. When asked whether he had formatted the computer the reply was a yes… but using a different hard disk. The hard disk on the original computer was very small and he had decided to replace it with a higher capacity one. The contents of the original hard disk were intact.

A couple of hours later we had rigged the original hard disk within the donated computer and had successfully copied the contents of the data on the external hard disk to unencrypted storage. Without getting too much into the technicalities what follows is a simple explanation of how EFS works. The first time a user enables the EFS, the system automatically generates a public/private key pair for that user if one doesn’t already exist.  This information is held in the user’s profile. For each file / folder, EFS generates a random number and uses the public key to encrypt the file. In order to decrypt the file, the private key is necessary.

Once the private key is lost decrypting the data is impossible.

I would like to thank the client who offered the entire team as well as the chap who had not formatted the hard disk dinner. As he put it “My life depended on that data”. Sadly not all stories end like this.

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]]> http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/when-green-is-bad/feed/ 0 What your backup solution should be and do http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/what-your-backup-solution-should-be-and-do/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/what-your-backup-solution-should-be-and-do/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:02:06 +0000 chribonn http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=555 There are many sites with free, ad sponsored or paid for advice on how to design a pretty site. Many of these sites either directly host or have a link to web template sites. These templates carry a cost ranging from 0 dollars going all the way into the hundreds of dollars. A custom made site can bring up the cost of a solution into the thousands of dollars.

Yet Google a company with assets running into the billions and a profit and loss sheet with no traces of red on it has a simple white background with one 8Kb picture and less than twenty clickable items. For the record, Google does provide a hi-tech version consisting of practically the items described above on top of a picture of the user’s choice.

Why is it that a company that owns the absolute majority of all searches that take place can’t come up with a nicer interface? Lack of technical expertise? Can’t afford a good designer? I don’t want to waste your time asking other silly questions. The answer is that Google have based their computing model on three words: simplicity, functionality and focus.

All of Google’s solutions have no cluttering or confusing interface that came out of some study by some experts costing God knows how many millions. Google solutions have no weird options most of which came out of the necessity to make a new version available to paying customers. And Google solutions make what they do seem so simple that many of us may be mistakenly led to believe that what Google does can be done by pre-school kids.

Can the same be said about your backup solution? You do have a backup solution? For your own sake I’ll assume that you do. Does your solution make you wonder how you will go about retrieving your data if your working version becomes corrupted? Does your solution make you feel that you must get certified in order to use the product?

The next time you are out looking for a backup product, make sure that it has three basic ingredients: simplicity, functionality and focus.

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]]> http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/what-your-backup-solution-should-be-and-do/feed/ 0 Auto recovery options in Microsoft Office 2007 http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/auto-recovery-options-in-microsoft-office-2007/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/auto-recovery-options-in-microsoft-office-2007/#comments Mon, 14 Jun 2010 22:23:51 +0000 George http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=535 I have heard of people losing long word documents during power failures or could not recover documents due the lack of knowledge about Office auto recovery options. Personally, I had one or two incidents with older versions of Microsoft’s Word. This can happen to you and no matter how keen you are on data backups if your Office Word or Excel settings are incorrect or you have no idea how these are configured!

In my opinion, Word and Excel general parameters are somewhat tricky to find in the new versions of Microsoft’s Office. The tricky part is that you normally miss the tab Word options when clicking the Office button as your attention is on other parts of the menu window! I would not consider this location for such an important feature during an application usability exercise!

To access the application options, in this case Word Options start Microsoft Office Word and click the Office Button:

 

On the bottom right-hand side of the Office menu click Word Options

Click Save from the Word Options window to view the autorecover options

  1. Make sure that the Save AutoRecover information every… minutes is checked and set a reasonable value in the minutes box
  2. Take a note of the AutoRecover file location or set a new location, which is easier to find or remember
  3. In addition, you can set the Default file location for new documents


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]]> http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/auto-recovery-options-in-microsoft-office-2007/feed/ 0 Backup best practices for standalone computers http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/backup-best-practices-for-standalone-computers/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/backup-best-practices-for-standalone-computers/#comments Sun, 06 Jun 2010 20:49:12 +0000 George http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=531 Stand-alone systems such as, home and mobile users’ machines are prone to data loss too and hence, their owners should take advantage of the inbuilt tools that are available with their respective systems. If users are not so confident and happy with these tools then they should go for a third-party backup solution. There are various cheap but reliable solutions out there!

Mobile users – Today’s laptops are all equipped with a DVD burner and the most basic means of data backups would be using writable DVDs as the destination location. Additionally, a small factor external USB hard drive would be a step forward towards a superior backup job. That is, you can set full and incremental backup jobs since external USB drives have larger capacities than DVD media! Given that mobile users quite often connect to wireless networks, they might attempt a remote online backup service. However, due to bandwidth limitations over most wireless networks this solution would not be possible. On the other hand, one time or another mobile users dock their machines at home or at their offices where they can synchronize their backups to a remote storage location for additional safety.

Home users – the first line of backup devices should be removable media such as, DVD disks and external USB drives while, if the bandwidth is sufficient they should participate in remote online backups. A good practice is to enable automatic backups on regular basis and store any external drives away from the computer while not in use. This will protect your drive from damages caused by electrical surges and lightning induced voltages that normally pass through from the computer systems to all attached peripherals. In this case, it is safer to use write-once media such as CD/DVD media.

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]]> http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/backup-best-practices-for-standalone-computers/feed/ 0 The LT0-5 and data partitions http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/food-for-thought/the-lt0-5-and-data-partitions/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/food-for-thought/the-lt0-5-and-data-partitions/#comments Sun, 30 May 2010 17:37:34 +0000 George http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=516 From online backups to tape-drive articles! The latest generation of the LTO technology has some interesting features and since these relate to data backups, I decided to share a couple of thoughts with you!
The LTO (Linear Tape-Open) consortium has recently released the 5th generation of tape storage technology. It can store up to 3 TB of data if we assume a compression ratio of 2:1, it has data transfer speeds of up to 280 MB /s, it has a new partitioning feature and Linear Tape File System specification to provide enhanced file control and data management.
It includes two data partitions on the tape that support a tape file system, allowing files to be written directly to a tape and read by another computer, independent of OS or application. That is, we can say it is cross-platform capable and hence, truely portable!

The consortium’s roadmap for scalability and growth is already defined for the next three generations, and they state that the LTO Technology is a powerful and adaptable open tape format created to address the growing demands of data protection in the midrange to enterprise-class server environments. It is evident and understandable that such technology does not appeal to the SME (Small to Medium enterprises) market. I am not surprised at all, since the recent trend of remote online backups is very feasible to SMEs and home users, mainly because of its cheaper running costs.

We all agree that the LTO-5 is a big improvement …but over what…over its own technology!… I do not think that customers that went away from tape storage will return because of this new release! I reckon that the consortium needs to revise some concepts in order to be able to attract all kind of users.

The transfer speed improvement of 280 MB /s is quite good but not enough! Without compression it can go down to 140 MB /s and rest assured that you will never achieve a consistent compression rate of 2:1 while bear in mind the good transfer speeds of SATA 3.0 and SSD drives. Without optimal compression rates the storage capacity can go down to 1.5 TB. If I had to compare device with device then hard drives are much faster and can store same amounts data (while SSD capacity is increasing, SATA drives of 1 & 2 TB are quite common nowadays).

I would like to expand the argument about data partitions on tapes. It is a cool concept but is it that practical? Archiving to tape is not so much bound to the underlying operating system but more to the application performing the operation. Most large enterprises use a backup application that handles all backup and archiving operations and hence, I remain dependent on such backup application. So, if I had to take that partitioned tape to another system would I be able to read it without using the same application? Therefore, I would be loosing the interoperability functionality. This may bring up the idea of removing the application in between and write/read directly to the tape partition as to achieve 100% interoperability. But, if I want to use the tape as a data archiving partition, is it feasible to copy large amounts of data to a slow speed medium when I can achieve faster speeds with other media?  For example, disk drives are faster while support for the NTFS format with Linux systems and vice-versa (Ext3 for Windows) has been around for some time now! Therefore, we are platform independent with disk drives as well!

My point is why I should archive to tape when I can do it faster, cheaper and safely too – nonetheless, archiving to disk needs some taught like: having reliable RAID systems, verify features and a good reporting mechanism. However, the physical tapes remain more portable than a set of hard drives but note that their lifespan depend on the storage location, the tape drive head condition and the backup strategy used. A daily full backup reduces the lifespan of both the tape and the drive. From personal experience, some tapes lasted years while others few months!

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]]> http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/food-for-thought/the-lt0-5-and-data-partitions/feed/ 0 Can we trust cloud computing? http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/food-for-thought/can-we-trust-cloud-computing/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/food-for-thought/can-we-trust-cloud-computing/#comments Sun, 23 May 2010 22:11:08 +0000 George http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=509 Every solution has its two sides of the coin. We come across various marketing techniques that somehow define cloud computing in relation to the services they provide! In order to jump on to the cloud bandwagon and attract customers, some companies advertise their services as cloud services when in fact these are not! Therefore, what is cloud computing? – We define cloud computing as anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Cloud services are categorized as, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service or Software as a Service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS). While, the name cloud, is the symbol used to represent the Internet in various technical and non-technical drawings.

The cloud is not just a cool technology model but it is also a business model. It is a well-known fact that Amazon at the outset, designed the infrastructure for their own use but it evolved into a product or better a service offered as – Amazon’s Web, EC2, S3, or Amazon’s cloud. It is quite evident that now they are trying to increase their revenue by pushing their infrastructure to the limits through new offers such as, – Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. We all heard of power outages, resources that disappear and slower response times that may be a consequence of an overloaded setup. However, through personal experience I can say that these incidents are very rare with big providers such as, Amazon. Remember, that downtime is also possible with in-house solutions!

One common SaaS is email – if the main criteria are costs, then outsourcing email is your best option. Although, big corporations can negotiate favorable agreements with email providers such as, Google – remember that small to medium businesses may not get the same favor! A word about Google email and applications services – it is very hard to get reasonable support and you may need to rely on third-party tools for basic stuff such as, backing up email boxes. In addition, there is no guarantee that user data would be secure and backed up.

All cloud services share the available resources and therefore, you are competing for computer resources with other customers. A good alternative would be to place your assets with two different providers or use the cloud just to scale-up your systems when the demand rises. Although, you may implement all of the security measures provided by the cloud provider and by the systems themselves, there is still the risk of possible intrusion/destruction from neighboring hosts. Neighboring hosts are virtual machines that are running on the same server or in the same data center. One university claims to have a prototype/model that can identify the exact location of a virtual machine and eventually can start a neighboring VM (Virtual Machine) with high utilization that can hook the underlying platform! In the event of using the cloud as a storage provider, implementing data encryption would adequately harden security – read Securing your online backup archives

No cloud standards yet exist! If you are using the cloud as an infrastructure service, it is impossible to move your assets elsewhere say, to another cloud provider without rebuilding your systems from scratch and moving all your data, as virtual machines setups are not compatible from one provider to another. If you are using software as a service then you need to find another provider that provides the same service and data migration capabilities. Apart from all this, one of the major setbacks remains your Internet connection – so before contemplating to use cloud services make sure to invest in a good and reliable Internet connection, otherwise, you will be disappointed!

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]]> http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/food-for-thought/can-we-trust-cloud-computing/feed/ 0 Database backup and restore principles http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/database-backup-and-restore-principles/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/database-backup-and-restore-principles/#comments Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:16:27 +0000 George http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=460 Databases are the technical basis of most data repositories of today’s world! Downtime in transaction processing systems is so critical that can shutdown whole organizations with a high possibility of going out of business. DataBase Management Systems (DBMS) must be able to recover from failures without any data loss and preferably in a short period of time. Therefore, the database needs to be restored to the state it was in just before a problem stopped any database processing.

Database backups occur frequently; however, they always lack interim data that update the database between backup jobs’ intervals! As shown in the image below, a completed transaction must be copied both to the active database and to a transaction journal. When a database backup is performed the transaction journal is marked with a date stamp as to refer to it in case a restore is required.

The recovery process starts with the last complete backup plus a journal listing of all the transactions since the last backup. The recovery process reruns all the transactions up to the one when the system crashed. Therefore, the transaction journal is critical to the database integrity as it brings it back to its operational state without any loss of transactions.

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]]> http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/database-backup-and-restore-principles/feed/ 0 Data Backup Types http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/data-backup-types/ http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/basics/data-backup-types/#comments Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:46:03 +0000 George http://www.backupmyhost.com/blog/?p=453 ratchet-spannersFull Backup: A full backup is a copy of all files from one location to another. Although, this is a very safe and straight forward method, it takes a long time to complete and consumes lots of storage space. Some backup systems refer to this method as a copy backup. A full backup resets the archive bit.

For example: A company finds that their data hardly change on a daily basis and decides to perform a full copy (backup job) of their folders and files on a weekly basis. They decided to call this backup job as ‘Weekly Full’ and used a remote storage location as the backup destination. Also, they may want to have a back-storage of four weeks such as, Weekly 1 Full, Weekly 2 Full, Weekly 3 Full and Weekly 4 Full. Then on Week 5 they start again from Weekly 1 as to rotate their backup job over four weeks. With this strategy they can go back to weekly restores to a maximum of four weeks.

Incremental Backup: Only the files which have been modified or created on the day are backed up. This method is very fast and consumes little storage space; however, it is best to incorporate a regular full backup with this method!  The restore operation is more complex as all the backups have to be restored in the correct sequence. Some backup systems refer to this method as a daily backup. An incremental backup resets the archive bit.

For example: The company requirements have changed and now they have files that are updated on daily basis. It was decided that apart from the weekly full backups, a daily incremental backup is introduced. While the weekly full backups are performed on a Saturday, the daily incremental were labeled as follows: Inc Mon for Monday’s, Inc Tue for Tuesday’s, etc.

Differential Backup: Only the files which have been modified or created since the last full backup are backed up. This method uses the previous full backup as a reference point and any file that has changed or was created after that reference point is backed up. A daily differential backup does not reflect on any previous differential backups but only on previous full backups. So, Friday’s daily differential would be larger than Monday’s. However, the restore operation is faster and simpler than the incremental as only the latest differential and full backups are needed. A differential backup does not reset the archive bit.

For example: The company wanted to restore 3 files that were updated on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The restore request was done on a Friday morning and hence, they had to search the 3 (Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday) incremental backups and perform a lengthy restore operation. As a result it was decided that the daily backups are changed to differentials and will be called Diff Mon, Diff Tues, etc. Then a restore operation for the same 3 files would only require the latest differential backup.

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