No matter what business you’re involved with, I can almost guarantee there’s some type of data. Data can be as simple as a mailing list or a complex database, without data the business will fail. Choosing safe and reliable storage is necessary for all businesses.
Clothing stores may have customer and vendor lists, doctors with patient information and accountants with numbers. For years now I’ve been preaching about the necessity of regular data backups but I rarely talk about storing current data. Data backups are necessary no matter how your data is stored or used; there is no excuse for not backing up data.
Back in the early days of computers one hard drive for the operating system and data was the norm. Bigger companies had servers that would host files, but they too only had one hard drive. In case of a hard drive failure all the data would be lost. If the business was fortunate enough to have a tape drive the company could restore data to a new drive.
Eventually someone decided that having multiple drives was a better approach. One drive would hold the operating system and the other would keep data. This was a much better approach because it placed less stress on the data drive. Backups became much easier because only the data drive needed to be copied.
At some point an evil person decided to combine multiple drives and created RAID. They weren’t evil because RAID is bad, the technology is very confusing. RAID1 duplicates the data drive and RAID0 splits the data between two drives. RAID0, the evil twin, almost always leads to complete data loss either due to hardware failure or bad luck.
RAID in itself isn’t terribly bad, it’s only the RAID0 type that splits data between drives. RAID1, on the other hand, is a great choice for systems because it automatically duplicates to two identical hard drives. Provided both drives don’t fail at the same time, swapping out a bad drive typically means rebuilding the array using a new hard drive.
Encrypting an entire drive is a stupid idea and should be avoided at all costs. There is no legitimate use for encryption as it makes any chance of retrieving data off a failed drive impossible. Software companies build data encryption into their titles which is specifically designed to meet or exceed industry specific requirements.
Hardware maintenance is just as important as regular data backups. Any system retaining data needs to have the hard drive replaced regularly. Drives typically fail after two or three years; however, I’ve seen new drives fail within months after being installed. Drives in servers are used more than those in desktop PC’s so they could fail significantly faster.
Sizing hard drives is something we all have a problem with. Most people think bigger is better, but in reality smaller is better. Large drives fail quickly because they pack a ton of precise stuff into the same size package as every other hard drive. Most business data doesn’t take up that much room so calculating the minimum drive size the business needs will make hardware last longer.
In a perfect world we’d all be using properly sized hard drives in RAID1 and we’d all back up our systems daily. We’re not all in that perfect world and some of us do some really stupid things like encrypting our oversized RAID0 hard drives. Properly design your business system so you don’t have to come see me.
(Jeromy Patriquin is the President of Laptop & Computer Repair, Inc. located at 509 Main St. in Gardner. You can read past articles at www.LocalComputerWiz.com.)