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Welcome to TechSoup Talks. This is After the Crash: Minimize Your Downtime.
My name is Kami Griffiths. And I would like to welcome Laura Richardson
from Uptime Resources and Gregory Seeley from TechSoup.
I am the training and outreach manager here at TechSoup. And we have been doing webinars
for almost 2 years now. And we are excited to have this presentation
for folks interested in the topic of data recovery.
So Laura, I would like you to tell us a little bit about what you do at Uptime Resources.
Laura: Hello everyone. I am happy to be able to be part of this. I run the IT consulting grou
at Uptime Resources, so I have been helping small and midsized businesses
with all things IT for about eight years now. And we are certainly involved with working
with TechSoup as a high percentage of our clients are also in the nonprofit sector.
Kami: Excellent. Thanks Laura. And Gregory, tell us a little bit about what you do here at TechSoup.
Gregory: Well, I am a customer service representative
and I have been here for almost 4 years now. And I'm putting in my time to make sure organizations
get all their documents and, get qualified, and are able to access all the donations
they are eligible for. So I spend my time helping organizations access and get set up,
and get everything straightened out, and get their software and get it back in worst-case scenario,
but yeah, helping organizations get what they need.
Kami: Excellent, thanks. And welcome both of you.
Before we get started I wanted to quickly go through the agenda.
I know that the topic is data recovery, but in order to recover your data you have to do some things,
or it is better to do some things before hand. So we are going to first start talking about
what do you do to prevent the problems, documenting your computer or your server,
backing up your data, talking about hiring a techie, but spending about 15 minutes talking about
what to expect during a restore. And then we will have about 15 minutes at the end
for questions and answers.
So I would like to get started by asking Laura, why would you want to present,
make a presentation like this?
Laura: Well, it is something that we get involved in periodically
where we are needing to help a client restore data after some kind of crisis.
So a couple of scenarios pop to my mind, and if we can use them
as a way to make your life a little easier if it happens to you, I think that would be fabulous.
So just to kind of give you a little background on the kinds of things we get involved in,
Bryan's laptop is near and dear to my heart. He had unfortunately had no backu
and didn't realize he didn't have no active antivirus application on his system either.
So he nicely let his son use his laptop to try to get to Disney.com and it all when terribly wrong.
And he ended up sort of unknowingly reformatting his hard drive and losing all of his data,
and ending up with a laptop that was not really usable.
So we helped him recover data from his formatted hard drive.
But it took him a couple of weeks to get a laptop back to a situation where he could use it again,
because he didn't really know what applications he had installed on there.
He didn't have any record of what he had purchased. A week or a couple of days
would go by and he would realize oh, something else I normally use isn't here.
And then he would realize he had no installation disks. It was a painful two weeks.
So we would like to avoid that at all costs really.
And then the second one that I wanted to bring up, the Glaucoma Research Foundation
is one of our clients. And while they would've liked to have been here as an in person case study,
they are totally happy for me to talk about their problem.
They would like to use their scenario as a way to prevent this from happening to anybody else.
But essentially they had a major exchange server hardware failure,
and in the course of trying to recover that, realized that they had not had good backu
of that exchange server for almost 6 months. And they got into a situation
where they were about a week — it took us about a week to get everything totally back up again.
Eventually the restore was successful, but they did lose quite a bit of e-mail data.
It is just a situation where no one wants to be in this one.
And there was a bright side and a dark side to that whole situation,
so I will be referring to that as we talk more during the presentation.
But that's really why I want to be part of this is that we should try to avoid
those worst-case scenarios and do the best we can to make sure that any kind of failure
which will happen is not as painful as these two examples.
Kami: That obviously sounds painful. We had several people submit in the chat
commenting on how horrible. Is there anything that they could have done
to have prevented this in the first place?
Laura: Well, there are a couple of things that may seem obvious.
Prevention is a moving target. So these are the kinds of things that you need to do them
more often than just once. And it is just a good reminder to go back through
and make sure that all of these things are the case.
So for example, antivirus software, if you have individual copies
they do need to get renewed periodically. So you should just make sure you know
when they are current, and when they are going to need to be renewed,
and that you actually have them.
Windows updates on the desktop side need to be done. I added a couple of documents
that you can download from the TechSoup website that will explain how to do that.
But users will sometimes unknowingly turn them off, or prevent them from actually happening,
or having the PC reboot. So Windows updates are really important.
Server maintenance is also important. Microsoft comes out with patches all the time,
and you need to make sure that those things are applied
and that servers are allowed to be rebooted. A lot of them require reboots,
so you need to make time for that.
If you can avoid it, don't let your kids use your work equipment.
We have had so many problems that were unintentionally caused by people's children.
So if you can keep them off your machine, that would be a good thing.
Power protection is huge. If we have a power spike, or a power failure
and you have equipment that goes down hard, it can break things.
And so you should definitely be putting servers on UPSs. And we see it often where people will have
some servers on in UPS, but maybe not all of them, or maybe not realize that the battery
on the UPS has got a red light on it now and not working.
So review your power protection situation periodically.
Be suspicious about the software you are installing especially on the desktop,
but even on the server side. Make sure that you know where you are getting it from
and that it is important to your business, and that it is coming from a good source.
And then with any of these things, if you find yourself out of your comfort zone
that may be an indication that it is time to hire somebody to come and help you with that.
Even if it is a desktop issue, if you are not quite sure if you are really backing up,
or you are not quite sure if you are really getting Windows updates,
that might be a good indication that you should bring somebody in,
an expert and to help with them.
Kami: I'd imagine it speeds recovery to have your data backed u
and know where is. Can you tell us about that?
Laura: When it comes to desktops and laptops just identify where your data is and what it is.
And again, this is a moving target, so you need to do it periodically.
But make sure that you are backing up and have actually identified what your important data is first.
So it could be things like photos and music. But what files do you have that you would absolutely
need to have, and do you know where they are stored on your computer?
And another thing that I think is interesting to point out is that when you are buying new equipment
these days, it doesn't always come with the installation CDs of old,
and the keys and things like that. And a lot of new hardware vendors are expecting you
to run this utility called Recovery Disk Creator or whatever they call it,
depending on which manufacturer you are buying equipment from.
So when you get new equipment, make sure you go through that process
of creating that recovery CD and store it in a safe place. If you pull a Bryan,
and accidentally reformat your hard drive, you are going to need that CD
to be able to rebuild your system.
And then you should go through and document everything about your desktop or your laptop.
There is a download again available from the TechSoup website. It is the template
that we use to make sure that we have everything documented. But it should include things like
serial numbers and service tags of the hardware, all the applications that you have installed.
Even if you think you are going to remember, list them along with any installation keys.
And then also, any of your service providers that you work with. Where is your website hosted?
Who is your ISP, and any other hosted services that you use.
Again, you may think you will remember them, but if you don't use them that often
you may forget. And you may also forget how to log back onto them
if you have to set up a brand-new system. Those are things you should include in documentation.
And then on the server side, basically you are doing a similar kind of inventory of all the things
that you have on there. But it is important to be conscious of where something is stored,
and I am going to give you a quick scenario here.
We were brought in by a new client to restore a single file
that somebody had accidentally deleted. And it should have been fairly simple
but there are techie was on vacation, so they called us to see if we could help.
It turned out that when they added a hard drive to their server, they had copied all of their data
over to the new location but had forgotten to point the backup at the new location.
So the back up had been running successfully but they were backing up the wrong data store.
So for about three months, all of that data that had been created in those three months
wasn't being backed up and we couldn't actually restore that single file.
So it was only one file lost but it made them realize, oh we need to go back through
and make sure that our backup is pointed at the right set of files.
If you have a SQL database, make sure that you have a SQL agent to back that u
or that you're using a built in backup utility inside the application
that can spit out a file that your backup system can actually backup.
You should be backing up systems state and directory information.
And then with Exchange, this is for email, you should be thinking about
whether you're able to restore single files or single messages. Or if you're backing u
the entire mailbox store, kind of think through what you might have to recover.
In a little failure like somebody accidentally deletes something versus something major.
Network documentation is really important, this is where you keep all this information
and again there's a template that you're all free to download and to use
if you just want to make sure that you have everything documented.
Kami: Well great quick overview and I just want to let people know
that we don't want to spend too much time on backup because we've done a couple
other webinars on this topic which I'll be sending you links to.
So we're kind of plowing through this information kind of quickly.
But I want to switch gears quickly and bring Gregory on
because since TechSoup donated software is a little bit different than software
that you'd buy we wanted to talk a little bit about that. So Gregory can you tell us a little bit
about how people should be documenting and dealing with their TechSoup donations?
Gregory: Certainly. Again, one of our biggest problems is that we lack warehouse space
and so in order to be able to get the products to the customers,
we've gone to a download system which is great because then we have more product to give out,
but you have the fragility of not having the physical product in your hand.
So it's very important to keep that in mind that there is that fragility.
And frankly donation products are neither appropriate or reliable to access sometimes
once you've gotten it. So you've got to protect it, it's a donation, it's fragile, it can be lost.
The most important thing to do frankly is access the product, when you get it.
If you wait too long, you know, versions might change or you can lose things,
it can be lost if it isn't accessed relatively quickly.
And once you've gotten it to hang on to emails that you're getting, physical products,
disks for example, and a couple of our partners do send disks still. Hang on to them.
Print out volume license keys or any other product keys or you might even want to print out
the emails and hang onto this information in case you have to go back later on
because TechSoup hangs onto a lot of this information but things can get lost.
Individual partners may or may not store this information on their side.
Frequently our product is not for resale so you're dealing with stuff that isn't retail.
You call customer service [indistinct] partner, they won't know what you're talking about
and you can end up losing your product.
I'm going to very quickly go through four of our biggest, largest partners here
and go through a little bit about re-accessing your product.
I can't talk about all of them because there are too many of them.
Microsoft is probably the easiest as far as recovering
because they send you physical disks via UPS, or FedEx, or whatever their mood is at the time.
And once you've accessed the volume license keys via their volume license website,
you can print the page out, you can hang onto this information. If you lose this software,
you can put it back on again. You really haven't lost that much, or you're still able to get it.
They also store the information on their volume license website and that stays for two years,
the end of a cycle as we say in TechSoup, during which time you have access to them.
You can go back, you can re-download the product again or you can purchase media again.
At the end of that two years it goes away and you lose that ability.
So it's important to try and hang on to that. But again Microsoft
if you have the information is fairly easy.
The next one is Adobe. Adobe is entirely a download thing.
However, at the website there is both the current version still available and something called
the Releasde Archive tab, where you can go in and you can actually download
the previous version. But if you're one version beyond that you've lost it.
You need to hang onto that email because it will have the serial number key that you need
to reinstall the product. Generally speaking you do have more time
with that partner to be able to get it in case you've lost the software.
With Intuit and their QuickBooks and such, the version lasts for about a year
where you're able to go back in and use the link and get back into the website.
We can frequently find previous versions but not always, and they do at some point
with the versions they will finally go away. But you generally have a year, a bit more of time
within which if you lose something you're able to get it back. Again it's so important to backu
and hang onto this stuff because again once it's gone, you know, it's a not for retail version
and it can be very difficult to re-access if it's lost.
And finally with Symantec, Symantec use to sell this on disks. They stopped doing that now.
It's an entirely downloaded version which means you're going to be given links in emails
with the keys and such. As long as the version hasn't changed you can still go back
using the same email and you can re-access the product again.
Once the version has changed we can often find it. Symantec has a large number of products
and there can be things lost or gotten rid of. We can actually sometimes,
Symantec will choose to you know, a product that isn't very popular will remove it from the catalog
at which point, if you had that product and it's gone, and you blow up the computer,
you may end up losing it. Obviously the subscriptions do expire for the definitions,
but the product is still — you can normally get it fairly easily.
Kami: Great. Thanks Gregory, and we do have about 30 other vendor partners
but it's very different depending on the vendor so we only wanted to talk about
the main software that we distribute.
So now that we've discussed documentation and identified what to backup,
Laura, can you briefly tell us how we do back it up?
Laura: I just wanted to comment that there's a whole different range of skill sets and perspective
coming into this, so some of this may be review and other of it may be too technical for everybody,
but we're trying to kind of hit the middle here. And I just wanted to make sure that we were all talking
about backups from the same perspective. So a backup really is —
when I talk about a backup it's a combination of both software and a target for the data
that you're backing it up to. And from the software perspective you know,
there are products that run on the PCs and then there are products that run on the servers.
But on the PCs I wanted to point out one that is kind of interesting.
Symantec has a product called Ghost and other vendors make something similar as well.
But it's a way to get a snapshot of your system as it's set up in that particular point in time.
So that would include — it's basically an exact copy of your hard drive at the moment
you make it, and it does include things like data and all the other applications that you have.
So for people that would like to get a snapshot of a single point in time
you should be thinking about products like that.
And then there are other products that essentially just backup data from the desktop side,
so it may not do things like keep track of your applications for you. It would really be
backing up files. So kind of think about software in terms of what it's actually doing for you.
And then on the server side we actually encounter the same thing.
Mature products like Symantec Backup Exec you have the ability to select
what you want to backup. And that could include things like an active directory
and how your domain is actually configured, but it doesn't have to.
So make sure you know what you're backing up. Are you backing up just data
or are you backing up information about your entire network?
There are many products that people use to backup their data
so management type people should know what you're using, and obviously engineers.
My biggest recommendation is to try to keep a support contract current,
and to stay on the current version of whatever software you're using if at all possible.
If you get stuck with a messy restore and you wish you had somebody to call,
the software vendor can actually be quite helpful.
On the target side I just wanted to mention that we're still seeing an awful lot of tape drives
as a target for data for folks and for companies. And so the upside of tapes
is that an individual tape is not that expensive, and so I would recommend
keeping enough tapes so you can have a nice historical record.
For example, Glaucoma Research and their kind of sad situation, they ended up to be lucky
in that they had a set of tapes that extended back years. And so even though they had months
of exchange backup failures they had the ability to go back to a tape that was six months old.
We have met companies and organizations that only keep five tapes.
They have a Monday through Friday tape and they overwrite them every week.
So if you have a whole week of failures you may end up with a set of tapes
that are completely useless and have nothing on them.
So tapes are not expensive and I would say please add some to your backup set.
And make sure that you keep them as long as you can or as long as you think you'll need them.
And if you're taking them offsite you should be running a version of software
that will encrypt them so in case you lose them you're not going to be totally stressed
about the data that's on them.
Disk based backups are definitely becoming more prevalent.
There's a number of ways you can do it including just replacing your target tape drive
with a hard drive. Hard drives are mechanical so make sure you're testing your backup frequently,
so if you have a failed hard drive where your backup is going to you can replace that hard drive
before you need it. But there are other vendors that do this as well.
Barracuda is one that we're familiar with. You basically buy a hard drive
and the software that runs your backup comes with it.
And there's a bunch of automated offsite services as well that people can be looking at.
The idea here is that you get your data offsite automatically. They handle all of that for you.
Single file restores are very easy and I've listed some that we're familiar with that we do like.
The biggest thing to remember is that if you're restoring an entire server or an entire hard drive
on a PC from an offsite backup, it takes a long time to downloads 50 gigs, 80 gigs, 250 gigs,
depending on what your backup size is. So be aware of that just be conscious of the fact
that downloading an entire backup if you have a restore situation,
it can actually take quite some time.
Kami: Great. So now that we know the backup process,
how do we know when we need to hire someone or can we do this ourselves?
Laura: What I basically tell people is as soon as you feel a little bit out of your comfort zone,
that's a good time to talk to a technical person. I've included a list of questions that you can use
as a basis to discuss internally within your organization,
or with your technical contact. And it's about 30 questions.
And I would say that if you have difficulty answering any of them
with any kind of confidence that might be an indication that you want to bring someone in
even for a short term kind of project to help you get a handle on those.
Management should have an understanding of what the answers to those questions are as well,
and some of them are pretty technical, but they all have say a 30,000 foot perspective
that's important for the entire organization to understand.
So for example, if you lose a server like Glaucoma lost their exchange server,
everybody in the organization you know, in that management perspective should understand
what a likely restore window would be. And I often meet people who think
that we could restore an exchange server in half a day to a day.
Sometimes that's possible depending on the kind of backup they have,
but for the most part we're looking at a number of days even in a good situation.
And I think it's important for everybody to at least understand how the answers to those questions
impact their organization, and also you know, on a day to day basis,
how it impacts the other people in the company.
If you are testing your restores, and everyone should,
you should at least do single file test restores on your backup whether it's a PC-based backu
or on a server. If they're failing and you don't know why,
that's a good time to get somebody onsite to help you with that.
If you walk into your server room and you see a whole bunch of red lights on your server,
and you don't really know why and why they're there, that would be another good time
to get somebody in. Again, prevent it before it actually dies. And if you have a hard drive
on your server that's not functioning properly, get it replaced before it causes major problems.
If you can have somebody come in and give you an audit on your backup system,
that's not a bad idea to do that. It's one of the things that we all like to think
that we won't ever have to use, but you know, we as a consulting company
get in a situation a number of times every year where we're having to restore servers
that fail just due to age or whatever. And I think we get a phone call three to four times a week
for one of our clients asking us to help them restore a single file that they accidentally deleted
or it somehow got corrupted. So backups are important.
Kami: And I have a comment that I wanted to spend a second addressing.
Danny says, as a techie in support of several nonprofits I found a lot of push backs on NPO's
about paying for tech support. I find that small nonprofits
simply don't think of budgeting for such things. We had talked about this when we were planning
that some small investments can really help you out. Can you address that?
Laura: Yeah we tend to work with nonprofits that do have an identified IT budget,
but we also work with a number of contractors here in the Bay Area whose billable rates
are not really that high. They're somewhere between $35 to $70 dollars an hour.
And for nonprofits that don't have servers, they just have maybe a small peer to peer network
or individual PCs, these contractors who we work with would be able to setu
an offsite backup system that may cost between $10 and $20 dollars a month per machine,
and it would probably take them an hour per machine to get that set up at the most.
So investing a couple hundred dollars would be all that organization needs to make sure
that their data is safe. And recovering data from a machine that has not been properly backed u
can take thousands of dollars if you have to send a hard drive out to get it restored.
So a couple hundred bucks for a set of PCs and you can actually get data backed up.
And again, on the server side I kind of strongly feel that if you're running a server
and it's running your business, then again you need to invest at least a quarterly visit
from an IT professional that can just audit it and make sure that the patches are applied,
and take a look at the health of the system, and to test the backup to make sure
that you're not in a situation like Glaucoma was, where they thought they were backing u
but they actually weren't.
And again ,that doesn't have to be that expensive. It can be as little as say $300, $400 a quarter.
It was an expensive restore process for Glaucoma
and it would have been much less expensive for them to proactively have us come in
and test their backup monthly. By the way, they actually have changed their contract with us,
so we are now working with them in that capacity where once a month we test their backu
and we do all the proactive maintenance for them, so they just have a better comfort level
of where they're at. But you know, they were trying to save IT money which is fair enough,
but you know, for them they wish that they had done it differently.
Kami: Well, let's start talking about the restore process
and what does it look like and how do you do a restore?
Laura: So this is always interesting for people who have never gone through it.
The timeline can actually take a while. So for example, you have a machine
and whether it's a PC or a server, something will stop working
and that's when people kind of raise the red flag. Oh, I can't get email anymore,
or I can't do something. This thing's broken. So unless it's something totally obvious,
it may be that you need to get your IT Person involved. And the first ste
is trying to identify what the problem actually is; what broke?
And that can take a while and it can even become a little more frustrating for everybody
when you know, we have a bunch of people standing in front of a machine saying
well what do you think it is? And how do you do this? And what do we do?
And you know, that can be a number of hours.
Once we identify what broke, then we actually need to wait for the replacement component.
And so this is where I think everyone should take a look at what kind of warranty they have
on their most important equipment, say it's a server that's actually
kind of running the organization. If you have a warranty where you can get same day parts,
then that's certainly going to shave off time on this timeline here,
but for the most part it's next day. So we're already into 24 hours
before we even have a working server.
Once we have fixed hardware the next step that we go through is to reinstall the operating system,
and to reinstall the backup software. And it can actually take two to four hours to do that,
so we already are half day into the next day where we have a server
that's now ready to have the data restored to.
The final step is to take the backup system, whether it's a hard drive or a tape,
and to restore the data to the server. And kind of a general rule of thumb
that I think people should talk about internally is well however long it takes for you to backu
your data nightly is how long it will take to restore it, roughly.
So if you have a backup that takes five hours to do every night,
that's probably why you schedule it say at midnight because it's when people
aren't tending to be using the system. Well if it takes five hours to back it u
it's going to take five hours to take the data off that system and put it back on the server.
So it's not uncommon at all to have a three day restore process. You know, and that third day
is a combination of you know, getting the data back on there but also helping individual users
with any glitches or with any little problems that have come up from the restore.
In the case of Glaucoma it was over a week and one of the reasons for them
that it took so long is the tape that we had to go back to didn't have domain information on there.
So we actually had to recreate their domain from scratch for the 20 users
before we could even apply the six month old backup.
So it's always eye opening I think for people to sit through a discussion about what does it mean
for their organization to restore a particular server or a particular PC
and think about well how long is it really going to take? You know, if you have a PC
with 50 gigs of data being backed up on it, it's going to take quite some time
to download all of that from the web.
Kami: So this sounds like a long time.
What can people do to reduce the time or make it less painful?
Laura: One of the things that is good to think about is
if you have the ability to have any spare hardware in your organization,
and it may be that you just have an older PC, or when you do get some money to spend on IT
that you just buy an extra PC. You can actually have a huge productivity hit
even if the whole network is fine and you just have a hard drive on somebody's PC,
and you know, deadlines are what they are, and all of a sudden they don't have a machine
to work on anymore. And so if you can move over to a spare PC
you should be able to continue working, so spare hardware is definitely useful.
I think upgraded warranties and maintenance agreements are an excellent way
to reduce the restore time. If for example, we're often recommending IBM or HP servers,
we have a number of organizations that have Dell as well.
But if you can upgrade your warranty to a same day hardware restore you can shave off 24 hours
potentially on a restore process.
The other thing I would look at is some lower end equipment only comes with a one year warranty.
Obviously all nonprofits expect to use a server for longer than a year. So if you can upgrade
to that warranty the same day and extend it to say five years,
which is typically what we see our nonprofits hoping equipment will last.
Obviously it can even be longer than that but definitely five years,
then for the lifetime of that server you know you can get same day replacement parts.
So that kind of dovetails into my next point which is white box servers can be very problematic.
These are ones that may be built from scratch, not recognizable equipment manufacturers.
As they age, getting replacement parts that can easily bring the server back up again
becomes more complicated. So for example, if you have a four year old white box server
and you have a motherboard that dies, finding a motherboard that will fit into that server
that will work with all the drivers and work with all the data that you have
can actually be really time consuming and depending on what you need to buy
you may not even be able to get it overnight. So I would avoid white box servers
if you can possibly help it.
Faster internet connections will definitely improve restore time
especially on the desktop or PC side. If you need to download an awful lot of offsite data
and you don't have a local copy, you're just relying on an offsite service,
the faster your internet connection the faster you can get your data restored.
So that kind of brings up another area where you might want to think about the value
of having a local backup. I think offsite services are excellent especially for single file
or single folder restores. The data size tends to be fairly small. But especially for a server
or a large hard drive on a PC it's nice to have a local hard drive or a local backup tape
that we can go to without having to deal with the time lag of downloading data over the internet.
And then lastly, making sure that you have good documentation.
You can really get tripped up on a restore process if you can't find the key
to get the operating system installed or you don't have the installation media
and someone needs to go find it or download it from another machine
before you can even reinstall the operating system.
But having good documentation, knowing what you have installed in the first place
and having all the installation keys can really save an awful lot of running around
what you need to install.
I think another thing that I would encourage everyone to think about are some safety nets
for critical applications that you can have in place to make the time that you're waiting
for the equipment to be repaired, to make that time more palatable for everybody.
So for example, those of you who are using Microsoft Exchange as your email system,
Microsoft has a service, they refer to it as MEHS Continuity,
actually it's in their business productivity suite now.
And what Continuity does is in addition to filtering your email for viruses and spam,
which I think is definitely a good thing, it will give all of your users a 30 day rolling mailbox
of all of their mail that they've sent and received.
So if your exchange server is dead, as long as they can find a computer
with an internet connection with a web browser they can continue to send and receive email.
Now it lacks your shared contacts and shared folders and also the calendar and things like that
but at least your community that you work with doesn't need to know
that you're in the middle of a huge exchange failure.
So that safety net isn't that expensive. I think it's $10 to $20 per user per year
or something like that. And it means that even if you have a total hardware failure
you're not really without email.
You could look at hosted services for the most critical things that you do as well.
There's things like hosted SharePoint or Hosted Exchange where you're not responsible
for maintaining a redundant system for your emails. Because it's hosted,
the vendor actually does that for you. And if email's the most important thing
for your organization then at least you have a way of saying that email is the most stable as well.
With files, having an offsite or an automatic offsite backup of your files
means that if you have a file server failure and your files are no longer available
you could in theory restore a single file or those important ones
that you were working with, restore them from the offsite backup to another location.
So you work from home, you restore that single file to your home system
and you continue to work on those files while your main servers or your main systems
are being repaired. That could actually help if you're the PC user as well.
It may be that you do have access to more than one PC or more than one Mac.
So if you're main system is in the repair shop you can download a backup file
from your backup system and work from another machine.
I think another important question to ask especially for organizations
of more than a few people is if you lose your primary server or your main server
does everybody in the company still have the ability to access the internet
even if the server is down? And so it may be that you do have more than one server
but the second one hasn't been set up to be a backup DNS server
so people can keep getting to the internet even if their main server is down.
So these are things that you can do to make the restore or the repair time of your equipment
a little bit more palatable. But it's going to be different for every organization
I think who's listening to the call.
So when you sit down and run through that questionnaire that I've added to the downloads
that you can get to, you need to be clear about what the most important things are
to the organization and what are the things you could live without for a few days
and then come up with a safety net for each one of those really critical applications.
So you can kind of limp through the downtime. You know, limping through it is much better
than not being able to move at all. So if you can come up with a way to limp through it
you'll be grateful for doing that.
Kami: Well that's just great information and there's been quite a few questions
that have come through so unless you have anything else you want to say about this
then I'm going to move into questions. Is that okay Laura?
Laura: No that's fine with me.
Kami: Okay great. So if you have any questions at this point please submit them via the chat box.
Becky will be holding them and I'll ask them, we should be able to get to most of them,
we have about 15 minutes. So one question from Allen,
can a recovery CD be created at any point beforehand?
Laura: Yes, is the short answer to that. You know, it's going to be different
for every hardware vendor and if you want a specific answer to that
I would be more than happy to take this offline and have you send me the information
about the machine that you have and if I can't answer it
then I can definitely have one of my engineers answer it for you.
It depends on the age of the machine and what actually came with it when you bought it,
but the new ones do have that utility you can get to which is to create your recovery CDs.
And I can't tell you where that is off the top of my head but I could tell you where it is specifically
if we want to take that offline.
The other thing that you may want to look at is for machines that are a little bit older
and you don't have the media that you know originally came with it,
to take a look at a product like Symantec Ghost or any product that will actually image
your PC and take a snapshot of everything on it.
In some ways that accomplishes the same mission. You'll have an identical copy
of your hard drive with all of your data at that point in time as well as all the applications
that were installed. And that can be a nice local snapshot of your system.
The reason I bring that up is I work with a consultant here in the Bay Area
who works with a lot of nonprofits and she can set up a system like that in an hour or two
for somebody with a PC as long as they have purchased the software.
So again you do have to purchase the software and you would have to spend a couple of hours
with her but I think she's charging about $45 dollars an hour. So it doesn't always have to be
super expensive to make sure that you're just not going to lose your important stuff.
Kami: And Danny had a question, what programs do you suggest to accomplish the backups?
And he listed Acronis, Norton Ghost, others?
Laura: Yeah, Ghost is something that we use often. I'm looking at one of my engineers
sitting next to me right now. Meetesh, do you have any other ghosting software
that you like to use besides Symantec? He's saying no.
That's the one that we just standardize on because it's reliable.
But again I would be more than happy if we want to take that one offline to come up with a list
of ones that people do like and have used and I can share that with everyone
who's been on the call.
Kami: Okay. And we do have the forums that we've started,
so Laura I'll send you the information for that so perhaps you can take that discussion there
and then the larger group will be able to read that information.
So another question, well there's quite a few questions about backing up a disk.
Is there a way to backup an auto playing installation disk?
And then there are questions specific to can we burn licenses onto disk?
And these were discussions that we had in planning. Could you address
kind of how people can back up their software and what's legal and what's not?
Laura: So I think what the caller is questioning is when you purchase software
and you're downloading it, what you're actually downloading is an auto installer
and people tend to just click run or run it from that particular portion.
And so I think what the questioner is asking well if you go ahead and do that
and you install what you've got, how do you back that up?
So basically once you install that program there's no way to backup the original installer
so that you can install it on say another computer. I'm sorry, someone's talking to me
at the same time here. The installer can be backed up but the program,
once it's installed cannot unless you're ghosting a machine.
So I think that would be a good place to have a techie come in and take a look at what you do
have installed and where the automatic folders that were created during that installation
so you're selecting the right thing in your backup job to make sure that you are backing that up.
But if you have a lot of those applications installed on the PC I think that would be a good reason
to get an image, or a ghost image of that machine so you don't actually have to go through
all of that when you do have to restore your hard drive.
Kami: Well I think I would also like to point out, and we talked about this in the planning.
If you, for example, with TechSoup you get a link to a download file instead of opening it
and running it you're going to want to save that to your computer locally
at which point you can back that up as well.
Laura: Yes and you also want to save that email as well. I think you know,
that was brought up earlier on in the talk, that that particular email that has all that information in it
is something you don't want to lose it. So include that email, or cut and paste it out of your email
and put it in your documentation document that you may have printed out
or you're including in your backup job so you know where did you originally get it from
and what was the key that you used to install it? All of that should be something that you save.
Kami: And Gina had a question about, I don't know if you mentioned this,
how about using external hard drives for backup?
Laura: I think it's fine to use external hard drives for backup but people need to keep in mind
that they fail as well. It's just another hard drive but it is a nice low cost way
of having a local backup copy.
So I would say definitely consider that in your arsenal of targets in your backup, but you know,
schedule it into your month or every couple of weeks when you're actually testing that.
And you're doing a test restore and you're convinced that that particular hard drive
is still in good working order.
The other thing to keep in mind is that unless you're swapping out hard drives
and taking one offsite, you've got an onsite backup but you know, if god forbid
the worst happens and your building burns down, you're external hard drive goes with it.
Or if the water pipe above your system breaks, it may hit your external hard drive as well
as your primary system. So it may not be sufficient but it's a necessary
and nice piece of what your backup system could look like.
Kami: And Mellina had a question. When you were talking about servers,
they're wondering what is the lifespan, the average lifespan of a server?
Laura: I think five years is a reasonable lifespan for a server but there's a lot of factors
that are going to play into that. If you're just talking about age, again it could be five years.
But if you have the server sitting in a really dusty place and it's getting filled up with dust
and it's getting hotter than you like it to be you can easily reduce the lifespan of a server
just because it's in a bad location and it's getting hot and filled with stuff.
I mean we've even seen servers that had like mice living inside of them.
So whenever those things happen you're not going to get five years out of it.
When we're working with a client, we tend to start in year number three,
planning for when are we going to replace that system?
And it's a combination of is it still meeting your needs? Can it run all the applications you need
to do? What does the physical lifespan look like of that server? And if it's clean and well maintained,
three years is way too early to replace it. We have some servers
that are still six and seven years.
What we tend to do with the six and seven year old servers is they're relegated to less important
roles, where we all know exactly what we're going to do when they fail,
of course they will at some point in time, and that it's performing a service for the organization
that they can live without. So that we all have time then to either replace the server
or to move what it was doing to different equipment.
Kami: Sarah's question, is it advisable to keep backup tapes at the director's home?
Laura: Sometimes that's your only choice and I would say if they can be encrypted
I wouldn't worry about it at all. If they're not encrypted then you really need to think
about what's on them. I think you need to expect that your house
will get broken into and someone's going to steal it.
And just go through that scenario in your head and if you can live with what they steal
because you think it's not sensitive data, then if you have unencrypted tapes in someone's home,
that's a choice that you can make. But if you assume that they will get stolen or lost
or dropped in a backyard or whatever happens to it, if they're encrypted
then you have much less to worry about.
You have to be careful about where you're storing them. So if you're putting them in a place
where they can get damp or full of dust or heat, you can ruin a tape as well,
so make sure that they're stored in a decent storage location.
Kami: Kat's question has to do with Outlook Calendar and Contacts,
is it really enough to export those folders as PST files like they say.
Laura: I'm sorry can you say that one more time, I missed part of that.
Kami: It has to do with exporting Outlook Calendar and Contacts,
and is exporting a PST file enough?
Laura: Okay so what you're doing when you export a PST file is you're taking the mail out
of an Exchange store and you're moving it to a different kind of file structure.
And that's actually a great question because what will happen oftentimes
is the archive is setup to take that mail out of the Exchange system which is backed u
and store it to a local drive on the PC that is oftentimes not backed up.
So the user may not feel that that mail that is stored in their PST file is any less important
than the mail they have in their Exchange and they may not even think of them as being different
because you access both of them in Outlook. But if their hard drive on their PC were to die,
that PST file goes with it unless it was backed up.
So those things tend to be relatively small. You could copy one to a DVD
to keep a backup copy of just the PST file if you want to take more responsibility
for your own mail. Some other companies that we work with, they let their users copy
those PST files to the server so they can be included in the backup job.
But that's actually a great question. I think all organizations and individual users
should really sit down and think about where is their mail stored?
You know, and for individual users you may not even ever be downloading it from your IS
so it may always be in the cloud. But if you're downloading it to your PC,
you should make sure that you're backing that up or you'll lose it all when your hard drive dies.
Kami: Derek's question, can I use Symantec Ghost
over a number of systems or is it a per user license?
Laura: It depends on how you purchase it. You can buy a per user license
that when we're selling it to larger organizations we're often selling them like a 20 user license
kind of thing depending on how many people they have in there. And then for IT shops like us,
there's even other kinds of licensing structures that we can tap into.
So it really depends but if you're walking into a retail location it's a single user license.
Kami: Peter's question, do you have any experience
with open source cloning like Clonezilla?
Laura: I do not personally, no.
Kami: Okay so if anybody else out there has, if you wouldn't mind sending that via the chat
then we can do a little cross sourcing. A question about how
can I set up an automatic POP3 email backup?
Laura: An automatic POP3 email backup, well what I'm thinking the user is talking about
is that they're downloading their mail to their PC when they're reading it
and so a way to set up an automatic backup of that you probably have a couple of choices.
One of them would be is if you're using something like Mozy or Connected,
you can include that in your back up job. And so that could be backing u
in almost real time. Those services tend to backup when your computer is idle.
So that would be something that's kind of almost like a set it and forget it,
except for the sense that I would recommend people testing it every once in a while.
But that way, that mail that you're downloading from your POP account
would be automatically backed up.
If you're using Outlook, POP goes automatically to a PST file and so again
if you just do a quick search on your computer for all of your PST files,
you should make sure that that location or those files are included in your backup job.
If you don't have something automated like Mozy or one of those similar services,
then periodically, and you can put it as a calendar event, if you have to do this manually,
but you should be copying those PST files to a DVD or a CD or something like that.
Or it could be an external hard drive that you have as well.
Kami: Well one question has to do with all of those files that you've been talking about
during the presentation. I wanted to remind people that I'll be attaching these documents
to the follow-up email that will go out sometime this afternoon.
So there's about four documents that Laura put together.
Those will be sent to you as an attachment to an email that will be going out.
Another question that Terry had, can you encrypt an external hard drive?
Laura: You can. You can buy external hard drives that come with encryption technology already
as part of what you get and so that also holds true for things like the thumb drives
that people are using. Some folks with PC's that have not a ton of data,
they use an encrypted thumb drive as one of their backup destinations.
And then there's also software you can use that can encrypt external hard drives.
So PGP is one that we've used in a number of places where it's encrypting the hard drive
in the PC but it can also encrypt a target external hard drive or thumb drive
with the same encryption technology that's being used to encrypt the hard drive
in the laptop for example.
So you have two ways of doing it. You can buy software that lets you do that
or you can actually on purpose buy a device that comes with encryption technology.
Kami: Danny has a question, what about those machines that come with a recovery
on a separate partition. Can you make a disk of that?
Laura: Yeah you should actually. Because you should assume that it's a separate partition,
that's useful if it gets your data corrupted or mess something up but the idea is
that's the information you'd need on a DVD and you should make a DVD of that.
The other thing that I guess generally we believe on my engineering side is that relying
on built-in recovery and built-in snapshotting where you can kind of move to a previous point
in time in your PC, those things are not always reliable.
So they're sold as a nice feature for a PC where especially in Windows, you know,
where you can backtrack. If you install software and it doesn't work
and you've messed yourself up, you can back step to a different point in time.
They're not 100% reliable.
So I would just throw that out there that even if they've worked for you in the past
I would not expect them to because it does fail for us in the field every once in a while.
Kami: A question from Khan, do you have a list of software that we can use
as a techie for performing restores for desktops?
Laura: I do. Off the top of my head I don't but I would be more than happy to send that to Kami
after the call. That one may take an extra day for me to pull together but my field engineers
have all sorts of tools that I'd be happy to share with everyone on the call
for dealing with things like viruses and malware and restores, and even the tool
that one of my engineers used to restore that data from the formatted hard drive,
I'd be happy to share that with people as well.
Again, they're not always successful and restoring data is a bit of an art,
recovering data if you delete it is a bit of an art, but we do have some that seem to work
pretty well over the last year or so.
Kami: So what I'll do is I'll send the email out today in a few hours and then
probably a second email tomorrow with this list and it will all be included on the archive page
that's on the TechSoup site. Another question from John, what are the advantages
of having a spare PC or would a RAID (and this is in capital letters) drive be good?
Laura: RAID is better than not-RAID but you can still have things go wrong that break the RAID set.
So the advantage of having a spare PC really is, you can immediately move
over to something that's working.
A raided disk set will protect you from some things that can happen but if the RAID software
is messed up or the hardware RAID that you might be using,
you can actually what they call break the raid set, so the disks are no longer functioning,
you can't read the data off of them and you're still in a situation where you have to rebuild that.
It's not permanently lost data but you haven't solved the time problem, essentially with that.
So it's better than not doing it definitely, and when we're building servers we do the same thing.
We would never put a server in place that had just one hard drive.
RAID implies that you have multiple hard drives that work as a team essentially
for the non-techie people on the call, and if one hard drive dies
in a RAID set then the machine keeps working.
So on a server we definitely do that. People do it on PC's as well and that's better than
not having it, but I don't think that's sufficient. You shouldn't assume that you're protected
against everything. You've just taken out some of the things that could happen to you
that would mess you up.
Kami: A question from Allen, if you do not have the documentation for a key code
is there a way to create it at this point?
Laura: Say that one more time?
Kami: I think they don't have their key codes, the software's installed
but they don't have the keys any longer. Is there a way to get that?
Laura: Yes, it depends on what the application is, there are ways of recovering the keys.
I know in the Microsoft world, especially on servers, we have to do that sometimes.
But if you're talking about a desktop, what I would say is that if you really are in a situation
where you've got software you're using you have no idea where you got it from,
but you love it, you have no idea where the keys could be and you can't get it from the vendor,
I would say that's a great excuse, or a great time to say
okay, I'm going to have to image this PC or Ghost for example.
And if you take an image of that and you store it on a separate hard drive
then that is a way to mitigate the risk of no longer having any installation information
about what you have on your computer.
Kami: Well that's time. We've got some great information, thank you so much Laura.
If there are additional questions, which there are about probably 15 questions
we weren't able to get to so my apologies for that.But please do post those questions
to our community forums. I will send this information to Laura
so she can follow-up via our community forums as opposed to emails.
And here's a tiny URL that will lead you to that forum post
if you want to start posting your questions there.
Laura: One thing I would add to that is for those of you who are very technical in the call,
if you have some specific technical questions that I only half answered or punted on,
definitely post them because I don't want to leave you with no answers.
We have people who work with me here who are very senior in alternate categories of things.
So I would happily send those kinds of questions off to them to get a nice answer for you on.
So don't be shy, if you've got something you want to know, go ahead and post it.
Kami: Thank you so much for that. So to do the wrap up, if you're new to TechSou
and there's all sorts of things that we offer other than webinars and donated software.
So we've got community forums and articles, and we promote upcoming events.
So please check out more of our website.
There's some upcoming webinars I'd like to tell you about.
Next week our program is Creating A Successful Refurbishing Program.
The following week we'll be talking about Facebook,
and then into April we're talking about donor databases.
So I'd like to thank ReadyTalk again for their support of this program.
ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada
reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration
through their audio conferencing and web conferencing tools.
So thank you everyone for participating in this webinar.
Thanks Laura and Gregory for your great presentation.
I hope this helped answer some questions and I also hope you participate
in another TechSoup Talks webinar. Have a great day everyone.
Laura: Thank you.
Kami: Bye-bye.