1.3. Why Back Up? I've heard it all. I've been accused of caring only about backups. It's been said that I think the whole world revolves around a cartridge reel. I've said that someday the world's going to crash, and I'm going to have the backup. The question is: how serious are you about protecting your data? To help you come to a decision on this matter, let's talk about what happens if you don't have good backups. That's Not What I Meant! I was administering a QA group for a major software company. When the software did its setup, it created a directory in $HOME/foo so the software could install the user portion. A QA person was doing the install under root. The software created the directory $HOME/foo; literally, $HOME was the directory name. He submitted the bug fix, and decided to get rid of the useless directory. You've probably guessed it: # rm -rf $HOME
(This was on a standard Unix system where $HOME for root was still /.) Once I finally stopped laughing, I went and got the install media to rebuild the machine (no jumpstart image for that one, unfortunately, nor any backups for the various QA servers). Fortunately, most of the critical data was on the NFS server. William Birch |
1.3.1. What Will Lost Data Cost You? To answer this question, you need to consider what kind of data you are backing up. This is a perfect time to include people who may not consider themselves computer people. Get input from other departments to answer this question. When all those 1s and 0s come together, just what kind of information are we talking about? Do you use manual accounting methods or are your company's financial records stored in some accounting software somewhere? When a customer calls in and orders something, do you jot that down on a carbon-copied order form or do you enter it in some sort of order processing program? What about things like budgets, memoranda, inventories, and any other "paperwork" that you throw around from day to day? Do you keep copies of every important memo that you send, or do you depend on the computer for that? If you're like most people, you have grown quite dependent on these things we call computers. You forget how much of your work has been saved in the form of little magnetized bits spread out across a bunch of spinning platters. Maybe you work in an environment in which you've never lost a disk, so you've never had to do a restore. Maybe you've never fat-fingered a key and deleted an important file. If that's the case, remember what my dad used to say: "motorcycle riders come in two typesthose who have fallen and those who will fall." The same is true of disk drives. If you've never had a failed disk drive, trust me, your turn is coming! So what would you lose if you lost data? To quantify this, we need to examine the types of information that may reside in your environment and what would happen if you lost each type of information. Most of what you could lose is very tangibleand quantifiable in monetary termsand it might surprise you.
Lost customers -
This is quite possibly the most tangible and most devastating of all losses. If your entire customer database is on a computer somewhere, how will you know who they are if that computer dies? You might actually "lose" your customers and never find them again. You could also lose customers who depend on data that is on one or more of your computers; if the customer finds out that you have lost his data, he will undoubtedly be less than impressed with you. The degree to which this data loss affects him may not even be relevant to him; he knows that you lost his data, and he might leave just because he no longer feels your company is competent.
Orders -
Whatever service or product your company provides, you have some way to keep track of requests for that product or service. Again, chances are that the method is computer-based. Data loss may mean several hours, days, or even weeks of lost orders. These may be orders that your salespeople worked very hard to get!
Morale -
Think about how you would feel if you were one of the salespeople whose orders were lost. You spent days or weeks working on sales, and now they're gone forever. Maybe you should go somewhere where your hard work doesn't go to waste. The better the salesperson, the better the chance that she may jump ship if you lose her sales. What about the average employee? If your computers have a reputation for going down and a reputation for losing data, it gives the employees a feeling of helplessness. Maybe they should go somewhere where they have the proper equipment to do their jobs.
Image -
What about your standing in the industry? News of a major data loss undoubtedly spreads. This news may get to competitors, whom you can trust to use it against you at any opportunity. The news may also get to a regulatory agency that is in charge of your type of company. For example, if you work for a U.S. bank, it would be a terrible thing for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to find out that you had a major data loss. They may decide to take a really close look at your affairs. Nobody wants that kind of attention!
Budget -
It takes only one story of lost data to give your computer department an internal reputation for data loss. Try as you might to get rid of it, that reputation may stay for a while. You're only as good as your last restore. (A friend of mine said, "You're only as good as your worst restore.") If people don't trust your backups, they will duplicate your backup efforts. Employees will spend time and money backing up their systems locally. Each person may decide to buy his own backup drive and backup software or even to come up with his own in-house script. Their backups will be inefficient and costly at best, and may subject them to further data loss at worst. When everybody takes matters into their own hands, you can lose quite a bit of money in people-hours and extra hardware.
Time -
How many people are supporting your computers? How much of their efforts will you lose if your development system loses data? I know of many companies that have numerous contract programmers writing code all the time. If the system that houses their work loses their code, how much money will you have wasted? In fact, no matter what department you look at, if they do their work on a computer, and you lose that data, you can lose considerable time and money. 1.3.2. What Will Downtime Cost You? When planning your backup and recovery program, you may have several options that affect the speed of the recovery. The faster the recovery, the more the backup system will cost you. What you must ask yourself before deciding on these types of options is, "What will downtime cost?" When thinking about this, I'm reminded of a copier machine commercial from a few years ago: "When your copier goes down, do people just say, 'That's all right, we'll just use carbon paper!'?" If one of your main systems goes down, can your people continue working, or does your entire company come to a standstill? If it comes to a standstill, are your people salaried, so that sending them home saves you no money? Here are some additional costs to consider:
Customer perception -
A customer hates to hear, "Please call back; our computers are down," or "Connection not responding." Depending on your type of business, they might just decide to go elsewhere. The longer your systems are down, the more customers will hear this message.
Employee perception -
Nobody wants to work at a company where the computers are always going down. The more your employees depend on your systems, the truer this becomes. If you were a salesperson who couldn't use your contact database for a day or so, how happy would you be?
Time -
Again, you lose time. You lose headway, and your salaried employees who depend on the system that is down are effectively being paid to do nothing. |
