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Although still very common, there are major disadvantages with traditional tape based backup systems. They are plagued by mechanical and media failure and they have limited capacity given the ever growing storage requirements of most organisations in the legal sector. They are slow (consider the speed of a tape drive compared to the speed of a hard disk) and they bring with them a perpetual replacement cycle for drives, media and software upgrades which of course is an ongoing cost. In addition tape pools require a great deal of IT resource to manage and (particularly at remote sites) it is sometimes necessary to rely on non IT staff to manage tape libraries.
The removal of tapes from the premises introduces a security and confidentiality risk in that the tape could be lost, stolen or subject to unauthorised duplication.
And finally, how can you be sure that the backup has actually taken place? The backup software may say it has written to the tape successfully and that a successful verification had taken place, but the proof of the pudding is when you come to recovery and the data can or cannot be retrieved.
Disk to Disk solutions have become more prevalent recently following the reduction in cost of hard drive storage over the past few years; the solutions are now much more affordable for small and medium sized businesses and there are even systems for home office or individual use.
The Evault solution is a disk to disk backup technology. Considering that the majority of backup failures are due to tapes and tape technology then this in itself improves reliability considerably. We are seeing a 99% success rate on backups today.
The software performs only one full backup - the first backup, called the 'initial seed'. After that it will just backup the changes. Note that Evault will back up only the blocks that have changed; some products backup any file which has changed. Just backing up the blocks which have changed reduces the amount of data to be transported and stored to an absolute minimum. Indeed, we never back up the same file more than once, unless it changes. We have noticed that we require only a tenth of the media previously demanded by our backup application. Instead of a daily backup taking 8 hours it is now done in 30 minutes.
This allows us to backup data from our remote offices to a vault located in our head office over a variety of different connections including low bandwidth connections. Before the data is transported it is encrypted and compressed which makes it very secure. In addition the data can be optionally further encrypted when written to disk which would ensure that no one (without the password) was able to see the saved data.
A software 'Agent' runs on those servers which require backing up. The Agent operates with a set of parameters defined by the data retention policy of the firm. It monitors the schedule using a graphical scheduling system and when a backup task is due for execution, the Agent opens up the backup task definition file, reads in the parameters and executes the backup accordingly.
Backup is fine but what about data recovery? Revisions of files are kept so we can go back to any date - select the file we want to restore and recover a particular version of the file. The Vault copies the file/directory from its disk back to the server's disk. You are also given an option to restore files or directories to locations which may be different from the one where they originated. Another useful feature is the ability to do a 'system state' backup; this means that we can restore a full server and not just its data files.
Although very happy with this as an architecture we felt it did not totally meet our Business Continuity Objectives, i.e. to have our data backed up to two locations. We therefore opted to implement a dual vault solution. This allows us to run two parallel backups, one to the vault at the head office and a second to a vault at a remote site. This means that at any point of time we have three working copies of each piece of data in the organisation and that if disaster should strike one site then the data also exists elsewhere and can be quickly recovered. This also negates the need to take tapes offsite and introduce the security risks associated with doing this.
Evault now backs up all our Windows and Netware servers and we are looking at adding the Desktop/Laptop version to back up remote workers as well. We can monitor operations through a Central Control securely from anywhere – either the office or remotely using a laptop.
This has saved us a considerable about of time and money; we now no longer need to buy tapes or tape drives or pay for annual hardware maintenance. We do not need to worry about data movement and taking it offsite. We do not need to worry about tape rotation and tape care. We do not worry about bad blocks and sectors, read and write errors, tape media and formats. The process is now fully automated.
Antony Nicholls is IT Director of Lees Lloyd Whitley, www.llw.co.uk. Lees Lloyd Whitley are a national practice, with offices in the North West of England and London. Antony has been involved with legal IT for 8 years and is a Chartered member of the British Computer Society.
Email asn@llw.co.uk.
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