Creating a Backup Plan

By Stephen Bucaro

Your company's data may be its most important asset. Imagine a large corporation with millions of dollars of account receivable and account payable data stored on their network. A fire causes massive data loss. How much work would be required to re-create lost data? Without backups, company may not survive disaster.

Choosing a backup media is important, but in this article I'll focus on creating a plan for type and frequency of backups. Let's assume you will use some type of tape backup media.

If your company has only a small amount of data, you may be able to perform a full backup every night. You would need two tapes which you would alternate in case most recent full backup turns out defective. At least you have a previous one to go back to. You would store tapes in a secure off-site location to avoid being destroyed in same disaster that might destroy original data.

When you perform a full backup, each file that gets baked up has "archive" attribute in its file properties set to zero.

The archive attribute is a flag stored for each file that has been created or modified. It indicates that file needs to be archived. Backup programs can reduce size of backups by saving only files which have been modified since previous backup. When file is saved in a full or incremental backup, archive bit is set to one.

In Windows, you can view archive attribute for any file by right-clicking file in Windows Explorer and selecting "Properties" in popup menu. In "Properties" dialog box, click on "Advanced..." button.

If your company has a large amount of data, it would be too time consuming to perform a full backup every night. Instead, you would perform a full backup only on Friday nights, and perform a "differential" backup on other weekday night. This backup plan would require six tapes.

1. Don't use easily guess passwords like a date of birth, spouse, child's or pet's name. In fact, don't use any word or phrase that even remotely relates to you or your world. You need to use a password which is difficult for anyone to guess but is not so difficult for you to remember.

2. Use a combination of upper and lower case letters, symbols and numbers to make password harder to guess. Some web sites do not allow symbols so you may not be able to always use them. Almost all web sites treat passwords as CaSe SeNsItIvE so mixing case is a good idea.

3. Make your password at least eight characters long. Longer is even better. The more characters there are harder it will be to guess.

4. Use a different password for each account or web site. That way if one gets compromised you'll still be protected elsewhere.

5. Change your passwords frequently. Pick a period, like 15th of each month, and change all of your passwords on that date.