Law Office Computing

January 2003

Winton Woods

A Reliable, Cheap and Easy Backup System—Finally!!!

As we move toward a world in which almost all of the information in our law offices is contained only in electronic form, regular and careful electronic backup becomes both an ethical mandate and a potential malpractice concern. When I last wrote on this topic a few years ago the choices were confusing. Now, I believe, you can develop a backup protocol that is cheap, virtually automatic and easy to do.

There are two basic backup goals. The first, which I will talk about in more detail later, deals with the physical preservation of data itself. The second deals with the preservation of your computer system configuration and the ability to restore it to a functioning state in the event of disaster without having to reinstall all of your applications. Disaster may be a physical crash of your hard drive occasioned by uncontrolled power surge or simple component failure. However, disaster may also be caused by a virus or by hacker who has broken into your computer system for fun. Disaster occurs on a regular basis with all computers and unless you are prepared, it can be devastating. One thing is sure: if you use computers you will some day experience disaster. If you have a very simple computer system, it may be enough to just plan to re-install Windows and your basic applications that are necessary to access your data files. Few of us have such a simple system, however. Even if you have all of your original software disks easily available, it may take hours or even days to rebuild your system from a big time crash.

One solution is to create what is called a mirror image of your system using a product such as Symantec's Ghost imaging software or PowerQuest’s DriveCopy program. Both of these imaging programs will create an exact duplicate of each of your hard drives that can be transferred to a new hard drive with ease. Both of these products are relatively inexpensive and easy to use protection against computer disaster. An image of your drive or drives, however, simply freezes your system at a particular point in time. If you take the image every Monday you'll be up-to-date as of the last Monday. If your office was active during the preceding week relying on a weekly image as your only backup solution means that you will lose a week's worth of work. That is an intolerable risk for most of us and therefore you must supplement the drive image process with what are called “incremental” or daily data backups. For that reason, the imaging procedure (which is very time consuming) is often avoided as a regular backup procedure.

The bottom line is that you must back up your data every day. For that back up I strongly recommend that you buy a product called GoBack to supplement your drive imaging or other backup procedure. GoBack allows you to recover from a Windows crash by restoring the entire system to the state it was in at any point up to three days before. If you get a virus, you can go back to yesterday before the virus came. If you install a product that locks up your system you simply reboot and go back to the prior configuration when you see the GoBack screen. GoBack can be launched before Windows so it is a great workaround for almost any kind of computer crash other than a failed hard drive. Be warned, however, that if you use Ghost or DriveCopy to image your drive there is a conflict between the imaging tool and GoBack. The procedures for resolving the conflict are spelled out in the documentation for both programs. Windows XP has a similar utility called System Restore, which can be accessed from System Tools menu under Accessories on the Start menu. But since System Restore runs under Windows it won’t work if your problem is that Windows has crashed. GoBack will save your bacon even under those circumstances and I recommend that you have it on your system in all events. Make sure, however, you get the upgrade from the Roxio site that allows GoBack to work with Windows XP. Frankly, I believe that GoBack is the keystone to my data security system. It costs $29 direct from Roxio at www.roxio.com.  I have used it often.

Most of you have moved to Windows 2000 or Windows XP, where the built-in backup tool is very powerful. The Windows Backup utility contains many new options, allowing users to back up selected volumes or folders to tape or to the hard drive. Scheduling is built directly into Windows Backup, so there is no need to use a separate scheduler. You also can choose to back up your Windows operating system configuration by checking a box, which you should always do. You can add an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for power protection by following a wizard. If you have not yet moved to Win2K or XP then I recommend the VERITAS Backup MyPC™ product line which won the PC Magazine Editor’s Choice award last year (www.veritas.com). It is widely used and compatible with the Windows operating system.  In fact, the regular Windows backup utility is in part licensed from Veritas. Even if you have Win2K or XP you may you want a more robust utility. If that is the case, the Veritas product line is extensive and ranges from very cheap to very expensive. In other words, you have a lot of choice on the software side. But remember, the only way to avoid having to reinstall all of your software is to do a complete back up of both your system configuration and your applications.

The larger question is the hardware side of the backup process. Here there are many options and many vendors. Those systems are generally expensive and not easy to use. The result is that it is easy to put off the back up procedure. That is very dangerous. By far the best and easiest procedure is to back up directly to another physical hard drive. It is much faster and the physical drive can be taken away from the office or locked in a safe for extra security. Western Digital 80 GB Firewire and USB2 external hard drives have dropped below $200 (www.westerndigital.com) and provide a perfect vehicle for regular backup. They are very reliable and easy to install and use. The other alternative, which is the one I use, is to backup to a removable IDE internal hard drive which is also taken off-site every night. Western Digital 80 GB internal hard drives are now available for under $100. A removable drive tray costs $15 and is easy to install and use. You can use the external or removable hard drive with Ghost or DriveCopy and you have a bootable complete hard drive copy of your system in case of a total system failure. I wish I could discipline myself to do that every week or so, but the ease of a fully automatic back up keeps me from doing what I know I should do!

There you have it. Roxio GoBack, a Windows’ back up utility and a removable or external hard drive and a couple of hundred bucks gives you all the protection that you need at a very affordable price. It is also very easy. No more excuses, please!! Back up and, remember, floss every day!