“Evolving Your Backups, Tape to Disk” is a great article, by Greg Shields, in the latest REDMONDMAG released in April 2011.

The synopsis is how painful it is to try to restore data from tapes, and how a minor mistake caused him to stay up 72 hour straight restoring about 1TB of data (just data) from tape (Been there, done that), how backing up to disk (hard drives) is superior in many ways, et cetera.

He took the words right out of our mouth. In fact, we kind of take this advice from this article for granted a little. We’ve actually been pushing our customers to disk based backup, and starting new systems with disk based backup straight out of the gate for several years now.

At one time, it simply was not close to affordable, especially for the SMB space, to even consider backing up to hard drives. We can definitely understand how in the past companies, especially SMB’s(we’re one ourselves), may have shied away this type of backup system. Those days are over.

Today, a 1TB USB hard drive will likely cost you anywhere between $150-200, and a 1TB has a fair chance of suiting the needs for how much data an SMB is likely to backup. (SMB sized graphic design firms, engineering, musicians, et cetera may need larger capacity)

For several years now we have also relied heavily on moving our customers away from what is known as simple “file level backup” (think Symantec BackupExec, ArcServ Brightsor, NTBackup, et cetera), and moved to “disk imaging” backup solutions. We’re a proud reseller of StorageCraft’s various flavors of “Shadow Protect”.

The difference is a file level backup does just that, only backs up files, not your installed programs, not your custom settings, not your user accounts, et cetera.

A disk imaging solution takes a snapshot of the entire contents of the hard drive, and duplicates the hard drive into a compressed “image file” , getting not only the data, but everything else as well.

Simply put, the superiority is in the restore process. Let’s face it, the most important factor of a backup is the restore process. Do you want to be back up and running in 4 hours, or 3 days?

Let’s say your Small Business Server had a complete hard drive failure:

With a file level backup, we’d first have to:

Replace the hard drive.
Reinstall the opearting sytem (easily half a day to a days work)
Restore the domain (if even possible)
Rebuild the domain from scratch (more often than not)
Restore the data.
Reinstall LOB software (as SBS servers often have multiple functions).
Reset customizations from memory.
Et Cetera.

All of this may very legitimately take your IT guy several days to accomplish.

Now let’s look at restoring from the kind of failure using a disk imaging solution:

Replace/repair hard drive system.
Boot to recovery CD.
Restore last full disk image.
Boot server.

ShadowProtect has a tried and true (we’ve done it several times) “Hardware Indepedent Restore” functionality with it that lets you restore your disk images to dissimilar hardware (barring any OEM licensing requirements, but that’s a different story).

Let’s examine that for a minute:

Your server has a complete hardware meltdown. Hard drives fail, motherboard fails, no identical motherboard replacement available, et cetera.

No problem

Boot your rescue CD on different server
Restore your image to a such said server.
Boot the server.

The entire contents of the server is contained in the image file, via a snapshot made at the point in time.
With Shadow Protect, if you have the proper storage system in place, you can easily take a snapshot of your server(s) every 15 minutes!

There are some pitfalls to the disk image backup that we like to cover by supplementing disk image backups with our cloud based file level backup service. We’d love to talk to you about those if you’re interested.

We think that disk image backups , specifically Shadow Protect, which we know works, is a no-brainer.

Before we tell the price, let me point out that we don’t put a lot of markup in the cost of the software that we sell. Notice we didn’t say there’s “no markup”, we said there’s “very little”. Truthfully, there’s close to no markup.

For home users, Shadow Protect Desktop edition is going to cost you about $100.00 for the software.

For SMB customers running an “SBS” flavor of Windows Server it’s going to cost you around $500.00

Selling software is honestly not our core business. Our core business is consulting and support. If you don’t want to visit the online store yourself, consider the markup on the software a convenience charge.

For non-SBS flavor servers, the software is going to cost you about $1000.00 per server.

While some some of these prices might sting, we strongly urge your to truly consider how much a week long server outage is going to cost you vs. the cost of a implementing a strong disaster recovery procedure before it’s too late.