Supply Chain Risk | Business Continuity | Transport Vulnerability » data recovery

Earthquake, tsunami, meltdown and data backup

Jan Husdal — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:10:49 +0000

Japan is suffering. First an earthquake, then a tsunami, and now a possible nuclear meltdown. Perhaps I’m capitalizing on the current catchphrases of the day, but in a sense I too was in disaster management mode the last night, and if you are a regular reader of this blog, and if you happened to visit me between 1930 and 2130 GMT last night, you will know why. My blog was down. While this does happen from time to time and still is within the 99,99% uptime my web host promises me, this time was different. I had caused it myself, by messing around with settings better left untouched, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to solve it. Well, that was until I found the rescue button, after some harrowing hours in front of my computer: BlueHost Site Backup and Restore. These two hours were the best supply chain disruption and business continuity lesson I could have had, and this post is about what I learned. Mind you, if you’re unfamiliar with blogging in general, and WordPress in particular, this may not be the most interesting post for you, but I hope you will enjoy it anyway.

Going mobile

A couple weeks back I wrote about how I set up a Content Delivery Network for my blog, in order to serve my readers better and faster. While that made sense, given my readership and its global distribution, what I tried yesterday was perhaps going a bit too far in giving product variety where product variety is perhaps not needed. I attempted to make my blog mobile, i.e. adding a mobile version, so that readers accessing my blog on their handheld would see a stripped down version of my blog. After all, a “huge” 3% of my readers view my blog on their mobile, and given the predicted (or presumed) proliferation of handheld devices among my readers, I thought that was a good idea. As it turned out, it was NOT a good idea.

Internal Server Error

For the WordPress techies among you, what I tried was to set up the WPtouch plugin with W3 Total Cache. I had previously tried the WordPress Mobile Pack, which did work, but this time, with WPtouch, it didn’t go well, and the second I activated this brand new feature and tried to view my blog, that’s when disaster struck, and my screen went:

OMG! My very own Black Swan event. What to do? Not only was the whole blog like this, it also meant that the usual admin pages were inaccessible, so I had no way to deactivate the plugin that had caused this. D’oh! OK, Next step, restore. But how?

Backup and restore

Well, one good thing about having BlueHost as my web host is that they provide weekly backups, automatically, and logging into my cPanel I quickly found what I was looking for, downloaded it to my computer and then hit the restore button for the husdal.com database. Sadly, this weekly backup had been done two days ago, and had I written a full post and a bunch of drafts since then, but if that would restore my blog to almost where it was, I could live with that. Just as in Sheffi’s profile of supply chain disruption, you may not get back to where you were following a disruption, but you would still be working. Well…it didn’t work. Double D’oh! What now?

MySQL and php…do YOU have any clue?

Searching Internet forums for clues I tried accessing my database tables, edited my .htaccess, even did some fancy php…all to no avail. Nothing seemed to work. And the error logs didn’t provide any clues either, at least not to me, and my computer understanding is quite good otherwise, but not in this case. I was ready to give up and even considered temporarily redirecting husdal.com to some other domain that I own with a message saying that “husdal.com is down but will be back up shortly” while I would be frantically working behind the scenes all night. Triple D’oh! What now…or rather what the h… now?

Rescue

As the minutes and now hours ticked by I became more and more desperate. Luckily, I found the rescue button. Literally. As I was looking at my cPanel for the nth time I noticed an icon I hadn’t seen before: “Site Backup & Restore”. Hmm…how was this different from the usual Backup found in the cPanel? Anyway, I clicked, and what now appeared in front of me did look much more convincing than the normal backup interface and as I studied the options I decided to try the “Restore Home Directory”. After all, how bad could that be? Certainly not worse than what had already not worked. Interestingly I got option to restore the backup from the same date that I had tried before, the manual one, which hadn’t worked, I clicked, and voila, two seconds later, my site was back up. Well, almost. Said posts were missing, and needed to be rewritten, and since I had manually disabled the plugins using php I needed to reactivate them, but within an hour I was back online, and I had lost only a hundred or so visitors during my downtime. Phew! Needless to say, I immediately discarded the thought of going mobile. For good. At least until a better solution comes up.

Lessons learned

The first lesson I learned, obviously is not to mess with things I know nothing about. While I do take pride in being somewhat more computer literate than the average Joe and Jane, I still don’t know enough about WordPress, the blogging tool I am using. And if I do mess around, make sure to have some backup. I did, but I didn’t know how to use it properly. I had never tested it before, but now I learned.

The second lesson is the importance of having the right backup. I found that out in the end. Checking out this newfound function I learned that the Blue Host Site Backup & Restore Pro version offers daily rather than weekly backups, plus a bunch of other flexible backup and restore options, at the low price of $12.95/year. After my experience with the above I didn’t think for a second before I signed up for that. Maybe an unnecessary insurance, since I did get my Restore working without the Pro, but at least I’ll make me sleep better at night, and in hindsight, I think it’ll be worth it.

The third lesson is that product variety offered may not always be product variety demanded. Why do I need a mobile version of my site anyway? I mean, 3% mobile readership… that’s not a whole lot and hardly worth catering for. That said, are you a frequent mobile visitor on my site? And is the current format detrimental to your reader experience on a handheld device? Please let me know. I’ll be more than happy to re-consider going mobile if there is a demand for it.

Backup Backup Backup

While I was able to solve my problem in almost the blink of an eye (although it did not at all feel that way), it’s not going to go away that quickly in Japan. Unfortunately there is no rescue button for nuclear power plants, although Homer Simpson appears to have one in his plant, and I do admire the workers at the Japanese power plant(s) who are trying to save the plant and Japan and the world from a nuclear disaster. For data records, like a website or a blog, there’s always backup and restore. That is, if you remember to do a backup…so my final question to you is: Does your website have a backup, or do you have a backup plan? Have you ever suffered a site loss, and what did you do? I’d love to read your comments.

Hard Drive Recovery and Business Continuity

Jan Husdal — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 12:05:15 +0000

Having access to the most up-to-date business information is vital to any business. That is why you should back up your data regularly. Data backup and data recovery are major ingredients of any business continuity plan. Do you regularly back up vital business information? Not? Well, maybe hard drive recovery may save the day for you after all, should the worst thing happen: your hard drive crashes or is destroyed when you most need it. That is when hard drive repair may come to your rescue.

Backup or recovery?

In a previous post Will your business byte the dust? I described the importance of data backup. Nonetheless, even if you do back up your data, sometimes the data you need to access in case of a disaster hasn’t yet been backed up. Or a file is simply corrupted and cannot be read. Or it has been accidentally deleted. That’s when data recovery comes into play.

Wikipedia describes data recovery as:

the process of salvaging data from damaged, failed, corrupted, or inaccessible secondary storage media when it cannot be accessed normally

However, as I said in my previous post Will your business byte the dust?

Before you splurge on whatever technology has to offer, keep in mind that you need a tool that is in line with the value of the data to your business [...] it does not make sense to implement a solution that will allow a full recovery in days when you need hours or minutes.

One of the crucial factor in business continuity is the recovery time objective RTO that Wikipedia describes as

the duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.

The The Definitive Handbook of Business Continuity Management offers considerable insights on this and other matters in business continuity management.

Hard Drive Repair

That said, what tools are available for hard drive recovery and how do you go about it? This PC World Article About DTI put me on the track to DIT, one of many companies that do Hard Drive Recovery.

As it happens, one of the most common failures in hard drives is so-called head failure or degradation, signified by clicking or any other strange sounds coming from the hard drive, and if the hard drive is run too long in this degraded state it can make data unrecoverable at times. I didn’t know that, but in this case, hard drive repair is relatively easy.

DTI appears to be so sure of their recovery abilities in Hard Drive Repair that they offer a ‘no cure, no pay’ solution. ‘If we can’t fix it, we won’t charge you’. Admittedly, in the computer world, under normal circumstances, nothing is ever ‘deleted’, and can usually be fully or partially retrieved, given the right set of tools.

Need to know more?

I’m sure there are other places, too, but I found the resource center at dtidata.com a very helpful site in understanding hard drive failures and hard drive recovery techniques. You’d better be somewhat more technically inclined than I am to gain the full benefit from their writing, but there are some posts for the lay person like Restore Deleted Emails In Outlook Express or How To Remove Unwanted Software From Windows XP.

In addition, the DTI site also offers a selection of free data recovery software, even a floppy disk data recovery tool, for those still using such ‘antiquated’ data storage.

DTIData is only one of many specialists in hard drive recovery and hard drive repair, but it’s the company I happened to read about this weekend. If you have other preferences, please feel free to share them with me.

Will your business byte the dust?

Jan Husdal — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:30:09 +0000

To backup or not to backup? Honestly, you shouldn’t even be asking yourself this question. Can you afford not to backup? In the article Managing risk in global supply chains, Paul Wassenhove mentions the “3Bs” that flow in any supply chain: Boxes, Bytes and Bucks. Traditionally, the boxes have received the most attention, but all three flows are equally important, and securing vital business information, or the “bytes”, is paramount in Business Continuity Planning. Why?

Recovery or Backup?

To answer this question, let me draw upon another article, Planning to recover your data , by Thomas Carroll, in The Definitive Handbook of Business Continuity Management. Carroll is a Principal Consultant with Kingswell International, a global consultancy specializing in business risk management and continuity. In the article, Carroll elaborates on the difference between how to backup versus how to recover your data, making a case for the ability to recover as far more important than the process of backup.

Why should you backup?

To restore data in the event of a disaster
To retrieve a file in case of deletion or corruption
To store historical data a) for the record and b) to comply with regulations

Before you splurge on whatever technology has to offer, keep in mind that you need a tool that is in line with the value of the data to your business, i.e. a cost-effective tool. It does not make sense to implement an overly expensive solution to prevent loss of data that has little or no value. It also does not make sense to implement a solution that will allow a full recovery in days when you need hours or minutes. Any solution should be justified on a cost/benefit basis.

Which tool is best?

Now, there are many tools around that you could use, and I really cannot recommend one over the other. Most of them do more or less the same. Personally, for my own little business, I have settled for Backup Platinum, an easy-to-use yet powerful backup program that makes a reserve copy of my most critical data files.

Why Backup Platinum?

Here are my reasons for choosing Backup Platinum:

Storage medium

A backup program should be able to transfer your critical data to wide range of storage mediums. Backup Platinum works with anything from old-fashioned CDs to modern Blu-Ray discs. CDs are fine with me. What I like, although I have never used it, is that I can split my backup into several parts and store it on several discs.

LAN and FTP

I only have one computer (and one travel laptop), since I work from home, so LAN is not for me, but being able to FTP my backup data to a remote server is the next best thing, if not even a better solution than having an external hard drive. If my house burns down, or is burglarized, my external hard drive is gone anyway, so FTP gives me extra security.

Synchronisation

Not only does Backup Platinum copy my data, it also synchronizes my data, effectively mirroring it, such that the remote server can do the job just as easily as the main server, thus eliminating any downtime, should the main server fail. In my case, when I’m on the road, I can link my travel laptop to my backup server whenever i need and make sure I have the same data available as when I’m in my home office.

ZIP-compressed

Backups can be huge, and although memory comes cheap these days, keeping your backups compressed minimizes space requirements. Not a big issue in my case, but nice to have.

Encryption

I may have control over who has access to my computer at home, but in order to keep my backup safe, it should be encrypted. Backup Platinum has two options for this purpose: regular ZIP password protection and strong 128-bit Blowfish encryption.

Open files

Another good thing about Backup Platinum is thatit works with open applications. I do not have to exit all programs or close all windows to do my backup. I can just work as usual, and the scheduled or (manually invoked) backup runs its course.

Scheduling

I’ve set my anti-virus and anti-spyware program to run checks on a regular basis. I’ve done the same with my backups. I don’t even have to think about backing up. I can set it to run every day, run on selected week days, run on selected month days, or I can set a custom recurring period. I can even schedule what files to back up when. Not that I’ve played that much with the options, but they are there, and that’s nice to know.

Want to learn more?

I’ve had a couple of computers crash on me over the years, and lost much valuable data. because of that. That’s why I recommend using backups. With regular and scheduled backups no data will not be lost ever again…I hope.

If you worry about loosing your data, you should consider giving Backup Platinum a try: Backup Platinum.

husdal.com: Hard drive recovery and business continuity