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Backup Disaster War Stories   [OT]

By: Andrew Watson     Perth, Western Australia  
Date: Mar 12,2014 at 05:49
In Response to: Backup Philosophy 101 (Andrew Atton)

> >> any backup system that requires a human to initiate it is doomed to
> failure
> Disagree. Overblown, unreliable software is what causes most of my
> problems. I like to be in control myself. (Perhaps that is why we love
> Ztree)

I agree that for knowledgeable users on a single user PC this may work. I would class myself as knowledgeable but I don't even trust myself to do backups on a regular basis. That's why I have been investigating hybrid (cloud and external local drive) automated back up systems for my and my clients' use.

I deal with a lot of very small businesses such as:

1. Doctor with one receptionist (single PC)

2. Husband and wife import business with 2 employees (4 PCs)

3. HR consultant working from home for an employment agency (single PC)

4. Homestay organiser with 3 or 4 part time workers (3 or 4 PCs) dealing with 500 host families and up to 600 guest arrivals per week.

When I first started dealing with them I found a total lack of any backup systems.

In each case my backup systems have saved them from total business failure due to data loss even if most, if not all, not realising how close to total disaster they came even after I explained to them what had happened and how I had recovered the data.

1. Doctor

Windows 98 on 1999 hardware. Wife of friend from work was receptionist.

All appointment, contacts (patient and supplier), patient notes and accounting data were on single PC with no backup.

I was in Melbourne when she called me. I suggested she should contact support company I usually refer people to. (I'm retired, I travel, I'm not available to provide on going support.)

Support company found that fortunately, power supply had failed and not HD. They were able to recover all data from HD and copy it onto new PC.

I was asked to visit practice a few days later because support company couldn't get 1998 practice management software and printer to run under Win 7. I managed to get it going with one non-fatal error message when printing.

I tried to persuade 70 year old doctor to get Internet access so I could set up off site backup but he wasn't interested.

When I pointed out his duty of care to preserve patient records he said he had paper copies (which I said would burn in a fire) and he was going to retire soon so he wouldn't agree.

Support company had set up single USB thumb drive backup system. In the end I expanded this to 2 USB drive system and hand balled them back to support company.

Hand ball - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handball_(Australian_rules_football)

Two months ago, while I was in Melbourne, two years after my last contact with practice, I received a call from new receptionist saying she had been referred to me by previous receptionist who had retired and that she was having problems with system.

I asked if they were still using USB thumb drive or any other backup system. She said she hadn't been told about such a system when she took over the job. I gave her contact details for support company and slowly shook my head.

2. Import business

MYOB (Mind Your Own Business - popular accounting package in Oz) loves to corrupt data files. Company had system that backed up data files to single external drive. I set up versioning system using 3 external drives, one being connected to home PC. (This was before I retired 6 years ago when cloud backup wasn't available).

MYOB burped. Backup system copied bad file over good file and they would have been up shit creek without a paddle if they hadn't had a copy of a previous version.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=up+shit+creek

3 HR Consultant

She was using Mozy, my recommended system because it does cloud backup, backup to local external drive and versioning.

She had purchased 125GB of storage. She had accepted Mozy defaults of backing up everything under UserID. She had installed corporate Dropbox that had dropped 250GB onto her drive under her UserID. She hadn't seen/taken notice of Mozy warnings that she had exceeded backup capacity and none of her data was being backed up.

By carefully selecting data to backup (you don't need to backup holiday photos - they never change!) I got it down to 7GB (and even that's more than she needs to have in backup system. Archive old data!).

Another problem was her 3.5GB Outlook .PST file that she was trying to backup twice a day, ie she was trying to backup every email she had every received or sent.

Her ADSL2+ down speed was great at 13Mbs but her up speed was only 0.5Mbs. Assuming she actually got this upload speed it would take nearly 2 hours to backup this file.

Of course, it can't be backed up when Outlook is open during daytime backup and she shutdown PC every night so it wasn't being backed up then.

I have archived everything for previous years and she now only has to backup mail since beginning of calendar year. She still has to remember to shutdown Outlook and leave PC on at night for backup to take place.

I still have to persuade her to move to cloud email or at least route her email via Gmail so it is backed up by them.

4. Homestay

I set up Mozy for her 2 years ago. She didn't realise (SCREAM!) that one of her employees had moved external drive from one port to another (so she could plug in her phone) so it had been allocated a new drive letter and so Mozy couldn't find it. She had ignored status messages that were clearly displayed. If this had been her sole backup location she would have been screwed.

Her crazy mongrel Excel and Word mashup system partially crashed (Excel macros had stopped working). She continued to add data for several days before she contacted me. I was able to roll back 3 or 4 days to a cloud version that worked.

Then I had to work out how to get data she had added since then back into system. In Excel she uses fonts, bolding, colours, shading, borders and cell notes to represent data. It took a vast number of VLOOKUPs and Paste Specials to do the job.

I found Homestay Manager

https://www.homestaymanager.com/

that seemed to cover everything that she did. Even if it didn't, I suggested it was much better to change the way she does business than to try and get a custom system developed. That's what she did last time (by 16 year old kid who lived next door who has now moved away and who refuses to help her.)

She refused to have anything to do with it. She didn't want to lose control of her host family data which she was afraid they would steal from her.

I pointed out to her that if her system crashed and she left 600 students at Heathrow Airport with no meeters and greeters, no buses and nowhere to sleep the ensuing bad publicity (current affairs TV would love to cover something like that) and court cases would blow her out of the water.

---------------

The above are just a small sampling of the backup disasters I have averted - some I haven't and I have had to help try and pick up the pieces.

I hope you can see why backup is such an interest for me and why I spend so much effort understanding exactly, as much as possible, how they function.


Andrew Watson

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