Small Business Backup in Practise

This week we decided to do something a little different and get some input from a couple of our Twitter followers on online backup plans and practices that they have put in place recently with small business customers.

When I asked the guys, I advised that they didn’t need to have Carbonite in the story, as I was more interested in the backup plan as such rather than the technology.

So I have a couple good stories to share with you this week.

The first is from Grant Booth from Upside Down Websites. You can learn more about Grant and his many services by following him on Twitter or visiting his website. www.upsidedownwebsites.com

I was asked a year ago to audit a local newspaper’s backup. They already had something set up but wanted to upgrade their backup so that they could be up and running in 30 minutes following a complete data/system failure.

The current backup included a Raid1 set up on the server with all data from the Raid duplicated to two NAS drives (rotating weekly – if they remembered) once per week (one kept offsite).

The goal was to offer 100% recovery in 30 minutes. Therefore, even though the Raid or Server could have a total 100% failure, we also installed Carbonite for live offsite back up (presently 300GB of data).

The newspaper has a deadline of 7pm on a Tuesday night. With the above mentioned setup they could now be up and running within 20 minutes by either plugging the NAS directly into a work or home computer or using Carbonite’s remote access to download the files to any computer and complete their deadline.

The combination of local and offsite/online backup means the paper can now recover from 99% of disasters save a nature disaster where having the newspaper out the next day would simply not be necessary.

The second story is from Dan Rippon. You can catch Dan and his many talents at www.thatcomputerguy.net.au or via Twitter

I have a financial services client running online backup for their server, prior to which they had nothing at all in place (shudder!). Online backup was chosen as it removes the need for big up front hardware investment and also potential for human failure in not maintaining tape rotations – and without an in-house IT person, this was a large factor. The firm has a light business broadband plan with a data quota of 100GB per month. This wasn’t enough to support an upload of the initial data via the internet.

The online backup provider I used in this instance was Onlinebackupservices.com.au, a business I have had a long association with. The initial upload of which was done via a data dump to a USB drive. The drive was sent by the online backup provider and I took care of the configuration and initial extract. I couriered the drive back to Melbourne shortly after, where the provider uploaded it directly to their server. From there the software client kicked in to sync everything up.

Backup is set to the company data folders, so anything added is backed up; data retention is currently 365 days but could be more.
I get an email every morning of backup activity so I can react to any issues if needed, otherwise it runs like it should.

So there you have it, two original and real small business online backup stories directly from Carbonite resellers. Thanks again guys and keep up the good work.

Carbonite and the travelling salesperson

They say that a salesperson in the office is an under-performing sales person because they should be out on the road visiting clients.

One of the challenges faced by sales people who are out on the road is how do they backup their laptops. What usually happens is they will visit the office from time to time, log into the network, do what they need to do and then leave again. They seldom transfer files from their hard drive to the network drives to ensure it is backed up.

So when the inevitable happens and that PC crashes, gets stolen or they accidentally delete a key proposal, they end up giving their laptop into the IT dept for atleast a week for them to try and recover whatever they can.

Now consider how much this process costs. It would waste at least 5 – 10 hrs of the sales persons’ time and at least 20 hours of the IT resources time. That amounts to well over $1000.

A sensible alternative for a sale person on the road who needs to backup their PC’s is to look to an online backup solution like Carbonite. To date, we have had several customers buy Carbonite for their entire sales teams to do just that, ensure that the laptops are constantly backed up.

Carbonite will backup their email files, it will backup their CRM files as well as any proposals or other documentation they have prepared for clients. Best of all it doesn’t require the sale person to do anything. Once installed on their PC, each time they access a broadband internet connection eg at work, home or in the hotel, it will begin to automatically look for new or changed files and perform its backup. And at $6 per month, you see that it much more economic alternative to sending the PC to the IT person to fiddle around with for a week.

So if you are out on the road and worried that you should probably be securing that critical information on your PC more frequently than you currently are, tell your IT department about Carbonite. Alternatively buy it yourself and claim it as a work expense (speak to your Accountant first).

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