Remote Offsite Backup for your Office
If backups are a headache for your IT manager, backing up data at remote offices can be a massive migraine. Most small/medium sized businesses will traditionally backup a remote office using tape or an external hard drive. This has a number of obvious drawbacks, not the least of which is reliability because of the need for human intervention.
To address the issue of the manual backups (tape or hard drive), many IT managers are looking for alternative solutions that are just as effective, less costly and less time consuming. With economic times being what they are, more and more articles are being written about offsite backup solutions, which shows that it is becoming more and more popular, particularly for small businesses.
Remote offices are generally characterised by relatively small amounts of data that have to be backed up, as well as a lack of IT savvy staff. They usually include a sales person(s) and back office staff. In an office with just 20 – 30 GB to back up, tape can be relatively expensive. Tape drives aren’t cheap, and tape loaders and libraries are even more expensive. The economics are seriously skewed.
Hard drives on the other hand are much cheaper and there is plenty of software around that can assist with both manual as well as automated backups. Terrabyte drives are relatively cheap these days. The problem with hard drives, even with a small amount of data is that you can never eliminate hardware failure as well as people not following proper processes.
But the biggest issue in a remote backup scenario using tape or hard drive, and the one most likely to affect your data protection, is that most remote offices don’t have staff who can maintain (and repair) the backup process. Backups are often handled by an administrative assistant or clerical person with little or no training in IT generally.
In most situations, a receptionist has to change tapes daily or check that the backup was complete. They mean well, but they’re busy and what happens when it doesn’t work. There have also been cases where someone has left the same tape in the drive all week and, in one case, an employee locked the tapes in a safe and lost the key.
Switching to another form of backup won’t magically produce someone with the training to run remote office backups. But most of the alternative technologies require much less manual intervention, and in some cases none at all.
One of the more intriguing backup alternatives for remote sites and smaller offices is offsite online backup.
Remote backup services such as Carbonite can be an ideal solution for that remote small office. Backups are automatic and happen offsite, ie they don’t require manual intervention from the receptionist or office manager. If a remote office has a relatively modest amount of data to back up, a service such as Carbonite may be a good fit. The office will however require a broadband connection and enough bandwidth to cover the initial and daily uploads. Given the low Gig amount being backed up, restores should also be relatively quick.
Some tips for online remote backups:
1. Check your bandwidth. You need to know how much data you expect to back up to a service such as Carbonite and if your current bandwidth is adequate not just to handle backups in a reasonable time, but for restores. Note that downloading data is several times quicker than uploading
2. Ensure reliability. Select a reputable service. Regular outages can cause you big problems. Also ensure that the service provider is profitable and stable. Carbonite has been operating as an offsite backup solution for mum and dad and small businesses for several years and now has over 600,000 customers worldwide.
3. Tally the costs. Online remote backup services vary in their pricing models. Some can cost you thousands a month. Carbonite offers single PC unlimited backup for $71.95 per annum.
4. Make sure your data is safe. Ask what measures the service provider takes to safeguard your data. Carbonite encrypts your data (twice) whilst it’s being transferred to our servers as well as whilst it’s being stored. We use the same encryption standards that banks use.
5. Stop and resume. Ensure your offsite backup service allows you to stop a backup in progress and then restart it from the point it was interrupted. Having to re-run an entire backup is costly and time consuming. Carbonite allows you to pause your backup and restart it as required.
6. Protect desktop and laptop data. Carbonite is an ideal service for backing laptops and people on the move regularly as it offers protection for the entire hard drive of the PC.
7. Continuous or scheduled backups. Carbonite offers ongoing automated backup that can be set to run constantly or as required by the user.
A major advantage of backing up using a remote offiste backup solution is that in most cases, you can recover to any computer. This is a new feature to Carbonite (only recently launched and not yet available to our Australian users (but coming soon)). Carbonite provides protection whist your are downloading by encrypting your data during the entire process.
Because most online remote backup services rely on the Internet to transfer data, there are some practical size limits on how much data you can effectively back up. The upload process and speed depends almost entirely on the bandwidth of your connection. The other determining factor is the size of the backup window. Most transmissions are generally small eg 20 – 30 GB which will as an initial backup usually take about 10 working days to complete. Subsequent backups are then only the changes that occur to files, so they take minutes not hours or days.
As many IT Managers start reviewing their budgets for the coming financial year, offsite backup solutions for remote offices will become an option they will consider this time round.
