by

Ross L. Kodner, Esq.

©1998 All Rights Reserved

When a group of lawyers talk technology, the topics are usually more scintillating than "backups." In animated fashion, with more than occasional one-upmanship involved, the conversation is peppered with comparisons of the speed of the latest Pentium laptops they’ve bought, or how long their laptop batteries last, or how big their laptop screens are. Never, ever would you overhear such a group bragging about the alternating backup cycle they use or their "hot" new DLT (digital linear tape) backup system. Why? Because backup is really BORING!

Now, let’s define what "backup" is and then we can explore what constitutes "adequate" backup. The process of backing up one’s system simply means making a copy of the contents of one’s hard drive onto some other storage medium. In the event of a failure of your regular hard drive, the idea is that you can restore or rebuild your programs and your data--your documents, your calendar entries, your e-mail, your billing data, your conflicts information--by copying the information you previously saved onto a new or repaired hard drive. Pretty simple, isn’t it?

As to doing it, there are lots of different media types onto which you can backup your information. You can backup onto floppy disks (really slow and cumbersome, so much so that you will probably never do it), tape backup drives (usually reliable and can run automatically in the middle of the night), other hard drives in your PC or somewhere on your firm’s network, to a removable drive system like Iomega’s Zip or Jaz drives, Pinnacle Micro’s MO re-writable optical drives (MO stands for magneto-optical--welcome to acronym hell!), Syquest’s Syjet drives, or these days, even to special purpose Websites that serve as off-site backup "vaults." There’s even a fascinating new approach called "bit-by-bit drive image copying" made possible by software called Ghost from Innovative Data (www.ghostsoft.com), DriveCopy from Powerquest (www.powerquest.com) and Dupe It from CSC (www.corpsys.com). So there are LOTS of options available.

What should you backup? There are several approaches. The best approach, bar none, is to perform a "full backup"--in other words, take a "snapshot" picture of your entire workstation or fileserver hard drive, protecting all programs and their vital configuration information as well as every piece of data you’ve created. The attraction of this approach is that in the event of the need to recover from a total hard drive crash, you face the most obvious and easiest restoration process. After all, the whole idea is not to backup for backup’s sake, but to be able to restore your backed up information when the chips are down and your practice depends on it.

An undesirable backup approach is referred to as an "incremental" or "changed files only". The idea here is that a full backup of a hard drive might be run weekly. In between, each workday a backup of only those files (programs and data alike) that have changed since the time of the last backup are in fact, backed up. This tends to make for pretty short daily backups and on its face, that would seem to be a good thing. But under the general theory that we only backup so we can restore at some point, restoring from a collection of disks or tapes containing incremental backup sessions can be nightmarish--assembling bits and pieces of one’s system scattered across multiple media. About as much fun as changing dirty diapers. Or actually, much worse.

You can also perform a data-only backup, protecting just your data files and not the programs on your system. This can be especially efficient for users in a hurry, like laptop users where you might protect their entire hard drives via a full backup once a month or so and then backup the data much more often. Full backups are always the most desirable though. This method lends itself to a copying process--using Windows 95's Explorer or Windows 3.x’s File Manager to select and "drag and drop" data files or entire folders/directories from one drive to another, as an alternative to using dedicated backup software. Laptop users tend to be the most exposed--many NEVER backup their hard drives, even though irreplaceable critical client data is at stake. Copying laptop data files to a network hard drive before leaving the office to hit the road is highly recommended--and easy enough for a frantically busy Legal Road Warrior to manage.

There are two components you need to backup your system: some software to control the backup process and some kind of storage device to copy your data onto. Tape backup is the most traditional approach. It works well, is relatively inexpensive and allows middle-of-the-night "unattended" sessions where all you need to do is pop that night’s backup tape into the tape backup unit, make sure the software is "scheduled" to backup that night and home to friends and family you go. There is backup software intended for individual workstations and for network hard drives--the latter being a more complex process. Examples of workstation backup software included Cheyenne’s Backup for Windows 95 (www.cheyenne.com), Seagate’s Backup Exec (www.seagate.com) and Hewlett-Colorado’s Backup for Windows and Windows 95. These usually come "bundled" with new tape backup units, but some can even backup to removable cartridge hard drives like Iomega’s Jaz (1.0 gigabytes per $75-$125 dollar cartridge) and Zip drives (100 megabytes per $9-$15 cartridge) (www.iomega.com) or the Syquest Syjet cartridge system (1.5 gigabytes per $80-$120 dollar cartridge) (www.syquest.com).

For networks based on Microsoft Windows NT Server or Novell’s Netware or IntraNetware, you need heavier-duty, network-intended software to backup special configuration files. The benchmark product is Cheyenne’s Arcserve 6.1 for Netware and Arcserve 6.5 for Windows NT Server--industrial strength backup software that supports all sorts of backup drives and works REALLY, REALLY quickly. There is even a "Disaster Recovery Option" that can help you rebuild your server without first going through the time-consuming machinations of reinstalling your network operating system--cutting costly down-time to an absolute minimum. Other products include Seagate’s Backup Exec for Netware and NT. And these products are not just for big networks--they are available for the smallest workgroups at affordable prices--so there’s just no excuse.

The "bit-by-bit image copiers" are a whole new animal with interesting implications for backup systems. These products allow you to copy an entire hard drive and its contents--including DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows NT and even SunOS and Unix drives to a "master drive" as an "image file." You can then use the software to make an exact duplicate of the "source drive" onto a different hard drive. VERY slick. Certainly handy for setting up a whole bunch of new PCs in the office--set up one perfectly and duplicate to the other new PCs--huge time savings. But the same thing could be done for backup purposes. Examples include Ghost from Innovative Data (www.ghostsoft.com), DiskClone from Quarterdeck (www.qdeck.com) and Drive Image/Drive Image Pro from Powerquest (www.powerquest.com).

As to tape drives, a myriad of products to choose from but our favorites are from the Hewlett-Packard Surestore Series. These range from the 4 gigabyte per Travan TR-4 tape model T4i at under $400 to a range of models using high-speed, high reliability DAT (digital audio tape cartridges that are so small they look like a gadget Q would haven given to 007 in a recent flick) units ranging up to the Surestore 24 unit storing 12/24 gigabytes (uncompressed/compressed) per tape for between $1100 and $1400. At the higher-end are the super fast DLT (digital linear tape) units from Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, ADIC and others at 15/30 to 20/40 to a whopping 35/70 gigabytes of capacity per tape for about $2500 to $10,000. Something for everyone.

Another interesting approach is to use the latest removable cartridge drive systems. The attraction of these devices which store from 100 to 4.7 gigabytes per hard drive-like re-writable, removable cartridge is that in addition to backup purposes, add more cartridges and you have unlimited portable regular hard drive storage. Units include the previously mentioned, and now ubiquitous Iomega Zip drive, the Iomega Jaz drive, the Syquest SparQ and Syjet--great competitors to the Zip and Jaz series. There are also the removable re-writable optical drives such as those from Pinnacle Micro (www.pinnaclemicro.com) storing from 640 meg to 4.6 gigabytes per fast, nearly indestructible optical cartridges at costs from $500 (with $60 cartridges) to $1900 ($160 cartridges). Very interesting alternative to single-purpose tape backup systems which can not be used for ordinary daily data and program storage and access.

The latest twist on data backup are the crop of web-based protection schemes. The thinking here seems to be that we can do just about everything else on the Web, so why shouldn’t we also back up to it too? This lends a whole new meaning to "off-site" backup! The process is not particularly complicated--you use some kind of software which backs up or copies files from your PC to someone’s server on the Net. Advantages? You can do it from anywhere--like copying a critical brief that’s due in court the next morning, from your hotel room to a "safe" server somewhere. Disadvantages? How fast do you think this process could be, even with lots of data compression, over a 28.8 or 33.6 dial-up Internet connection? Not very. And what happens if that remote backup server happens to be either crashed or real busy when you absolutely, positively need to restore your data? These are also not places to backup your network server’s 12 gig of stuff--first, it would take MONTHS over a dial-up connection and second, with storage prices running around 10 per 25 meg or so, one backup session would cost the rough equivalent of 1/1,000,000 of the National Debt! So the idea is that these are places to backup key pieces of your data--not your entire system, or to do incremental backups of only data changed since the last time you did a backup. Web backup products include BackupNet from Hot Wire Data Security at www.hotwire.net (free to backup but you have to buy "client" software for $495 for 10 client licenses); and Connected Online Backup from Connected Corporation at www.connected.com ($19.95 for "consumers" per month for unlimited backup--the site indicates "corporate pricing is available"). We just don’t think this approach is QUITE there yet but stills shows some promise at least for small volume of data-only transfer.

Another backup option invariably mentioned is writable CD technology. I do not think this is an effective backup technology except for data sets smaller than the approximately 650 megabytes one can fit onto a CD-R/RW disk. For most uses this is simply too small--most of us have data sets larger than this and it goes without saying that most, if not all networks have far more information to back up. But, CD-R technology has its place--archival storage is something which it is well suited for. For example, you might make a CD-R containing your entire billing and accounting system every month before you run your monthly close-out process. This gives you an historical snapshot of your billing and accounting status for each month of the year. Storing closed file information might make sense as well, although frankly, adding more live storage space might be more sensible. Until writable DVD-RAM becomes widely available, CD-style writable disks don’t really cut it as backup systems.

So that’s all folks--remember, let’s backup our systems and cover our assets! Even if it is a mind-numbingly dull PC practice.