 We will also have a discussion in our Tech Planning Forum where you can ask any additional questions after we wrap up today. So to get us officially started, hopefully everybody is back on the line, Disaster Planning, back up, back up, back up. And I am Becky Regan from TechSoup. I'm a staff writer here and also help with the webinars. We will be joined today by Anna Marie Jones from Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disaster. Zach Mutex from Sarai, a consulting company. Chris Shipley who is also from a consulting company, Nutmeg. And we will have Kevin Rowe and Kami Griffiths both from TechSoup helping to respond to chat questions throughout the webinar. We will also have them fielding questions to us during the Q&A. So if you ask a question and it's not answered immediately, know that we will try to address it during that section toward the end. So today the agenda that we are going to be looking at is talking about why back up is important especially for nonprofits and libraries. We will discuss some best practices including policies and processes that you can adopt in your office. We will give an overview of various types of back up options and then some examples and resources and then we will go through Q&A. So to get the ball rolling on why back up is so important and especially for nonprofits, I'm going to turn it over to Anna Marie to get us started. Great, thank you Becky. Hello everyone. My passion in the world is certainly preparedness for nonprofits and when it comes to backing up systems, second only to protecting and saving life backing up your tech can mean everything to your ability to function in the middle of a disaster and certainly moving forward. I would also argue that having appropriate backups and that level of resilience with your technology directly supports life safety meaning keeping yourself, your volunteers, the people you serve alive, healthy, and well. There is simply no way for nonprofits to function these days without varying levels of technology whether it's even just your telephones and your capacity to communicate with each other much less access all of your documentation. And I know in the world of prioritizing it's very hard sometimes for nonprofits, particularly the smaller ones, to prioritize disaster planning at all and then sometimes backing up your systems gets buried even deeper in that conversation but I hope by the end of this presentation we can really see that backing up is absolutely critical to your ability to fulfill on your mission, serve your community, keep people alive, healthy, and well, and position yourself to actually prosper in the face of a disaster. That's great Anna Marie. I think we talked about a little bit in the planning of this as to why nonprofits and libraries are a little bit different from a company or a corporation. And I think that you gave some great examples that are here listed on the screen about nonprofits often serving, offering direct service to sometimes the most vulnerable members of our population, libraries also serving communities, and just the critical nature of some of the services that are provided largely by nonprofits and that not having a system in place can really cause havoc within a community as a whole. And if you just look at those are just some of the bullet points, but the reality is is that nonprofits do operate by an entirely different business model. It's not just about did we profit, did we not. This is going to be about whether people get fed, whether they have the medical support they need, whether the advocacy issues that are changing the world move forward or not, and absolutely whether you remain a fundable organization now and in the future and in the spirit of our model which is prepared to prosper, if you have your data backed up in such a way that you have that immediate capacity to move forward, you're also in the position of being able to jump on an opportunity to be able to pull and mobilize those assets immediately leaves you in a better place for receiving funding, leveraging funding, and moving forward. That's great. Well, and I know there are lots of organizations out there in the world that still use this kind of system for backup or may not have any system and they're relying on whatever disks happen to be in their drawer that were used from years ago. We also have disasters that can take place like fires we've mentioned, but then there's also littler things like somebody lost their laptop and all of this great information, maybe it's a grant proposal is lost. So the disasters can come in all sizes and shapes and backup is the one surefire way to help ensure that you can recover and remain resilient. Is there a bunch of little hard drives that were smashed? This makes me sad just looking at them. So everybody on this line is calling in for a reason because I think they understand that backup is important. So hopefully we'll be able to offer some good advice today from our presenters. But I also wanted to point folks to our brand new guide, the Resilient Organization, a guide for disaster planning and recovery, which includes a couple of chapters on the importance of backup and a lot of great resources specifically on that topic. But in the context of disaster planning, it's a terrific guide and we have a toolkit of other resources to go with the guide that hopefully can provide a variety of resources to help you get planning. I'm not just the best backup system, but I'm developing a disaster plan as part of your overall technology plan. So I want to get into a little bit of some of the best practices and policies. So I'm going to turn it over to Chris a little bit to talk about what are the best policies that we should be aiming for and that are ideal for our organizations to embrace as best practices, policies, and processes to help us ensure that not only once we get a system up that we actually adopted and use that system. So Chris can you go ahead and give us a little bit of background about what we should be backing up and how we should be doing it? Yeah, sure. So what the backup? There's two different really kinds of information. You have your static information which might be how your server is set up like with the software it's running, or policies and procedures, things that don't change on a daily basis. And then you kind of have that data that changes on either a weekly, daily, monthly basis like payroll, email, documents, or operational software. So to kind of keep the stuff that you need to back up on a daily basis kind of separated from the stuff that's static, you don't really need to back that up every day because it doesn't change. So kind of come up with a strategy that will back up only those things that are changing on a daily basis. Those are the things you don't need to, otherwise your backup set might get too large. Also you want to concentrate on the data as opposed to the software. For example, you don't need to back up Microsoft Word, but you should probably back up Microsoft Word documents. So that can also help you with keeping your backup set smaller. One thing you need to consider is how critical is the data you're backing up? What's accessible to your organization for losing that data? Like if I lost a week's worth of data from my operational software for case management, say, would that be okay? Like would I be able to recreate that data for my case managers, or would it really be too much data to recreate? And if you can answer that question, you really need to work that into your plan. Some people a week or two is fine, other people they can't really lose more than like an hour. So it all depends on the services that you're running. We also want to kind of take a look at the things you need to back up aren't only data. You have a lot of stuff that might not even be in computerized format. If you're not scanning documents in and keeping digital copies of these things, you only have hard copies, you should probably find a way to back those up as well. Not handheld computers and cell phones would be another thing. If you have your contact lists in your cell phone only and you have no way of backing that up, then that could be an issue for you too if you lose your phone. Go ahead. I know I was going to just say that's great to know that we didn't include cell phones and personal devices like that on the list, but we do talk about it a little bit later as well. You also need to know where it is. You need to document your process for backing it up, your process for retrieving backups, and all places where you're locating your backups and the frequency of those. For example, I know plenty of my clients will back up a lot of their data daily, but they only put information into a safe at a bank weekly. Then they ship something else kind of off-site, actually out of the state on a quarterly basis. If the huge disaster happens, at worst, they might actually lose a quarter of their data just city-wide or even a statewide disaster. So what constitutes a backup is there's a rule. As they call it in the disaster planning guide, it's the 2x2x2 rule where you need two copies in two locations with two people. So the 2x2x2 rule is all about making sure you have more than one copy. What I mean by that is if you have one more document stored on your server, and you think, hey, it's on the server, that's not actually a backup, because that's only one copy. If something happens to your server, you have no other way to get it back. So make sure that your documents are copied in many locations. You also need to kind of identify your locations. You have a local backup, there's online off-site backup services available for you for like far distance backups and whatnot. Or you could do something a little more traditional like I mentioned, my client will mail a DVD backup off-site. So your local backup might be to tape or other devices, and we'll get into those those more later. But the other part I need to stress here is you need to test your backup as part of your plan. If you don't test restoring your backup files on a periodic basis, then when a disaster does happen, that's not when you want to find out that backup doesn't work. That's why we put it twice on this slide right here. And those are really important points for sure. And when we talk about the 2x2 rule, we like to say two people, two types of backup in two different places, and that should be for all of those, especially those critical things that need to be backed up, that at least two people on your staff or team know where that's at and have access to it, two different types of duplicating it, remote and local, and two copies of that saved someplace. So if you can live by that rule, then you're living by the ideal standard to ensure that you can recover resiliently from anything that happens, whether it's just, oops, I dropped my laptop and it won't turn on. And I had important stuff on it to, oh my God, there's a hurricane that's just knocked our building over. And as an example, we interviewed a handful of organizations throughout building our new disaster planning guide. And this quote on the side about keep your friends close and your backups distant, the organization we talked to really stressed that you should consider your entire city a potential point of failure because for Hurricane Ike they were really knocked out in their entire city. And so having their backup systems near and far really helped them recover effectively. So it's a good advice and making sure you test them of course is also really important. If you have a tape drive that you use locally and it doesn't happen to work, then that's not really any backup. So making sure that you test regularly and that a couple of staff people know the process to see that it's being backed up properly is really, really important. Whether it's staff people or you have a consultant that comes in and checks it for you or a tech volunteer who can come in and verify that your local backup is working either way. It's a great idea. Becky, I wanted to just throw in that we recommend to agencies to have kind of a sister-city relationship, a city far away from your own and that way you have that extra sensibility and in fact it doesn't hurt if you're even in a different time zone because just having someone who could load your data, send you copies of your data and of course this needs to be someone you can trust and you've built that level of relationship but there are many disasters that are likely in the Bay Area in particular where you may not have anyone in a driving distance that is operational. And the power outage phenomenon is the same thing but if you have a backup in New York and you're in California, there's a lot of beauty to that. That's a great point. One of our participants chatted in, William Snyder said our offsite backup is across the street with just a little frowny face. And I think we're here in San Francisco at TechSoup and we have a lot of tech organizations and a lot of these backup, especially these hosted backup companies sprouted up out here and so maybe it's not the best option to use a hosted service that is also based in San Francisco if you're concerned about the threat of an earthquake. I think the same thing goes for any area that frequently experiences any kind of natural disaster. So if you're in a hurricane zone or in an area that floods frequently, that's something to definitely think about making sure that your backup isn't really across the street because they're likely to be hit by the same problems if there is any kind of big regional disaster. I'd like to pass it along to Zach to talk a little bit about some other types of policies and processes to get your staff and your office in order to ensure that you can have a good backup system. So Zach, can you go ahead and talk a little bit about these points? Zach Sure, I was just looking for my mute button. So policies and procedures, well I really like what Chris was saying about the different types of data that you have. And one of the things that I suggest is that when organizations are looking at developing a backup plan is they create an inventory, kind of a brainstorming list of where all the stuff is that they might want to protect and to be very broad-minded about that because as I think it's been mentioned, information can sometimes creep into little pockets where we don't really think of it as existing, but if it gets lost then it's hard to find. As an example I know some people, they never enter their contacts like their email addresses into their Outlook Contacts list. So even if Outlook is getting backed up maybe from a central location all of their important email addresses are stored in their auto-complete list on their computer. And if their computer dies then all of their quote-unquote contacts they vaporize with it. So sometimes people are collecting information in places that we don't really think about. I know there are a lot of organizations that will backup servers for example thinking, oh well that's where all the important stuff is, without really thinking about how much important stuff actually is on people's desktops. Yeah, just to interject one more thing on my desktops, Zach I think you can agree would be like a lot of people use bookmarks and those are all usually stored on your desktop. Yeah, exactly. That's a great example Chris. So for example policies and procedures, I know that there are organizations that will say well we'll backup the servers because that's relatively easy, but people are responsible for backing up their own desktops. And if you lose data well then it's your fault. It's on you. And I think that that's really kind of an irresponsible management position to take because in a lot of cases it's not that much more difficult to go ahead and backup the computers. And in most organizations if you make end users responsible for protecting their own data then you're essentially ensuring that it won't happen just because it's kind of human nature to forget about that kind of thing. And it's much easier to accomplish with tools like software and adequate storage than to rely on fallible human action relying on somebody actually having to do something. That's a great point. And boy you really reminded me that I never saved my contacts in Outlook and really ought to do that. I use the auto so all the time. And it's never even occurred to me that those contacts would be lost if my laptop died. That's a really good point. So beyond policies and I think the point of making it really easy as an organization as opposed to relying on individual staff people to backup their desktops, creating those shortcuts to where backup should happen on people's desktops, making it really easy for people to access if they're working remotely by opening up VPN so people are saving to servers or using an online hosted backup system to store their desktop materials. I think it's really important. A couple of points that we haven't covered around the online backup thing that we'll talk about a little bit more specific services and specific tools in the next section, but when talking about online backup in particular about keeping sensitive data secure and just in general the security issues that come when you have donor information and databases, maybe particular private information about individuals if you're a direct service agency, maybe that provides healthcare or a food bank or social services directly that there are a variety of regulatory requirements often to keeping things secure and private. And so also being cognizant of where you're storing that data and where you're backing it up and ensuring that it's not accessible by everybody within your organization and also not available online for people to access and hack. Jack, would you talk a little bit about some of those issues? Sure, sure. Yeah, well that's a very good point about considering security and it's something that is closely related to backup because maintaining the availability of your information, being able to get at your data when you need it is a big part of kind of an overall security plan for an organization, but it's also really important to think about who has access to the backup. For instance, you might have a very good password system on your computer. You might be able to control access to sensitive information, but if it's all backed up onto an external hard drive and that hard drive is not encrypted and the hard drive is not located in a secure location, then really anybody can just walk off with all of your information and your passwords weren't that useful. I've actually seen this happen in an organization. They weren't a client of mine, but I heard about it where they had backed up to an external hard drive which was attached to their server. And the server was in a meeting room that was sometimes used for meetings with people from outside the organization. And one day after a meeting the hard drive wasn't there anymore. And because in the state of California if sensitive information such as social security numbers or protected health information is disclosed to an unauthorized party, the organization is required to notify anyone whose information may have been compromised. And so it was kind of an all hands on deck situation that night with all of the staff and volunteers from the nonprofit stuffing envelopes to get the word out to anyone that they had ever served because it was a mental health organization letting them know that their sensitive information might have been disclosed. And probably whoever stole it just wanted the hard drive, but they still had to do it anyway. So maintaining physical security of backups and logical security by using encryption of those backups when appropriate is something important to consider. That's a great point. And when talking about office security in general, your office layout like you talked about that they had meetings in the room where their server was stored, well where you put things in your office can make a difference as well as to how well you're able to recover. So if your backup, your local backup system is a server and you leave it sitting directly on the floor, if you're on the ground floor of a building and it happens to flood, your server may be destroyed. Same with if you happen to put it in a room even if it's on a rack, but it's under a sprinkler head and there's a fire alarm pulled and the sprinklers go off, then again your server may be destroyed. So thinking about the office layout and how you keep your local backup held and kept can be really important as well. And I know the example was given earlier about an organization who sends a disc off to be housed at the bank or sent off someplace external. But it's a really important point as well if you use a server with any backup tapes that you don't just change out the tapes and leave them sitting there next to the server every day that they aren't left next to the server because if the server is destroyed it is quite possible that the tapes could be destroyed as well or taken. So just being cognizant of those kind of things when you're actually setting it up in your office. Becky, can I interject one thing about also personal responsibility? I wanted to sort of underscore the point from earlier. It really isn't an either or as to whether IT is 100% responsible, the IT management thing. It's both personal responsibility and management IT responsibility because many people take data homes, small nonprofits, it's common practice to send the backups with the executive director or the second in command. So it really is personal responsibility, office responsibility, securing data not just physically but with proper encryption, with proper pass codes, and this does not have to be super complex but it is looking at those simple things like is this external hard drive basically sitting here for a stranger to walk off with. When I take my data home it's not labeled with all sorts of card, blah blah blah. It's very carefully hidden. You'd really have to know and truly be committed to ransacking my entire house to find cards data. That's a great point. And I think recapping the idea of both office responsibility and personal responsibility, really the ideal is to have a setup where your office has a plan, makes it easy for employees to embrace it. One participant wrote in saying that they have personal folders on their terminal server for each user to use to back up their files and they only allowed access to their own files. So they've created a system where it's easier to train staff so that they do actually adopt a regular system that is backed up. And it does require not only the setup on the organization's end, but it requires some training of the staff to ensure that they understand how to back up, that they understand that it's part of the expectation as part of their job that they're backed up with whatever system that organization uses regularly, and that they're not leaving sensitive data or information just laying around. If they're traveling with a laptop or a device that has lots of organizational info on it, that they know that they have to be careful with that. And not necessarily suggesting that there's some punishment or anything involved if they're not, that's up to the individual organization to decide, but really stressing that the training up front to get staff on board so that it is adopted across the organization is really important. So I'd like to move this along and get started with talking about some of the actual backup systems and what types of backup there are out in the world. So I'd like to talk with Zach to start us off in talking about different types of back up hardware. So Zach can you give us an overview of what kind of options are available? Sure, sure thing. So if you're going to have a backup, if you're going to keep a second copy of your information somewhere, you're going to need some place to stick it. And so there are lots of different options for the type of hardware where you could keep a second copy of your information. The major requirements are that, one, it has to be capacious enough to store whatever it is you want to put on there. And in many cases that means that you need more storage than the total amount of storage that you already have. So if say for example you already have maybe 100 gigabytes of storage on a server, you're going to need more than 100 gigabytes for backup if you're going to keep more than one copy of that data. Even if it's an incremental backup it's going to take up more space than the original storage. The good news is that the cost of storage has dropped precipitously in recent years so that you can obtain just huge amounts of storage for very cheap, even buying brand new, like you can buy, I don't know, like a terabyte, 1,000 gigabytes of storage for something like $200 or less depending on where you're shopping. So having enough storage is definitely one thing to consider. And another thing to consider is how you're going to protect that information off-site. Now I'm a big fan of online backup for that and in a little bit farther along Chris is going to talk to us about some of the online backup options but it's still appropriate and if you have a ton of information to backup it's still cheaper to remove it yourself on physical media. And so another consideration if you are going to keep a copy of your own backup off-site on physical media on a hard drive or something is, is it portable? Is it designed to go someplace? So you can see here some examples on the slide of different types of media and the first row here, these are all very portable. A flash drive doesn't hold a lot of information but it certainly is super portable. Removable hard drive, this is something that has emerged, become more popular recently. The model that's displayed here is a Dell product and it's kind of like a tape but it's actually a hard drive that inserts into a cartridge and so you can pop out the hard drive and take it with you without worrying about damaging it because there's exposed electronics or something because it was designed to be removed from the system. Then there's the trusty tape drive which a lot of people still have and those tapes store a lot of information, they're not very fast but they sure are portable and it's easy to stash them in a safe deposit box or a fire safe at home and then there's the external hard drive available in all different sizes and very inexpensive and I know of several organizations that use external hard drives for removing site, removing data off-site. For organizations that have a lot of information to store they may not be able to fit it all on one cartridge or one tape. They might choose a robotic tape library which is a machine that sucks several tapes into it and then automatically exchanges the tapes so a human being doesn't have to stand there and switch the tapes periodically to allow the backup to complete. And for organizations that have a lot of data to store on-site network attached storage, it is like a file server in a box. They're fairly inexpensive and they're available in really large quantities that is size capacities, storage capacities. Not highly portable but it's good for storing backup on-site so those are some examples of where the backup might be stored. And in order to get the backup data onto the storage you have to have some method of doing that. Of course the simplest method is just to manually copy the files onto say a flash drive or a hard drive or something but I'm not a big fan of that at all because although it has the benefit of somebody sitting there and watching it having a satisfaction of knowing that it happened it relies on human action. And one of the things that software does very well is it handles repetitive boring or tedious tasks and backup is certainly one of those. And backup software can also help us to maintain multiple copies of software and it can tell us when something isn't working right. When it's not backing up if it's the kind of software that has that feature it can send you an email and say oh wait a minute I wasn't able to back this up. And you can bring that to your attention whereas if it's a person's responsibility and the backup doesn't happen, the person fails in their responsibility then you may never get the email saying oh you know what I didn't do the backup last night. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the software packages that you can choose from. Because small nonprofit organizations and even large ones who are watching their administrative overhead and libraries, cash is really tight right now for everybody and these organizations are certainly a prime example. So I wanted to point out some software packages that are free or super discounted for nonprofits. Crash Plan is a piece of software that can move your backup off-site. You can set up one copy on a computer at work and one copy on a computer at home and it will back up one to the other. I don't know if they have an official donation policy but I hope they don't mind my telling you that I asked for a donation for one of my clients and they donated five licenses. So we are very happy about that. It works with both Mac and Windows I believe. The Microsoft Windows System Data Protection Manager, these are just in alphabetical order. This piece of software is something that is really only appropriate for larger organizations, the kind of organization with more than one server. And the System Data Protection Manager will help to back up multiple servers. It's a great tool for those Microsoft shops and it's available for next-to-nothing through TechSoup stock. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and many organizations already have a Windows Server with an earlier version. It has some good backup features built right in. It has a feature called Volume Shadow Copy which makes point-in time backups of file shares. Those can be stored on the server itself or on external hard drive or some other media. And you can also back up computers on a network if you are using the Windows domain feature of a server. You can redirect the desktop and my documents folders on users' computers to a central location which makes it very easy to back those up. And that software is available for as little as $40 to organizations eligible to receive that donation from TechSoup stock. And I just want to remind folks really quickly as well that they don't need to scribble down all of these links right now since we will be sending out a follow-up email afterwards that will include all of these. So you don't need to scribble to take notes. I think if we can try and move it forward a little bit so that we leave enough time for questions. Folks can see the other items that are listed on here. And somebody asked us that $40. Yes, that is $40. And at least three of the products on the screen I know are available for donation to eligible libraries and nonprofits through TechSoup. So the other ones I think are available in their own right as a donation through the links that we give here. So that can have you talk a little bit about backup software and then we will get on to some of the host adoptions as well. Absolutely. So I am going to divide backup software into two broad categories. That is software designed to back up a single computer. And I will call that desktop backup software. And then there is software that is designed to back up a server or multiple computers on a network. And for very small organizations, those with only two or three computers it is probably suitable to use backup software, desktop backup software, and computers running Windows, computers running macOS 10 are the vast majority of systems that you all are going to have. They actually have backup software built right in. You don't have to pay anything extra for depending on the version that you have, macOS 10, 10.5, and 10.6 have time machine built in which is super easy to use. And if you don't have backup software built right in or you don't like it or it doesn't do the job, you want more features, you can add software inexpensively. There are many different packages. I am actually putting together a comprehensive list of backup packages that people might want to use. I didn't have it ready in time for this, but if people send me an email message I will be happy to reply with the document. So EMC Insignia Retrospect is a popular small office backup package. Then for backing up servers, backing up networks, there is a different version of Retrospect which is really good for backing up servers. There is a package called Backup Assist. I really like it because it is very inexpensive. It is like $250, and I think they have a discount for nonprofit and educational organizations. And it just backs up one server. And Symantec Backup Exec is really for more sophisticated organizations that have a lot of stuff to back up. And with the correct options it can back up multiple servers and desktop computers. And for organizations that have small business server which is a popular package from Microsoft, there are often discounted backup packages specifically designed for small business server that include all the components that you would need to back up the mail server part and the database server part. And normally those are very expensive, but if you are using SPSB on the lookout for a discounted backup package. So I already mentioned some of the features in the Windows server. And I know there are a lot of organizations that use Macs, and there are even organizations that use Linux. But I think it is worth highlighting the features in Windows Server because so many organizations use it. Great. Thanks for that, Zach. I really appreciate it. So I'd like to move this along pretty quickly so we've got some time to handle some Q&A. So I'm going to have Chris talk a little bit about hosted backup options. Hey everybody. So really quick, I personally evaluated three of the popular hosted backup options. That would be Mosey, Carbonite, and JungleBisk. There are a whole host of other options out there. But the reason I specifically evaluated these ones is that they were vetted by a third party company that I trust for security. And so all of the encryption and stuff on these three I know are already vetted and they are not hackable. And as we mentioned, security is important. Personally, I prefer Mosey mainly because it has better plug-ins to work with Windows Server and large databases on Microsoft SQL and Microsoft Exchange. And JungleBisk and Carbonite do not have those. But Mosey and Carbonite both work on PCs and Macs including servers. And as long as your file size is less than 4GB for any one single file, Carbonite would be a fine option for you as well, which happens to be easier to use than Mosey, but Mosey has better features. That's great, Chris. And there are a lot of different options of sites and places that have reviewed and compared the different features available in hosted and online backup services. I grabbed a screenshot of this page in Wikipedia, but there are probably hundreds of other sites that have reviewed them, have compared them. Everybody's got their favorite. We've listed a link to a couple of them here like PC Magazine had a review of a bunch of different hosted backup services. There's also this online backup review site that has a blog that keeps people up to date about new developments. And they're pretty thorough about their different reviews and comparisons, and they also offer a lot of free trials. So if you're looking to check them out. The other thing that I just thought was important to mention is that a lot of organizations are already using some sort of hosted system for a lot of their data like Google Docs or Microsoft Office Live Workspace, Salesforce as a CRM, hosting files of photos on Flickr. All of these are different types of hosted services that can act as a backup. But again, if you're hosting your photos only on Flickr, you do want to make sure that you're backing them up elsewhere as well so that you don't have them get lost if something happens or if they change their user policies and suddenly you can't access them anymore. So it's just good to be aware of. And then Chris, I know that you had talked a little bit previously about some synchronization tools and what the difference is between backups. Do you want to give a really quick little blurb about what that means? Yeah, sure. So a lot of the backup software out there today kind of makes a blob, like a big giant backup file. And I got 4 gigabytes of documents and they're all stored in this one big fat file or on this one big tape. And now I got to use software to be able to extract that. And that's actually kind of a pain in the butt when you need to get stuff fast. So what a synchronization tool does is basically synchronize the documents on say a server or desktop with another location, be it another server or another desktop or even an external hard drive or flash drive. So it's like an exact copy of the documents as you see them so you don't have to spend time to unpack them and whatnot. The most powerful tool is a command line tool called R-Sync that I've ever encountered. It comes included with Mac and Linux and you can download it for free for Windows. It's an open source tool. And then if you prefer not using command line stuff there are some graphical things you can do for the Mac and Microsoft that I've listed there on the slides. That's great. And we did have a couple of people asking about the cost for some of the hosted backup services. And I saw Chris that you responded to somebody directly saying about 20 gigabytes of data per month is less than $20 per month and that I think is in particular reference to Mosey's pricing. So it's really very reasonable cost for backup. And I know I have a friend in a really small organization who uses Jungle Disk and I think her total costs are about $50 a year because they are not hosting a whole lot of data there. So they can offer really reasonable backup options for you on very little budget which is great for folks who don't have much money to spend on this stuff. So I think we will go ahead. Zach, did you have a quick story about your experience with Mosey? You might want to share people because I think some people are worried about how quick they can get their data if it's a lot. Sure. I know we are running short on time so I will keep it quick. Basically I dropped my laptop. It broke and because I was using Mosey I got everything back. I didn't lose a single file. And it took them a couple of days to burn the files to DVD but they shipped it to me overnight. So I didn't lose a thing. So I was very pleased with the turnaround. That's really great. And we have one person who is asking about how secure is it. And I think Chris you sort of addressed that a little bit in the beginning saying that you had really tested those three different tools, Mosey, Jungle Disk, and Carbonite because they were recommended by a security site that you use. So I would gather that they are pretty secure around encryption but I would still caution that if you are holding really critical sensitive data that you need to be tracking data lineage for compliance with different regulations like if you are meeting HIPAA compliance. So if you have health information about patients that you might serve in a direct service type industry that it may not qualify and be certified for HIPAA compliance to host on one of these online services. So I think that's one issue around security that you would have to look into a little bit more. Chris do you want to respond to that a little bit more? Yeah. Mosey Pro was the only one that I found that allowed me to use my own encryption key. So I could create my own secret passphrase that would encrypt all of my data and not even Mosey has it. The other ones all like including Mosey, you can use their key but I like Mosey because I could use my own. That's great. So we are going to go through really quickly some resources and other examples. We worked with one organization, the Freestore Food Bank while developing our disaster planning guide. And they really talked about data protection manager software for doing shadow copies and replicas of their backup for their files. And that this is really what saved them when they had a disaster that they went through. And as a food bank they were also dealing with people in the community who were also experiencing the same regional crisis and really couldn't stop operations even though they were largely shut down because of, I believe it was a hurricane. So it can work for, it's essential to work especially if you are providing direct services to community members. So we were going to share some other success stories. I know that Zach already shared his one about Mosey shipping his backup DVDs overnight. But I'd like to try and move this on to questions so we have time to handle a few before we end at noon. We'll send links to all of these resources that were discussed today in the follow-up email. So I'm going to go ahead and open it up to questions. And we've had a lot that have already been asked. So I'm going to go ahead and field one over to Chris. So Chris, we have Clathi who asks about, she likes her portable storage but their computers don't have USB 2.0 little ports. So are there any suggestions on what sort of cheap hardware they could use to upgrade so that they can use things like thumb drives and connect through USB even though they don't have those in their current computers? Yeah, you can if it's expandable. But one of the things that Kevin Lowe pointed out and then answered to her is if the computer is too old, you're still going to have a bottleneck. So it will probably be a lot faster than the old USB. For about $30 you can probably add the USB 2.0 capability if you're handy enough to open a computer, plug in a PCI card, install the drivers. Well that's great to know. So we also have Karen Freeman asking saying that we're a small organization with a small budget and no server. We have two staff who work on their own Mac laptops. One works on the Office desktop PC. How do you suggest that we back up in this situation? So no network, no servers, and folks using different platforms. Zach, do you want to try and field that one? I'm sure. I'm sorry, I wasn't paying attention. Can you? Sure, no problem. Karen writes that she works with a small organization with a small budget. They have no server, two staff working on Mac laptops and one person working on an Office PC. What suggestion do you have for backing up in this situation? Well if everyone is in the same room at the same time during the day or different times of the day, then it's possible to set up a copy of Retrospect on say a Windows PC and it could back up all three computers. When the Macs are in the office they get backed up and when they're not they'll get backed up when they come back. So that's one possible option. Another option is to use an inexpensive online backup service for three PCs or for two Macs and a PC. You could use Mozi and you're not supposed to use Mozi Home to back up like a business or a nonprofit organization, but the Mozi Home service is only $4.99 or $4.95 or something per computer per month for unlimited backup. You can back up up to five machines that way. It's a little more if you use the Mozi Pro service but it's still quite affordable. I think I would recommend a hosted backup for such a small number of computers. That's great. So we also have a question. The unlimited backup actually does have some limitations. It will be fine for most people but there are a couple of limitations to them. So read those before you sign up for them and expect it to solve everything. Good. I always have to read the fine print. We have another question from Tanya asking about kind of on the other end of the spectrum that they have one TB of data from all servers that need to be backed up. Do you have remote options for that amount of data and how costly do you think that would be? Anybody can address that. Chris, what do you think? I think I was responding to something in the chat room. This is the problem with looking at the chat while also trying to present. The question was that we have about one TB of data from all servers that need to be backed up. Are there remote options for that amount of data and how costly is it? There are options. So basically, go ahead, Chris. Okay, but do you want me to answer or no? Yeah, go ahead, Chris. Okay. The initial upload for that would take forever. So what you might want to do in my experience is you could probably call them and send them a hard copy of that stuff. And typically you're just doing delta changes between the data. So I doubt that it's a terabyte of data that changes daily. So the subset of data that changes is probably a lot smaller. But if you have other things to say about that, go ahead. Well, I think that sounds like a good answer. So I'm going to actually see if we can get Anna Marie's voice back in the discussion really quickly. We have a question from Lisa who asks, who says, we have no office with only three employees who work at their homes. Should we just rely on online backup? Or is there some other solution we should use? I know you're great at dealing with suggestions for smaller organizations and figuring out what works for their needs. So do you have any advice? Oh, absolutely. If it's genuinely three individual laptops, then all of the very low-end things can be incredibly effective. I have my laptop and most of the important data, I have it backed up on the thumb drives. I make sure that anything that I have, I've also backed it up in another way. So for example, for many files, I have them on disks. I mean, if you're really talking a small amount of data which many, many nonprofits are really in the business of basically day-to-day documents rather than massive databases, almost any of those really low-end pieces can work. I have a friend who works for a very small nonprofit. He basically backs up all of his laptop to one of the very low-end, I think he pays $20 a month to do the online backup. And if each one of you did that, it's still a very small amount of money, and each laptop or computer would be backed up. And for a very small operation like that, that may be all you need. That's great advice, and I think that's the advice that we're going to try and wrap up with today since we are running out of time and I don't want to keep people over. So I'd love to refer folks, if you didn't participate last week, but would like to know a little bit more about general disaster planning and also how backup fits as part of that, feel free to visit our archived webinar and we'll send that link along after as well. You can continue the discussion with our presenters today by visiting our forums. In the Tech Planning Forum we'll be fielding other questions throughout the day. You can also continue Twittering about it, and we can hopefully respond on Twitter as well. And I'd like to thank our presenters today, Chris Shipley, Anna-Marie Jones, and Zach Metrix for their great presentations. And I'd also like to thank Kevin Lowe and Kami Griffiths for helping to manage the chat. And I'd like to thank our planning partners who helped support TechSoup in writing this new disaster guide and also promoting these webinars. Cisco is one of them on a Marie's organization collaborating agencies responding to disasters and One Northwest. Get the most out of TechSoup by visiting our forums, finding out for newsletters, reading our blog, and requesting donated and discounted software like some of the products mentioned earlier today. I'd also like to thank ReadyTalk for their generous support. The webinar was made possible by ReadyTalk, which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the US and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. Coming up soon, we'll also be offering webinars on how to present webinars in ReadyTalk. So keep an eye out for future webinars. Feel free to visit our techsoup.org slash go slash webinars if you'd like to see more. And thank you all for joining us today. Please take a moment to complete the post-event survey and continue the discussion with us in our forums. Thank you to everybody. Have a great day. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Anna Marie. Thanks, Zach. Thank you so much for having me. It was great to have you guys on. Thank you. Bye now. Bye everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you.