Back in 2008 when we first launched our Cloud Backup product, we expected our customers to use the service to backup their data primarily. It was a surprise to us that the most common use of the system initially was to create a shared space where files could be stored and worked on by various people within a team.

With the Cloud Backup solution installed on several machines you have the ability to setup a shared drive via the configuration screens, which you can then use to put shared documents. Obviously as they are stored on our system, if your PC oryour colleagues machine dies, your data is safe and secure still.

Below is a video showing you about the shared network drive feature:

The cloud backup and shared network drive services are complimentary and do not conflict with one another. You can start with either and then add the other (at no additional cost) at a later date. Please give it a go and let us know what you think.

As we speak to more and more people about our Online Backup to the cloud software solution and service, we are finding answers to the more common questions about what we provide, you will have noticed that by the content of the site recently. We are posting it online to make it easier to understand the benefits of what we offer and where be differ from a tape based central backup solution like Symantec BackupExec for example.

There are basically two ways to backup data files, centrally or at the edge on users machines. There are mixed solutions, but they are less common.

Centralised Backup

The standard deployment of a centralised backup is to have a tape drive (or more commonly now days a tape library/tape robot system) connected to one or more servers (or direct to the SAN). Backups are then run at regular intervals, traditionally overnight. The tape(s) are then taken away to be stored offsite. This is so that should the building be demolished, the tapes you backed all your data onto are not destroyed also.

Centralised backup is an excellent solution for many environments. There is a good reason it is the standard configuration for backup. However, it has limitations and risks that are worth considering. To start with, the data needs to be accessible to the backup software/server/tape drive. So typically a centralized backup solution will backup data stored on servers and not on users machines. Which works well in the traditional office environment and when staff are well trained to avoid putting data on their local machine.

The other big limitation of centralised backup is that it is time consuming to and can create a heavy load on the network and servers. You are often copying every single file on your network to one location and trying to write it to a magnetic tape as fast as the tape drive can handle it. Common issues surrounding this are backups slowing down the servers. Also the backup can take a very long time, many hours even, and start occuring during office hours and affecting staff performance.

Also the traditional model leaves huge (24 hour) windows of risk where data is on disk but not backed up. So if John down in accounting corrupts the excel spreadsheet he worked on all day, you have to restore from last night. If he corrupts the file in the afternoon all his work from the morning is lost. Again, there are solutions out there that can do multiple backups through out the day, but they are both expensive and complicated.

User Based Online Backup to the Cloud.

Our solution is different to the traditional model, we recommend for most users they backup every 5-15 minutes. Yes, as much as every 5 minutes. Here in the office we backup every 15 minutes. We can do this because each one of our backups only needs to send the changes to the data we have made in that 15 minutes period, which is normally pretty small. It means that should a file get corrupted or we just decide we hate what we have written in a document, we can roll back changes by restoring anyone of the backups we take every 15 minutes. I can restore the one from 15 minutes ago, from 30 minutes ago from 3:15 ago, which ever one suits me best.

Also, this restore process is something I do through an easy to use interface on my own machine. It happens immediately and IT do not need to be involved at all. So no need to call the IT guys/girls and ask for a file to be restored from tape, no more waiting for the tape to come in from the offiste storage site (the next day?) and then wait for someone to restore the file for me and eventually let me know its there, just to find it’s the wrong file or the wrong version.

The backups are automatically stored offsite, and so if my laptop or PC dies, the data has already been backed up offsite. So if a herd of elephants stampeds trhough the office destroying all the machines, I know my data is safe.

If a machine is left that can connect to the internet, I can access all my files right away. I can access the web interface from any machine and copy down the files I need and keep working. This might be a office pc, my personal laptop or a computer in an internet cafe or client site. This is all within my control as a user.

There are limitations to consider of course; our service is not good for making system state backups that include the operating system. So it is not good for people looking to be able to restore an entire machine in the event of a serious issue. For that you want to look at the more expensive and complicated solutions, and probably look at disk to disk replication. It is a approach fraught with problems, we find most people who actually have to do this regularly (large organisations) prefer to start from a standard build of all new machines and then install/restore applications and data unique to the user afterwards, it is easier and quicker on the whole.

A common question we receive is what are the differences between using an external USB drive and backing up to a cloud service online like ours. So we thought it merited a blog post.

Hardware vs. Software.

If you use a USB hard disk to backup you need to buy the hardware, you need to get a external drive which will cost you £50+ probably for one big enough to be useful. of course it depends on you backup strategy. If you use something like TiimeMachine on the Mac, then you’ll be wanting a drive at least as big as the drive on your computer you want to protect.

The big plus of a hard disk backup is that you can clone the entire disk and in the event your primary disk fails, you have everything including the Operating System backed up. So you should be able to either swap in the backup drive, or use it to boot from and maybe then resyore across.

With a online backup system like our CloudBackup service, we don’t backup the operating system just data that you want to protect. Most of our clients start by backing up a few directories of data, then expand it over time to include more and more directories of files. It is file based and does rely on the Internet as the transport mechanism for your backups.

The big plusses of software based online are that there is no external drive to spill coffee on, or knock onto the floor. In our case, the software based backup drive will never run out of space. With our solution, your data is stored encrypted in secure data centres, even the filenames are encrypted!

Local Speed Vs. Internet Speed

The disadvantage of cloud/online backup is that all your data has to be uploaded via the internet, at what ever upload speed you have available. Your backups go up to the data centre via an encrypted channel, but only as fast as your WAN connection can push it up. A USB drive of course is not limited this way, it’ll backup at whatever speed it can get through your USB port; which will be faster than an average web connection.

We address this of course, we push changes to files not full files, this saves bandwidth and of course the datacentres are well connected with speeds well in excess of the enduser connection speeds. If you are lucky enough to have a good upload speed, we adjust for that.

But USB does win on pure speed of backup, especially for that initial backup. What we find is that our clients often start by uploading 1 directory, then another and another and another. This way only relatively small amounts of data are pushed up in one hit at a time.

Cost up front vs. Pay for what you use.

If you use a USB drive, you need to buy that drive before you can use it. You need to buy one as big as you think you’ll need (you’ll guess wrong, you’ll need more). With cloud backup, you just use what you need, it does not run out of space. You don’t pay for the space you don’t use, just what you use. So if you only backup 100mb that is what you pay for, use 200mb you pay for that. As your data grows your bill does grow, but it is we find still normally less than what you would have paid for a nice big external disk.

The good thing about a cloud based system is that if you stop using it, you stop paying for it. You can’t return that USB drive to the shops when you have finished with it can you. We will happily remove all your data and stop billing you, you stop using the service; you stop paying.

We have been getting quite a bit of interest in the service lately, we still don’t know quite why, but we are not complaining. Hopefully this post helps answer some of those questions people have been asking in advance of them calling us out of the blue. (but don’t stop calling, it is always nice to have people call us rather than the other way around.)

Backup is a good idea! Photo by Martin Schmidt

One benefit of our CloudBackup for teams is the shared virtual network drive we talked about in our last p0st the other side of the coin is the less hand on experience of being able to bill uniquely to match how your organisation looks at expenses. We are able to bill individuals, teams, departments or entire businesses. However you group your staff, we can bill to match that.

Perhaps you want Cloud Backup or a Shared disk for a specific project? Yes, we can bill you by the project, or product, or client… you name it, we should be able to do it.

You can have a shared virtual network drive working on our CloudBackup and have one invoice per shared drive. The same configuration could be billed by individual too. We can bill flexibly and you can pay with flexibility… meaning cheques, BACS, paypal, credit card, etc.

We are also about to roll out added services for teams. We will monitor the backup status of your team and let you/them know if a backup has not been run for a while (or if there were issues) for example.We are just typing it all up and finalising the details, but we would love to hear from you if you have an idea that you would love to see offered as a service.

As we introduce our cloud backup software to more and more people we have discovered an area of data protection that is causing some confusion, in this post we shall try and make the differences and implications clearer.

When it comes to data protection, you could say there are the following approaches:

• Do nothing
• Backups
• CDP
• Replication
• Near CDP

Option one obvious is not providing any protection, but scarily is pretty common. Especially if you take the view (as we do) that if you don’t test your data protection system regularly then you may as well be doing nothing at all.

Backups are good, take a copy of all the data you wish to protect and store somewhere. They are generally daily and allow you to restore any file to the state it was in when backed up.

Continuos Data Protection (CDP), is when every change to every piece of data is backed up. You are able to restore a file to any point in time

Replication, is when the data you have is kept in two places and all changes are written to both locations either simultaneously or near to. No restores as such, you have an exact copy of the data in two locations, if you lose one data store you can use the other.

Near CDP, is when all the changes at short intervals are backed up. You have point in time backups to restore from.

Each method (and there are others) has its on pros and cons. Backups for example have a big disadvantage in that they typically are run once a day and as such you can only recover back to the point. If you backup at midnight, and you lose a file at 3pm the next day; when you recover the file from the backup you will have lost all the changes you made during the day. In this example the window of risk for your data is up to 24 hours.
That said, backups are simple and robust. The methodologies for good protection with backups are well understood ensuring that data is recoverable for a long time.

CDP is terrific for being able to recover a file that is lost or corrupted at a known time, you can restore a moment before the error and little (if any) work is lost. Lose that file at 3pm and you can recover it from 2:59pm (or perhaps 2:59.30 even). The window at which you data is at risk is virtually nil.  However, CDP requires quite a overhead in terms of processing changes and also needs greater storage requirements to store all changes. Typically CDP covers data only for a specific number of hours or days, otherwise the disk storage requirement becomes considerable. When used in conjunction with traditional backups it can be a good solution.

Replication provides arguably the best protection against hardware failure, specifically disk failures. Most replication solutions will switch from the primary store to the replica automatically if there is a failure. Unlike backups or CDP however, replication is not good for recovering files that are lost or corrupted, this is because all the changes to the storage are replicated to both locations. Lose a file and you lose it on both data stores/disks.

Near CDP, this is very similar to CDP, except that rather than every change being tracked and recoverable from, “snapshots” at specific intervals are taken perhaps every minute or 5 minutes or hourly. This allows you to minimise the window of time that data is at risk but also decreases the overhead required to protect your data.

When looking at data protection solutions you need to consider several factors:

Time to recover files
Windows of risk
Cost
Overhead
Length of time data is protected
Disk requirements

Each method of protection fits into these areas differently and there is a business decision to be made in regard to risks versus investment. For example replication of data will mean that hardware failures should not cause any downtime and users should not be affected. However, if a file becomes corrupted, that corruption will be replicated to both stores.
CDP allows you to recover to a point just prior to the corruption in our example, but the process often adds considerable overhead and does not protect as well as replication against a disk failure.
Backups provide a robust long-term protection of data, typically you’ll be able to recover a file from days, weeks, months and years in the past if required. However, the window of risk for losing data between data can be an issue.
Near continuous data protection is, we are finding a very good balance for most situations. Especially for laptop users, or organisations where use of the C: drive is common. The overhead is less than CDP as is the data storage requirement. The window of risk is also quite small and cost is often lower than the other solutions.

Of course we are biased, our cloud backup software does exactly this, you can have the changes to the files on your laptop backed up at very regular intervals. Typically every 5-15 minutes which when protection work or excel files is often adequate for 90% of data loss. Our software of course also allows the user to restore their own files to any of the points in time, no need for delays by involving the IT team.

Of course the other big thing with cloud backup is that you do not have to worry about storage of the backups. You don’t have to calculate how much disk/tape storage you’ll need as you have unlimited capacity on the cloud. Cost is another factor, buying all the tapes or disks to implement a solution is expensive, especially as you need to buy enough to cover expected future use; with the cloud you pay only for what you are actually using.

We are very happy talk through your data protection plans and strategies and to give advice on what will work for you; we generally find a mix of near CDP and traditional backups is a good mix. It is not often a single solution will address all you needs.

Please do take a look at our cloud backup pages, we have video demonstrations and cost estimates etc.  We genuinely believe that it is a great solution that can merge into most organisations smoothly.

When we are introducing our Cloud Backup product to people it can take a while to explain the benefits to people; especially in comparison to traditional tape based backups. In this post we’ll cover some of the benefits we see compared to traditional (and still very important) methods of data backup.

1. Go any where backups

Unlike tape backups, or even external hard drive backups, Cloud Based Online Backups can be done anywhere you can get internet access. This is really important for laptop using road warriors. You don’t want to be backing up just when you are in head office. For a start, when you are in head office you are busy right? So stopping to take a traditional backup is a pain, so unlikely to happen.

In “traditional” data centres, there is a movement to try and bill departments for use of corporate storage or compute resources. With cloud computing that  and cloud based online backup this is the default.

With cloud based backups you backup from anywhere with a  web connection. Regular backups (15 minutes or hourly for example) can just run in the background. Given how little data is liable to change in 15 minutes or even an hour, backing up to the cloud takes a small amount of time and bandwidth.

2. Low cost.

Especially in our current credit crunch and recession world, cost is a big issue. Especially capital costs. Cloud backups are a pay as you go, pay for what you use, with no “up front” costs. So rather than writing a big CAPEX for a tape drives, tapes, storage, etc. you pay an operating expense (OPEX) which will especially as you start be very small. It will takes months/years to meet the cost of a suitable hardware solution potentially.

3. Flexible Billing.

Hardware based backup solutions are inflexible, you buy it prior to use. With cloud based online backup, it is a service, you can be billed by invoice or direct debit or credit card. Your billing cycle can be weekly, fortnightly, monthly, every third Tuesday; dependingon what you require. Billing can be  for individual users, teams, departments, offices or across an entire organisation.

4. No tapes to manage/lose.

Traditional tape backups use tapes (funnily enough) and people often underestimate the overhead this causes the business. A person has to swap the tapes in and out of the drives. You need to store the tapes somewhere, both onsite and offsite. You need to transport the tapes to where ever they are stored, etc.

The other factor consider is the fact risk (or eventuality) that a tape (or tapes) will be lost. This not only means you may not be able to restore your data if required, but also means if your tape is found by “bad guys” they could gain access to your data.  Using cloud based online backup, you have no tapes to manage and transport. Assuming the data transfer is secured/encrypted as is that data stored, then an online backup can be considered safer.

5. User driven restore.

Typically, most restores are for users and are restoring a corrupted, deleted, or overwritten file. Users want a file back and they want it back now. In a traditional backup system, the user needs to call the IT helpdesk and request a restore, at which point a person has to deal with the request and restore the file. If the tape is in the office still, then restore might take 15 minutes all up, but if the courier has already picked up the tape to take it to the offsite storage, the restore time will be at earliest the next day. The user won’t be happy.

With cloud based backup, the users restore their own files via the software interface. A typical restore will be less than 60 seconds from start to finish. The user might restore a file several times using the ability to restore from previous versions of the file if they are looking for a “known good” version of the file.

Summary

Cloud based online backups are a great solution for backing up user files. Cloud based backup needs to be considered and potentially used in conjunction with more traditional backup methods such as tape and system imaging. We believe that it offers flexibility and a feature set that makes it compelling for a wide variety of business users. Specifically, laptop users can benefit from being able to backup regularly from home and office. Users mange their own restores, which delivers a better faster service for them and removes another task from your IT team.

Capital costs are removed and usage based operating expense takes it place. This when compared against savings in the time taken up managing the backup/restore processes by your staff can easily balance the backup costs. If you factor in the savings in capital costs and media it is even more compelling.

The Cloud Backup product we have been promoting in the leadup to Christmas is more than just backup.  The backup side we did a screencast about previously (Cloud Backup Screencast), but we did not cover the ability to use the software as a network drive.

So today we post a quick screencast showing how the Cloud Backup product can act as a shared network drive:

** Please note you can switch this screencast to be fullscreen.

As with standard LAN based network drives, the drive can be shared by multiple users if desired. The plus side being that the users do not need to be in the same office! A cache can be maintained to minimise network traffic/delays accessing files.

It is a short screencast of just less than six minutes, hopefully it gives you an understanding of this additional benefit to cloud based online backup versus traditional backup to tape.

After Monday’s mailing, several people asked for more information and demos of the software.

We can obviously create trial accounts for people, but we thought a small video demonstration might help people understand the technology a little better also.

Below is a quick 5 minute demonstration of the Cloud Backup product:

In the run up to Christmas, people are starting to take care of the admin tasks that need doing.
One of them is backup.

With this in mind we have just sent a small email out to some local businesses about our Cloud Backup solution. With a hope that we catch people whilst they are preparing for the festivities and make them realise that perhaps they can utilise “The Cloud” to protect their business data with minimal costs… less than tape!

I have been backing up my data to “The Cloud” for proabably 2 years solid now; and it is nice to be able to help others utilise the technology. I was so sick of having to buy external hard drives, then bigger drives, replacing lost power supplies, etc etc.

Now I just backup via the internet. I can do it from home, the office, Starbucks, where ever I can get the internet. Because the software sends only changes, the bandwidth usage is okay too. because the data is encrypted BEFORE it is sent, I am comfortable with it sitting in an anonymous data centre. As per my previous post in relation to the DPA, I genuinely think the data is probably more secure in “The Cloud” than on my laptop!

I really hope that this email that has been sent, catches the recipients eye. And that they considder backing up to “The Cloud”. It just makes so much sense!

Lance