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This morning, the editors at ZDNet posed a question for our blogging crew for Halloween:

as far as I am concerned.

What’s really scary is the type of thing that nails you due to your own inability or willingness to act, not by the actions of another vendor or the behavior of a particular product. I’m talking about neglecting your Business Continuity and Resiliency, be it on a personal or an enterprise level. And while these monsters are extremely easy to defeat, if you don’t make the adequate preparations beforehand, they will strike you dead. You can lose valuable data, lose customer confidence, as well as lots of money. Now THAT is truly scary.

I frequently get blank stares as a response, and that’s when I know we’re in big trouble.

. For your average end user, the RPO is the most important consideration - you want to be able to recover your files and data at a point in time closest to when you incurred the actual data loss. Whether it takes you an hour or a day to get the data back (your RTO) for a home user or small business is probably unimportant. For an enterprise, that’s an entirely different matter - some companies require RTO’s of less than 4 hours, and some I’ve seen as high as 72 depending on the criticality of the system or tier. Very low RTOs and RPOs require some very sophisticated solutions such as SAN snapshotting, replication technologies and Disaster Recovery (DR) sites and protocols. ?But most end-users are usually happy just to get their data back, period, and don’t require anything nearly as infrastructure-intensive.

, which is a high-end service that is usually reserved for Fortune 500 companies, also has an Internet-based backup solution for small businesses, but it’s a lot pricier.

As with any service, you need to weigh the maintenance fees against what a real failure would actually cost you, and what combination of services make the most sense and what data is more critical than others - obviously, your MP3 collection and your family photos from last Christmas probably aren’t as important as your Quicken/Quickbooks files or your Office documents, so you should be burning your non-critical or static data to cheap storage such as DVDs or a backup hard drive instead of using net-based backups which charge for storage and bandwidth by the gigabyte. Note to Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, HP and Amazon - here’s an area where you guys could really clean up and gain some serious customer loyalty — by providing affordable and easy to use Internet backup services.

for a great open source system imaging solution. As with any backup solution, image-based backups are only as good as how recent they were taken, so be sure to combine this with a file-based backup solution.

For those of you who want a completely transparent redundancy solution, you might want to consider putting in a second internal hard disk and configuring your system for RAID-1. RAID used to be for enterprises only, but every single consumer version of Windows has supported it out of the box since Windows XP, and it’s been in NT and “Enterprise” Windows desktops for ages. Simply install a second hard disk, partition it to be the exact size of your existing hard disk partitions, open up the Disk Manager in the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) and create a software RAID 1/Disk Mirror - no expensive RAID controller is needed, but your CPU will incur a little bit more overhead by mirroring the drive.

If your primary drive fails when you are using software mirroring, simply swap the cabling with your secondary drive and you are good to go - although it’s possible in some rare circumstances that you might destructively write or erase data on both drives simultaneously (I’ve seen this happen with things like database apps where no actual OS or hardware “crash” occurs but the application itself misbehaves causing a data loss) so you should always have a secondary backup/restore method handy. Linux also supports software-based drive mirroring, but the setup is a little more complicated and you’ll want to consult the ‘HOWTO’ guides on the Internet if you want to head down that route.

, both of which sell desktop caching SATA RAID controllers in the $200-$300 range depending on what features you need. Some motherboards on higher-end PCs also include RAID controller chipsets. With RAID controllers, you set up the mirroring in the controller BIOS and the RAID chipset does all the work - the host OS sees just one physical hard disk, even though you might have two or more (RAID-5) disks installed. When a drive fails, the controller does all the hard work of re-syncing the data when you put the replacement secondary hard disk back in.

should be on everyone’s download list.

of his industry affiliations.

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