Archive for the ‘Backup Plan’ Category
My approach to marketing any product or service I have ever worked with is to be frank about it. It probably doesn’t please everybody and paints me slightly negative but people have so many avenues to research products that simply ignoring that your product has weaknesses is in my way of thinking a flawed strategy. So in saying all of this, I wanted to list some of the key disadvantages of using online backup.
Speed
Many people complain that it takes far too long to backup your drive using online backup. I would have to agree that in Australia the upload speeds are relatively slow and particularly slow if you have cheap ISP plan or are backing up during peak times of the day. Carbonite states that you can backup up to 3GB per day. So if you had 30 gig which is about the average, it would take you a minimum 10 days. Now let me say that I have seen some people surpass 3GB per day but most don’t. Most do about half and so 30GB would normally take 20 days.
Is there anything you can do to speed the backup process. There are a couple of things. First is to leave your PC running over night so that Carbonite has as much opportunity as possible to complete its work. The second thing is to review the internet plan you are on and see if you can upgrade for a month whilst your backup is in progress.
The 3rd thing you can do is stagger the backup over a few months.
The beauty of Carbonite is that after the initial backup is done, the rest of the backups are incremental. So they should be pretty much instantaneous.
Yes hard drives are much faster than online backup because there is no internet to travel across. The data simply travels across the wire connecting your PC and the hard drive. In most cases, 30 minutes is all it takes to backup 30 GBs.
Restoring
The next disadvantage is restoring speeds. This issue is also linked to the first one. I was reading through a small business forum I regularly visit yesterday, and read a post by a PC repair person spelling out that downloading 100GB via an online backup service could take a very long time. He was right it certainly wouldn’t be done in a day. Carbonite downloads at about 10- 15 GB per day. Your download speeds are also much faster than your upload speeds which makes it much faster than uploading.
Again compared to having an external hard drive sitting next to your PC that you can simply plug in and transfer the files, online backup is slower. Internet speeds in Australia are going to get faster, whether the NBN hits your home or not in the not too distant future. Both ISPs and Carbonite are always looking at ways to improve the experience of their services.
The best way to manage the download process is to prioritise your restore focusing firstly on the files you need NOW. Obviously you are not going to need all of the 100GB right there and then. Carbonite lets you prioritise your restore using its smart restore wizard.
If you are organised enough to use more than one form of backup eg hard drive and online backup, then you can use your hard to restore your data. Your online backup can then be used as a fall back should your drive fail (and trust me they do).
Data Centres are Overseas
Carbonite’s data centres are in the US. Best to be upfront with that. How does this disadvantage you? If you need to visit the data centre, bringing in a spare drive that you wanted to dump the data onto, you can’t do this. Even if Carbonite offered this service, the time that it would take for you to send the drive to the US and to retrieve it wouldn’t be worth it.
Some people say that upload speeds would be faster if the data centre was local. I am probably not technical enough to know the answer to this one. Certainly it would cost your ISP a lot less to send and access this data for you if the centre was local, but this doesn’t impact you.
Honestly unless you have some legal reasons that require the data to store locally, then whether it is overseas or not shouldn’t really matter. With so much more going into the cloud these day, you will get used to the fact that some services are going to be sitting on your PC nor on your desk.
In terms of safety, the bigger and more successful the company the better and more secure you are. More resources means greater controls and processes to protect your data. It also means more hands on deck should you need assistance. Overseas online backup services offer this, but so do local ones. Do your research.
In terms of price, economies of scale play a big role with the price of online backup services. Its not simply you get what you pay for, ie because its cheap its lesser quality. Services out of the US are cheaper simply because there are just so many more people that will access the program from there. Local Australian online backup services simply don’t have the opportunity to get scale. The only companies in my mind that can do this are someone like Telstra or Optus with their millions of customers. Given their record for over pricing services, you are not likely to ever online backup of your entire PC for $72 pa.
Bandwidth Surcharges
When I first started at Carbonite I heard a lot about this. People being stung during the initial upload service because they have uploaded more than their allocated bandwidth for the month. Yes this can happen but I can honestly say that I had probably 2 customers in over 2 years that had to pay their ISP additional fees.
Internet plans are always improving in Australia, you only need to look at the introduction of unlimited plans over the past 6 months to see this. So your options here are to upgrade to a plan that gives you more bandwidth at least for the month you are uploading your initial backup or to stagger the backup over a few months, starting with your most important files first.
External Drives
Why doesn’t Carbonite also backup external drives? The simply answer is that Carbonite’s pricing is based on the average size of your internal hard drive and the average amount of data a PC stores on it. Most online backup services work the same way. If we were going to also allow for external drives then the pricing would need to be adjusted accordingly.
For customers who need to have an external drive backed up, we now have CarbonitePro. It does local, external and even network drives.
A new service that I saw one of our competitors release recently, was the ability to have your online backup service instruct your PC to also backup to a local (internal/external drive). This concept sounds appealing to me, particularly for our more organised users.
If you are a small business, you should be backing up locally (external drive) as well as using online backup as a 2nd defence.
Set & Forget
How can there be a disadvantage with set and forget. This isn’t really a disadvantage with Carbonite nor online backup, its called becoming lazy. Technology breaks and in most occasions it may have nothing to do with the tool you are using. So the risk I see with installing Carbonite and simply saying “there its done, no more need to worry about backup again” is that if Carbonite should stop working for whatever reason, you will never know. Carbonite has flags to tell you it isn’t working but you should be checking anyway. Remember Carbonite is just a tool. Its your data, your business and your responsibility to stay on top of it.
So there you have it, the main disadvantages of online backup as I see them.
Those of you out there manually backing up using CDs and DVDs to protect all your previous files are in for some bad news. Having spent a lot of time and energy backing up, imagine how frustrated you would be to discover years down the line the data you ‘protected’ by backing up has been lost due to the deterioration of its disc.
Research published last month by the French National Centre for Scientific Research has discovered data stored on physical discs has a limited life span, in some cases very limited.
After testing the longevity of portable media, results showed discs designed to last for centuries rarely lasted longer then five to ten years, and in some extreme cases merely a year! Additionally, the results revealed the life span of a disc can be artificially aged by heat, water and light, increasing its vulnerability.
This is potentially a big issue for both consumers and businesses. Jerome Duc-Mauge, an executive producer of documentary films, is not fully confident in manual backup.
“This is a big drama, this issue of how long these pictures will last. We don’t know. The manufacturer says to us, ‘Yeah, five years, 10 years, 15 years’.”
The question is which would you choose for your ‘digital life’ insurance? A time-consuming process with a short life span? Or online backup, which automates the process and ensures you can always backup an unlimited amount of data that can not be lost to theft, fire or father time.
If you’re reading this, you’re most likely already a Carbonite subscriber. But if you’re also using CDs and DVDs to backup, make sure you’re double backed up and, as the researchers suggest, you’re “spreading digital data rather than keeping it all archived in one place.”
I did some competitor analysis today and found out that one of our major competitors has released a new backup feature which I think is really useful except they have limited it so much that it only makes it half as good as it actually could be.
Without speaking in twists and turns, the competitor is Mozy and the feature is the ability to do a local as well as online backup at the same time.
There is no doubt that having both a local as well as remote backup option is the best backup plan that you can have. In terms of what you put into either is really up to you but obviously the things that will take longest to retrieve and you are most likely to need immediately, you should also keep locally.
The problem I find with this new feature is that the online backup software is the one controlling the backup for you. What this means is that unless you are organised enough to have the hard drive connected all of the time, you are unlikely to get the most out of this option. Maybe it forces you to keep it connected which probably isn’t a bad thing but it can make your desk areas quite messy.
The second issue I found with the feature is that if you delete a file from your local hard drive, not only will it eventually disappear from the online backup (Carbonite does this as well) but it will also be deleted from the external hard drive. ie I can therefore only assume that it is doing a full backup each time (not incremental), replacing the old with the new. Or Maybe it is treating your local external drive like the server and managing the files in it for you.
The way Carbonite manages this on the server side is to check if the file is also being kept locally. If it detects that you have deleted it from your hard drive, Carbonite will tag the file and then if it still hasn’t returned to you PC after 30 days it clears it off the server. They essentially do this because Carbonite is an online backup service (and is priced this way) not a storage facility.
So should you delete a file from your hard drive, you will not have it stored online nor will you have it stored on the hard drive. I don’t like this. The other thing is that depending on the amount of data you have on your PC, the backup process could take a while (assuming it is doing a full backup each time). You could also run the risk of the hard drive filling.
Also I wonder what would happen if the hard drive failed. Would Mozy tell you that it wasn’t working?
What I would have preferred to see is that you have the option of deciding which files get backed up online, offline or both and when this occurs. This gives you greater control of where you have your data. It should also be doing some monitoring of the drive. Telling about space consumed and available and checking that it is all working OK.
Maybe these features have already been thought of. Maybe they will get picked up from user feedback. Hopefully Carbonite Inc is also listening and will consider doing something better and more useful for its customers.
In all its great to see new features coming out, even if they are from competitors. It makes us all want to work harder and deliver more for our customers.
Just over 2 years ago, I experienced my first PC crash. It was actually a week or so before I started working at Carbonite Australia. Quite a coincidence really. I had a laptop (still have it) but at the time I wasn’t on broadband at home, just dialup. The laptop was new and I had Windows Vista on it. The laptop also had two hard drives. I specifically asked for this so that I could have more storage.
Wouldn’t you know it Vista kept on crashing so when Windows released their first major update, Service Pack 1, I couldn’t wait to download it. So using my dialup connection I waited a few hours to download it and by that time it was 2 or 3 am. I was too tired to run the installation and so having downloaded it, I shut my machine down. The next morning I went to start it to run the installation and the laptop was dead.
So my first PC crash was entirely my fault. Had I known what to do with my Windows update the error wouldn’t have happened. Luckily enough, the guys at the PC shop that I have purchased my PC through, managed to salvage most of my files (not emails) and they re-imaged the machine. Up until this time, I had never backed up any files on my laptop even though I had two internal drives and an external hard drive.
Then I started working at Carbonite Australia, helping hundreds and hundreds of customers find the best solution for their personal needs and their businesses.
Having experienced by first PC crash, I was conscious of it happening again. I started using my external drive to backup my emails and any docs/pictures that were important. There wasn’t a lot. I probably performed a backup every 2 months. I sounded like most of the customers on the phone.
The challenge I had was that I wasn’t storing much on my PC, so backup although important wasn’t a key concern. After a bit of time at Carbonite however, I started to do work from home as well as train myself on how to build websites. What this meant was that my PC started to slowly accumulate important information that I didn’t want to lose.
The next step in my enlightenment was to begin to also backup using my 2nd internal drive. So this gave me 2 copies of my files.
What then happened was that my PC died again. This time it was some driver going wrong and crashing the laptop. Back to the shop, $50 later they had reimaged the machine and salvaged my files again. No emails, but I had a copy of these anyway.
So in a matter of 12 months with a new laptop running Vista, I had experienced 2 laptop crashes. The trigger for me to invest in Carbonite was that I began to really value the information on my PC. In total I have backed up a total of 2GB of information but its made up of hundreds of small images that I use for some of the website I play around with.
For my family photos and videos, I have an external 1TB drive that I use to store them on. I also keep a copy of some photos on my laptop. I also use Carbonite for some of my more precious photos.
So as I have mentioned many times via this blog and via Twitter, Australians need to be educated about why they need to backup and why online backup is by far the easiest option for them.
As a typical PC user, I also had to learn the hard way.
As easy as you can make online backup software and let me tell you, Carbonite is by far the easiest online backup software I have trialled, when the “shxx” hits the fan and your PC breaks, people go into panic mode and the first thing they do is call our 1300 886 673 number (Australian customers only) to find out what is actually backed up and what they need to do to get their files retrieved using Carbonite.
Here are some tips on what to do when you are setting Carbonite up as well as when your PC is fine and working.
- When you have first installed Carbonite, be sure to list down all of the folders and files that are “must haves” for backup. This includes your Outlook email.
- Then go through your Windows Explorer or Carbonite Backup Drive to see if Carbonite has automatically selected these files for backup. It will in most cases, but I recommend that you check also. If not, then manually select them. Just right click and select “Backup with Carbonite”.
- This way, you know for a fact that you have selected the files for backup and haven’t relied purely on Carbonite guessing that they are important enough for you.
- Once Carbonite is up and running and you reach 100% backup, do a manual check of the files every few months or so to ensure that they continue to be in the backup set. I have never seen them disappear and Carbonite is a set and forget solution, but if the files are important to you then its best to be safe than sorry. Sometimes what you can get with Carbonite is a conflict with another piece of software (usually anti-virus) which can shut Carbonite down and close the connection to the server.
- This is simple enough to do. Using Windows Explorer, just visit the important files and folders and ensure that they have a green Carbonite maker on them. You can also look in your Carbonite Backup Drive.
The step above will get you set up OK, the next list is what to do when the PC dies.
- There are a couple of ways to get your data back through Carbonite. If you are desperate to get back just 1 or a handful of files, I recommend that you use the Remote Access function. This allows you to login to your Carbonite account and then download each file individually to the PC you are working on. You can do this from any PC anywhere in the world where you have internet access. You can access remote access from here.
- The second method to get your files back is to get access to a PC that you can restore your files to. This could be a new PC or your old PC repaired. The first step is to login to your Carbonite account and Restore Carbonite. Go to tab My Protected Computers and select Restore. This will require that you download and install Carbonite again. Follow the prompts until Carbonite has finished installing. Carbonite will automatically assign your new PC to your Account, it will also kickoff the restore process.
- Remember that you don’t have to restore all of your files straight away, you can elect to only restore the ones that you need. Carbonite will then stay in restore mode until you advise it that your are done restoring your files. It will then go to Backup mode.
Once in Backup Mode, Carbonite will begin to monitor your files, looking for the original backup set (all of the files it has backed up for you from your old PC). If you haven’t restored all of the original files to the new PC, it will give you a further 30 days to do so. After that if the new PC doesn’t have the original files on it, Carbonite will assume that you don’t want them and delete them from the server.
So it pays to stay in restore mode until you are sure that you have retrieved all of the files that you need.
- If your PC hasn’t totally died and you have just accidentally deleted a file, then you can use the Carbonite Backup Drive to find and retrieve it. An Icon for the Backup Drive will be on your desktop, you can also find it via All Programs > Carbonite from your Windows Start menu. The Backup Drive gives you 3 folders, Backed Up, Pending and Recovery Log. Look in Backed Up to find the file (it will be in the exact same directory structure as in your PC), simply right click and restore. You can also restore previous version from here if they exist.
If you are stressed however and don’t know where to start, you can try our FAQs or contact us on 1300 886 673. Carbonite also offers 24/7 chat support.
Your most valuable asset as a business (excluding your staff and bank balance if its positive) is your data. Customer records, tax invoices, contracts, plans, tax information. If it all goes, you will probably go with it (along with the bank balance).
Creating a backup plan and associated procedures are imperative to ensure that should disaster strike, you and your staff know what to do next to get the business started again. Unfortunately for most businesses, the creation of a Backup Plan or process is usually something that happens after data has been lost.
Once you have created your Backup or Disaster Recovery Plan, it needs to be communicated to all staff and it also needs to be accessible both locally and offsite. It must also be kept current which means reviewing it a few times a year to ensure it is still relevant and accurate.
To assist you with your backup you should first consult and IT professional. They will atleast give you a few options to think (get scared) about.
Your Backup Plan is only really effective if the recovery process actually works. Drive backup software such as Carbonite are ideal for micro and small businesses as they give you both a backup process to access and store the data, plus an easy to use method to recover it instantly.
Your backups need to be regular and you also need to consider both online and offline backups. Online allows you to safely store all or some of your data in a remote location, so should the building burn or hardware gets stolen, you can easily retrieve it. Offline backups (local hardware storage) give you the ability to get all of your data back instantly. You need both.
Your backups must also be regular. Services such as Carbonite (online backup) allow your backup to occur automatically for you, so you don’t need to physically perform it. Once a file has been backed up, it is automatically monitored by the software and any changes are updated for you. However your offline backup (using external hard drives) needs to be scheduled and performed daily or at a minimum, weekly.
Small businesses often fall into the trap of not training their entire team on the backup and recovery process. Your staff should atleast know where your backup plan is kept.
And finally Testing. We encourage everyone who trials Carbonite to test the recovery process so they atleast have some awareness of the recovery process when a PC failure occurs. I would expect that 10% probably perform this test. Most people are only interested in seeing the data being backed up. Rest assured Carbonite works. This same rule also applies with your local offline backup. You should be performing a review atleast monthly to ensure that the backup process is actually working and that the files kept on the external drive are correct and accessible.
So in your list of 2010 objectives, at the top of the list should be “Create backup and recovery plan“.
