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You’d think at this stage of the game, most computer users would be savvy enough to have a data backup plan in place. But you’d be wrong.

That’s why every storage, disaster recovery and backup vendor on the planet has glommed onto World Backup Day, which is Saturday, March 31.

The day itself was born out of a casual thought posted to Reddit last year by Adam Jeffreson. Cynics assumed Jeffreson worked for a storage or backup company, but that is not the case, he said via email.

“Basically I knew someone who broke their laptop, and they lost loads of important documents because they had never backed it up. When I asked them about why they didn’t, they said they had never thought to. After thinking about this I realized it was actually pretty common, and that most people needed to be reminded to do it. Hence, backup day.”

Reddit commenters jumped on the topic. One group set the actual date — March 31 seemed a good idea.  Another group started the website, which implores users: “Don’t be an April Fool. Back up your files. Check your restores.”

Last year was the first World Backup Day but it seems a lot of people still don’t get it. Sixty percent of 640 small and medium businesses surveyed recently don’t even budget for backup. And just 15 percent have any kind of automated online backup plan in place, according to the research which was conducted by Compass Partners for Mozy, an online backup vendor.

Many companies leave whatever backing up is done to the discretion of individual employees. That means a lot of files are stuck on USB drives or emailed to personal Hotmail and Gmail accounts. Sound familiar?

Jeffreson sounds happy that people took his idea and ran with it: “Posting an idea on the Internet is giving it away. I’m happy it went somewhere.”

It sure did: Vendors from Backblaze to Trend Micro to Spideroak were all aboard with their World Backup Day pitches this week. As self-serving as all that is for them, just ask yourself: When was the last time you backed up your files?  There’s no time like the present — or  maybe March 31.

Some rights reserved by Phil Aaronson

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With all the excitement surrounding the relatively recent wave of non-relational – otherwise known as “NoSQL” – databases, it can be hard to separate the hype from the reality. There’s a lot of talk, but how much NoSQL action is there in the real world? In this series, we’ll take a look at some real-world NoSQL deployments.

Trend Micro provides corporate computer security products, and maintains web reputation databases that allow intelligent detection of spam, phishing, or suspicious web sites. Maintenance of these databases requires processing massive amounts of log data from DNS and other Internet servers, accumulating at the rate of about four petabytes per year. New product offerings for Trend Micro required real-time analysis of exponentially growing data volumes. After evaluating a number of database alternatives – including Hypertable and Cassandra – Trend Micro settled on Apache Hbase as the core database of new elastic infrastructure.

Several years ago, Trend Micro adopted Hadoop – the increasingly ubiquitous, open-source implementation of Google’s MapReduce framework – to store and perform bulk processing of these data sets. However, Hadoop on its own doesn’t provide a data store that can support individually updatable data items; you can’t change a single data item within a raw Hadoop dataset without having to reprocess the entire set.

HBase, a NoSQL database modelled from Google’s BigTable system, offers the row level access required by Trend Micro and – since it is part of the Hadoop ecosystem already established at Trend Micro – may seem a natural choice. However, Trend Micro evaluated other non-relational databases, including Cassandra and HyperTable. HBase was eventually chosen because it demonstrated an ability to handle the transaction rates required and because of its active development community. Trend Micro’s HBase solution is scheduled to go live in the first half of 2011.

As well as the index of web sites that forms the core of the reputation database, the system accepts event traces and activity logs from customer desktops accumulating at the rate of 5 billion items every day. According to Andy Purtell, senior architect at Trend Micro, a traditional relational system would have been hundreds of times more expensive than HBase – if it could have handled the load at all. As well as the massive insert rate, HBase’s flexible schema, which allows new attributes to be added without reorganizing the database, and its tight Hadoop integration were compelling.

Because HBase is part of the Hadoop ecosystem, Trend Micro programmers have a variety of tools available that are tightly integrated with HBase. Currently, developers at Trend Micro write data access routines directly in Java, but they are considering PIG – a scripting language for Hadoop – and the SQL-like HIVE system for more ad-hoc access.

“I’m not that interested in the NoSQL vs. RDBMS debate,” Purtell says. “I’m more interested in finding the best tools to build a solution. For our application, HBase is faster and cheaper than the relational alternative.”

Guy Harrison is a director of research and development at Quest Software, and has over 20 years of experience in database design, development, administration, and optimization. He can be found on the internet at www.guyharrison.net, on e-mail at guy.harrison@quest.com and is @guyharrison on twitter.

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