When Did You Last Back Up Your Data?

this is Jason Bittner from triple helix Corporation and Welcome to our Helix Insider podcast I'm joined in studio today by two of my colleagues Andy Webster who is our senior web developer for triple helix and Sean coover who is our systems engineer for triple helix welcome to the studio guys so today we're going to be talking to you guys about the importance of backups and uh why it really matters this is a topic that I think everyone can kind of understand and appreciate but it's a little bit more to it than just hey making sure your files are backed up in case something bad happens to your computer so you can get them that kind of thing there's actually quite a bit to this so we'd like to walk you through it so Andy just for our listeners let's start with the importance of backups and why it's important yeah so in this day and age pretty much all your data is in electronic form mostly you know like you're you people have like tax documents you know bank statements stuff like that but

also just like important stuff like pictures of your kids and the older you get the more uh the more important data you accumulate is what I find and so um it's just it's just um for personal data first of all it's important to back up but also in terms of like business data it's just very important to back that up because that's time spent and that's work that you're gonna have to do again if you uh if you lost that so in a sense it's good to be a data pack rat in that sense which is what I I referred myself as yeah so we want to perform our backups on like a regular pretty regular basis I would say just because you never know when something's gonna happen you never know when uh your power is going to go out you know lightning surge could blow up your hard drive or something like that or just hard drives don't last forever I've had plenty of them go in my life and I've had some that had held on for surprisingly long periods of time but you know that's basically like storing your important

documents in in an old rotting shed kind of thing so yeah no no good point good point now not all backups are actually the same and they're not all created equal Sean why don't you walk us through what different types of backups are out there uh and what kind of devices we back up there's definitely several different types of backups that are uh available out there when you talk businesses there's incremental backups versus server backups server backups are typically images of the entire server that are stored off-premise so that you can uh restore the whole server then there's also incremental backups of your of your data so that when you should you should be on a rolling incremental status so where usually on a daily basis you should be backing up your your crucial data you could you could do it on an incremental basis where only the new data that's been stored gets backed up to the off-premise and there's also you know there's Cloud versus cold storage which I think we'll speak more

about that that now at a little bit incremental versus your full system backups uh you'll want to make sure you you have at least you know a daily a weekly and a monthly for your server images but all of your incremental data your databases all your all your uh server files you should be doing that on a uh on an incremental status and that should be going to some sort of cloud storage uh if you don't have your own code storage solution and uh code Storage Solutions are are sort of not the best way to go anymore but uh it is a good solution for personal uses but for business uses uh you definitely want to have both so let's talk a little bit now about Disaster Recovery because you know there's really no point in making a backup if you don't know your backups are working and so um Andy talk to us a little bit about like the importance of testing backups and and why that's very very important most times you know you're not doing your backups manually so the server is kind of doing it for

you or um and so you do want to check in every so often just to make sure that you didn't have like an update that broke something and you know you have you think you're ha you think you have seven days back of data and then something happens and you go to look at your backup and it's like oh uh actually we don't have a backup or you load it up and it's like three days ago or something like that instead of yesterday so um that's like uh pretty much every developer system admins nightmare um is when you need to have a backup and it's not actually there so yeah so good good practice to just um periodically check in and try to take your back up and move you know uh load it into something just to see if it's actually working that's an excellent point because I remember back in the day like we had clients that were using these old Antiquated tape backup systems in fact some people still use it and you know for our listeners the tape backup is similar to like a cassette tape that it's it's magnetic

and you would load the tape into the device and it would go through and it would like systematically back up and it wasn't instantaneous it would actually take quite a while maybe a few hours and what these customers of ours were doing is they were backing up to this tape but they would never test it and so at one point the worst case scenario happened where their primary server failed and they went back to the tape to try to recover it and realizing that they had been backing up empty tapes for the last 10 years and they had nothing it was the Doomsday scenario so the importance of testing backups just can't be understated and related to that you know we we're also aware that you know backups Technologies really evolved over the years and Sean was talking about this I'm going to come back to you Sean is that a mean instead of doing tapes you know we're now recommending something that goes completely out the building into the cloud and you know my recollection of cloud storage um in the

early days for backups it was quite expensive so a lot of folks just didn't do it it was cheaper to have your own tape or your own systems on premise but nowadays because uh storage is so cheap we really recommend putting your data in the cloud Sean why don't you talk to our listeners about like the importance of the the cloud backups and how easy and accessible and and moreover what it means for uh our listeners personally as well as for their businesses like I said before Cloud uh cloud storage has been evolving very rapidly the the cost of storage uh has has been decreasing and and plummeting really uh you know these uh one terabyte two terabyte ssds which are so much faster than hdds are are are going for cheap so uh businesses are setting up huge clouds that are all redundant with huge raid arrays and they're able to with the the cost of storage and uh the cost of data transfer coming down they're able to offer cheaper rates on cloud storage uh as I said uh experts are starting to

recommend cloud storage more than than just cold storage sure what's Cold Storage I don't believe we've defined that uh Cold Storage is where you you take a uh like an external hard drive or as you were mentioning the the tapes you plug it into your computer your you drop your data in there and you unplug it and you put it in a drawer Stone somewhere that's cold storage so it's unacceptable after you've stored it basically right it's not on it's not accessible so the hardware doesn't have as much wear and tear until you you plug it back in if you need that data again but you know that's a manual process too you have to manually do that just like the tapes so you mentioned uh you mentioned raid what what is what is rate exactly a raid is a redundant array of uh independent discs uh it's a server card where you plug multiple hard drives into it and there's multiple different levels of raid like ten and five but it makes sure that if a hard drive fails in this array they can take it out and

put it back in and not lose any data whatsoever right because it's actually writing the data simultaneously to multiple drives right Sean yes it's writing the data to multiple drives like uh a raid one is a mirror where you have one hard drive over here and another hard drive over here both connected the same data is being written to both of them so if one one fails you can pull it out and put the other one back in so we we have you know companies have been dedicated entire department and lots of resources to creating these huge uh cloud storage implementations and they're getting pretty cheap tools uh Google's Drive uh Microsoft OneDrive there's several others out there that are that are really cheap you can uh I I think Apple has iCloud for 10 bucks a month for two terabytes so cloud storage is getting really cheap and in the long run cold storage is cheaper but you know you you just don't get the redundancy with cold storage that you get with cloud storage because they have entire teams

that are dedicated to maintaining those servers and you know from a practical purpose you know we always tell our clients that they should be doing some sort of redundant storage not only for their business but actually for their personal because as you mentioned the the the different softwares that are out there the iclouds and the the Google Drives and the whatnot are so cheap there's really no excuse not to do that but it does take a little bit of effort to set it up initially because in a lot of these softwares what you'll do is you'll point at a directory on your machine or even like say the entire machine's hard drive and say hey when I make a change back this up and throw the file out on the cloud um and so you have that redundancy but it's automated and it's done for you companies are actually starting to make that even easier like apple and Microsoft iCloud and a OneDrive if you uh like for Windows Microsoft OneDrive if you save a file on your computer it goes to OneDrive if you

have a OneDrive account same for for Apple uh on on your Mac OS if you save a file and you have iCloud it saves to iCloud they're getting they're they're getting almost instantaneous with this Dropbox takes a little bit more time than instantaneous but some of these companies are really going for instant right right back in the day I actually started with Carbonite which is a really decent Backup Service initially it's interesting that Carbonite was one of the few companies that did instantaneous save that's not true anymore but they were very favored initially because when you did save your file it would go immediately to their Cloud archive whereas a Dropbox at the time it wasn't instantaneous it might take an hour or two before it was finally synced but to your point I mean it's all instantaneous now and there's just a huge wealth of options uh for businesses and individuals to use yeah there's definitely a lot of options for everyone to use so if I always recommend that everyone should

have redundant backups do some cold storage you know have an external hard drive where you dump your all your personal data there at but also have some sort of cloud storage solution so that uh in in the case of something like a house fire or you know God forbid a flood or something like that uh your your code storage devices may get damaged so there's there's always that threat so it's always a good idea to to look in the cloud storage I see we're getting actually close to the end of our time here just before we sign up any final thoughts back to you Andy just um it's not too hard to storage personally I mean I know that it's uh to me it's very important because you know I have pictures of my kids that I don't want to lose that's like those are those are things that are you know Irreplaceable and you know as well as just your business data it's just um oftentimes I think we don't think of electronic data as being as important as it is because I don't know maybe that's just me having come

through that period of time but um you know where things were every everything was written down and now everything's in the cloud but um you know it's it's just as important as those tax documents that you have written on paper so you know make sure you make sure you have it planned right for sure Sean how about you final thoughts my final thought is that uh redundancy is key there's going to be issues at some point you're going to have hard drive failures if you have a computer you're going to have you know uh phone failures stuff like that uh car Hardware goes bad so it's always important to have redundant backups of all your important data you know like I I have pictures of my kids too and you know I have important tax documents I have all sorts of uh personal important data that yeah I need to make sure that I have always so uh redundancy is key so I have cloud storage and cold storage and it's it's best to have both and if if if you're really if you're really paranoid or or really

want to get into backups uh you could have uh two cloud storage options like Google Drive and OneDrive I mean um I I have two so uh but that's just me I'm very paranoid about my my data I'm a Sims Engineers what I do yeah for sure man okay well thank you I want to thank my two guests Sean cougar and uh Andy Webster for joining me today in studio and this is our Helix Insider podcast till next time bye everybody [Music] foreign foreign