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Disaster Recovery In Your Shirt Pocket
February 2006
Backing up the electronic law office is now more critical than ever as we move toward paperless files and as disasters seem to multiply. Because nearby Augustine Volcano (located in the Cook Inlet, south central coastal Alaska) recently entered a state of frequent eruption that, depending upon the vagaries of winter winds, threatens to shut down our area with volcanic ash falls, it's fair to say that I am particularly sensitive at the moment about reliable and portable network backup.
Tape drives traditionally were used for backup purposes but hard disk capacities (even those of small notebook hard disks) and the large size of imaged office file systems, now far exceed the capacity of most readily available and affordable tape drives. Tape drive technology has many other drawbacks as well: it is far more costly, slower, not random access, and its data is not readily portable to other computers. As far as I am concerned, tape drives are obsolete technology except for very large sites. Tape drives make little sense anymore for the small to medium law firm.
Instead, we use regular high speed random access hard disks housed in an external enclosure that plugs into a regular high speed USB 2.0 port. Almost all modern enclosures are automatically recognized as a regular hard disk by Windows XP and Windows 2000. Then, simply use the same Microsoft Backup accessory program and save the backup file to whatever hard disk letter is assigned to the external enclosure by your operating system. One major advantage of using Windows Backup is that this program is installed by default on every Windows XP, Windows 2000, and 64-bit Windows XP x64 computer. Thus, you can easily plug into any other computer and have complete access to any file in your office. Aside from facilitating work at home, and of course you DO take your backups off-premises, being able to carry your complete office file system anywhere and to load it on any sufficiently capacious computer may be the ultimate insurance against going out of business in the event of a disaster.
We have found that the most cost-effective and portable approach to daily and long term file backup is the use of 2.5" notebook hard disks with a height of 9.5 mm. These are available in capacities up to 100 GB and fit in a USB enclosure so small that it easily slips into a shirt pocket. Because these notebook hard disks are so power-efficient, they operate solely from the electrical power provided by two USB ports using a double USB cable. Using small enclosures like this, you are not encumbered by external power supplies and can connect to almost any modern computer with nothing more than the enclosure and its dual-prong USB cable.
After trying a number of portable notebook hard disk enclosures, we found that although some generic enclosures seemed to fail after a few months use, those made by Sabrent have proven very reliable as a backup appliance with used with fast, high capacity notebook hard disks. We use both 80 GB 5400 rpm Toshiba drives and 80 GB 7200 rpm Hitachi drives. Both have proven very reliable and exceptionally portable. Of course, you still need to do a full backup every night of all network and local hard disk data and take it off-premises. With a volcano unpredictably belching nearby, that's not very difficult.