Where to store all that data, and how to backup

My wife has just started a home-based photography business and things are going well … for her. For me, as her de facto IT support person, there are some complications because every time she goes out on a shoot, she brings back about 15 gigabytes of data.

She’s not the only one creating plenty of data. Recent research by analyst firm IDC estimated that humans created 487 billion gigabytes of data in 2008 alone and expects that number to increase in the future.

That near-certain increase creates challenges for every business, many of which are illustrated by the things I need to consider to help my wife’s business function. How, for example, can I make sure that her photographs are backed up as soon as she uploads them from her cameras? How can I make sure those backups worked? If I needed to access a backup, how long would it take to do so? And what happens if our backups suffer a catastrophic physical failure or some kind of disaster befalls our computers (we live under a flight-path near a major airport)?

I also consider cost. Disk drives are relatively cheap, but with 15 gigbaytes of data arriving once or twice a week, the cost of storage escalates quickly. I also think about her clients’ wishes, because they could easily ask for more copies of photographs that she took months or years ago. How will I know where those photos are stored and will the machines they live on work five years from now?

These issues are far from unique to my wife’s photography business. Indeed, I constantly hear businesses of all sizes raise similar issues, along with a cry for help about how they can best protect their information. The place you must start is with a regular backup plan, which can be devised by asking yourself how long your business could carry on without access to data. Answer that question and you’ll know how often you need to back up. Then ask which laws you must comply with and how long they insist you preserve business data, as this will tell you how long your backups need to last.

These questions will help you to decide how to perform backups. Next, devise a plan to regularly test your backups because, like all things electronic, storage equipment is prone to failure. Businesses are often frustrated when backups they assume are bulletproof turn out to be fallible. Testing backups keeps your data safe.

Lastly, think about where data deserves to be stored. For most businesses, the server is the obvious place to store data, but is also a poor place to store backups because a full hard drive on a server degrades its performance. A plan to move old data you don’t use very often onto tapes or a dedicated archival storage device will save you money and also offers a nice secondary benefit of forcing you to catalogue old data for easy later retrieval.

Above all, recognise that information cannot manage itself. If you want to be able to protect your organisation in the same way I am working to protect my wife’s photography business, you need a plan, not just more and more disk drives.