Welcome to Simple backup strategies with HP Backup and Recovery Manager. Data loss is a serious threat to the ongoing viability of small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). According to the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C., 93 percent of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. And 50 percent of these same businesses filed for bankruptcy immediately. How long could your business run without its data?

Although backup and disaster recovery are increasingly cited in the news and on the web as critical business concerns, many SMBs don't understand:

• Which data is critical to the ongoing viability of their business
• How to implement a backup and recovery strategy to best address their business needs

Today, businesses of all sizes need a data disaster recovery plan (DRP), which helps ensure the company will continue operations after experiencing some type of disaster due to hardware failure, theft, a malicious act from a disgruntled employee or outsider, employee mistakes or natural disaster. In addition, a DRP details the steps to take during and after the disaster, the people responsible for specific tasks, the location of backup media and other critical recovery information.

Unfortunately, many business owners learn the value of their data—and level of recovery preparedness—after they've experienced a disaster and lost important files.

The first step toward establishing an appropriate DRP is to evaluate your risk and the importance of your data, which is referred to as a risk assessment. You can perform a simple self-assessment in-house or arrange for a formal, detailed assessment. Then you need to establish a workable and comprehensive backup and recovery plan, using tools that facilitate success.

This quick lesson focuses on utilizing HP Backup and Recovery Manager as the foundation or as part of a backup plan—both for individual users and businesses.

Deciding which data to back up

To determine which files to back up, you first need to understand the various types of files you create and modify in your business. Most businesses have the following types of company and customer data:

• Financial and accounting data
• Customer contact data and email
• Office productivity software and word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents
• Databases, web pages, graphics and similar data
• Other data specific to your business, such as marketing collateral, computer-aided design (CAD) drawings, music and video files and so on

Configure your applications to save data files to your Documents folders on your hard disk or to a network drive, creating subfolders to organize files appropriately. This will streamline your backup and recovery processes, regardless of which type of backup method you implement.

• Software settings and configurations, such as customizations you make for your particular business

Many businesses don't back up installed applications regularly. Instead, they keep the original installation media in a safe place and reinstall applications when necessary. However, capturing an image of a hard disk with all applications installed is a time-saving method for quick recovery, which you'll learn about later in this lesson.

How often do you need to back up data?

The backup schedule you select depends on a number of things but mainly on how much time and effort it would take to re-create the data. Thoroughly assess your business data and determine which data must be backed up daily, bi-weekly, weekly and monthly.

Companies that are subject to federal and state regulatory data privacy requirements, such as financial institutions and medical care providers, must adhere to strict data protection rules and procedures.

Generally, you should back up mission-critical data daily (or multiple times each day), and less-valuable data once or twice each week. Plan to create a full backup of all data and settings once each week and once each month.

Backup media options

Using a solution such as HP Backup and Recovery Manager, you can back up to your hard disk, a secondary hard disk installed in your computer or a universal serial bus (USB)-attached external hard disk, a flash or thumb drive, a network drive or optical media such as CDs or DVDs.

Keep one or more copies of backup media offsite. In addition, ensure that your backup media sets are secure—they contain the same sensitive information as the computer you're backing up.

Using advanced strategies as you grow

Although HP Backup and Recovery Manager provides an easy-to-use solution for creating recovery discs (CDs or DVDs), backing up personal data and restoring files, your particular business needs might require a more advanced solution. Consider one or more of the following options for current or future growth:

• Tape backups: Today's tape drives can store hundreds of gigabytes of data on a single tape. Tape formats include LTO Ultrium, Digital Linear Tape (DLT) and Digital Audio Tape (DAT) technology.
• Autoloaders: These devices include a tape drive and a cassette that holds multiple tapes, automatically swapping tapes as they fill with data.
• Tape libraries: These devices provide multiple tape drives in the same enclosure.
• Tape virtualization: This solution uses virtualization to configure disks to appear as tape interfaces.
• Disk-to-disk backups: This solution performs all backups to high-capacity disks. Redundant array of independent disks (RAID) technology is an example of disk-to-disk backup.
• Disk-to-disk-to-tape backups: This solution combines disk-to-disk backup with traditional tape technology for long-term storage.

Tape backups and autoloaders are generally the lowest-cost solutions in the preceding list, within financial reach of most small companies. The other solutions increase in cost depending on the environment but provide a higher degree of automation, flexibility and reliability.

Now that you understand the importance of a DRP and have some backup essentials under your belt, the next section explores many of the options available in HP Backup and Recovery Manager.