A good data backup system can preserve not just your company but your sanity.
Shop Talk
CEOs Search for the Right Technology
As the Y2K panic proved, the most common culprit for lost computer data is not system failure. It's plain old user error. And the only way to combat that is with an electronic safeguard -- a data backup system.
Patrick Guthrie, president and chief technology officer of the Pajo Group, a $15-million Internet service provider in Long Beach, Calif., learned that the hard way. In early 1998 a manager's tinkering rendered the company's customer database inaccessible. Guthrie wasn't too worried because he had easily recovered backed-up copies in the past. This time, however, none of his ideas worked. "We were frantic," he says. Finally, he was forced to do something he hated: call in a consultant. "We paid him his $125 an hour," Guthrie says ruefully. "It's amazing how monetary limitations don't apply when you're trying to get your data back." The incident was enough to spur him into looking for a backup system with more capacity and faster access.
Like many start-ups, the Pajo Group had built its backup system around the Band-Aid principle -- an effective enough method when it had to find lost E-mail for its 20 customers. The company's first purchase was a Hewlett-Packard Colorado Trakker 350 tape drive that cost about $500. "Back then [in late 1997] we were running pretty lean and mean," says Guthrie, "so we fixed problems as they happened."
The tape drive stored all Pajo's data -- a customer database, financial files, customers' files, and the company's own ISP-related files -- on 350MB magnetic tapes that resembled double-thick cassettes. Each tape had cost about $20 or $30. Guthrie himself executed the backup, inserting a tape into the drive each night and removing it the next morning. He completed the procedure by storing the tapes in a fireproof box in the company's offices in case of disaster.
The system worked fine, but Guthrie found that the recovery process averaged 10 minutes per file -- an inordinate amount of time -- because he had to rewind and search the entire tape for the lost data. True, he had to go through the process only about two times a month, but he knew that the number of requests was going to grow. Plus, because of his expanding client base, 350MB was too little space per tape; on many nights the tapes filled up before backup was complete. Pajo hadn't yet begun offering 24-hour technical support, so there was no one around in the wee hours to replace the full tapes with empty ones.
Then came the last straw: the customer-database fiasco. Determined to have a more robust system, Guthrie purchased an Iomega Jaz drive for $300 at a computer superstore after spending time at Iomega's booth at a trade show. It was bigger than his tape drive -- up to one gigabyte (1,000MB) of data could be stored on a Jaz cartridge. And it was much faster. As he watched the Jaz drive back up the amount of data in 10 minutes that the Colorado drive had handled in two hours, Guthrie became an instant fan. But he realized too late that he'd made his decision too quickly. Business was still booming, and nightly backups were running about 650MB and climbing. He was now using one cartridge a day that cost $80 to $90 for storage. That meant Guthrie was paying more each week to store his data than he had spent on the drive itself.
"Up until then I had always relied on our vendors for accurate technical advice," says Patrick Guthrie. "I couldn't do that anymore."
By early 1999, Pajo's menu of services had expanded to include hosting Web sites, colocating Web servers (meaning that his customers' servers actually resided at Pajo), and handling thousands of E-mail accounts and more than 150 T1-line customers. To support all the traffic, Pajo had a United Nationslike network that featured operating systems ranging from Windows NT to Linux to Unix and even to the Mac OS. If Pajo were ever to move beyond the Band-Aid approach to backup, the time had come.
Guthrie started asking around for advice. The consensus, from Pajo vendors like Ingram Micro and Tech Data as well as some consultants, was that a digital audiotape (DAT) drive would be the way to go. A DAT drive can store up to 40GB of data on one tape, at a cost comparable to that of storing data on magnetic tapes -- less than 10¢ per megabyte and half that for storing fully compressed data. However, compared with magnetic tapes, a DAT drive is less unwieldy to use for retrieving data. And although it's not as fast as a Jaz drive, a DAT drive takes only about 40 seconds to locate a file.
To run the DAT drive, Guthrie's vendors suggested that he use Seagate Technology's Backup Exec 7.2 software (it's now a product of Veritas) -- a far more sophisticated brand of backup software than he had used with the other drives. Guthrie wasn't quite sold, but then his sanity-check Internet search for "backup software" turned up Seagate's name repeatedly. So he purchased Seagate's Backup Exec software in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard's HP SureStore DAT24 drive, so named because it was capable of holding 24GB of data (again, in a perfectly compressed world). The price: $840 for the software and $1,251 for the drive.
Guthrie installed the software as well as the DAT drive on a server running Windows NT. That was a snap, but configuring the software to back up data across a smorgasbord of operating systems wasn't. To facilitate communication between Linux and the company's other systems, Guthrie earlier had created shortcuts called "Samba shares." For three days Guthrie tried to get the Backup Exec software to recognize the Samba shares, convinced that he had to be doing something wrong. Being a computer guy, he figured that if he couldn't fix things himself, he was as good as doomed. "You're S.O.L. once you call tech support," he says.
It certainly felt that way as he waded through Seagate's voice-mail system. When he finally reached a technician on the third call, he explained his problem and was told he'd receive a callback. In the mean- time, he relied on the Jaz drive for backup.
