Your WordPress website is made up of the files that contain your theme, eg the code that supports your templates as well as the actual database that contains your data, eg posts.
In order to backup your website you will need to back both of these up. Lets start with your website files first. Contained in your files are
- WordPress Core Installation
- WordPress Plugins
- WordPress Themes
- Images and Files
- Javascripts, PHP scripts, and other code files
- Additional Files and Static Web Pages
If you are actively updating your website, you will be familiar with some of these components eg the Theme is the design template of the site that you or your web designer built or selected for you. Your images and files are what you have physically added to your site as content.
Your database on the other hand contains your posts and a lot of data generated on your site.
Your hosting provider will normally allow you to perform a full backup of your server. This will contain both your files and the database. Its normally a very simple process and if you use a host like say Hostgator, its a matter of clicking one button and the service then lets you know when its done. What it isn’t however is automatic, ie you need to manually run each subsequent backup.
Click on this Backups icon once you have located it in Cpanel and you will be taken to the Full Backups page illustrated bellow:
Another challenge with simply relying upon your host provider is the ability to retrieve and restore your backup quickly. Again depending on your host, it can take time to request a copy of your site’s backup. Its important that you know how to back up your own site files and restore them.
Copy Your Files to Your Desktop
Using FTP Clients you can copy the files to a folder on your computer (simple drag and drop). Once there, you can zip or compress them into a zip file to save space, allowing you to keep several versions.
Try and keep a couple of copies of your files so that if one gets damaged or corrupted or lost, you are not left with no way to retrieve your files. Use a combination of media such as online and local and external hard drives.
Database Backup Instructions
Back up your WordPress database regularly, and always before an upgrade or move to a new location or hosting provider.
Accessing phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is probably the most popular database management system made available by most website hosting companies. You will need to know where it is and how to access it on your website host’s interface or cpanel. Each time you create a website on your server, you are also creating atleast one new database and using phpMyAdmin to do this. WordPress stores all of its information in a MySQL database and phpMyAdmin provides the interface to access that data.
While familiarity with phpMyAdmin is not necessary to back up your WordPress database, these instructions should take you step-by-step through the process of finding phpMyAdmin on your server and then you can follow the instructions below as a simple and easy backup or for more detailed instructions see Backing Up Your Database.
On the homepage of your Cpanel, click on the PhpMyAdmin icon under “Databases”.
Select the database of the blog you want to backup.
Click on Export on top of the page.
Check Add DROP TABLE/VIEW/PROCEDURE/FUNCTION, Add AUTO_INCREMENT value, Enclose table and field names with backquotes in the Structure section. Leave all the boxes unchecked in the Data section.
Check Save as file. If you want the SQL file to be zipped, select “zipped”.
Click Go to download your SQL database to your computer.
So there you have it, how to backup your WordPress files.
Images borrowed from: www.megahowto.com
“What is the best way to backup my data?” Many people call up asking this question. The real answer is that the more you do to backup your data, the better off you and your data will be. A single backup method or technology is rarely appropriate for a person or company.
Our businesses tend to hold multiple types of data and therefore we should be considering different backup strategies. Before we begin to worry about the technology or media we are going to use, we need to determine what data needs to be backed up. If your computer or office were completely destroyed and you had to get new equipment. What would you want restored to the new equipment?
To get started you should undertake an audit of your data and where it is held. Once you have it all listed, the next step is to classify it according to how quickly you need to be able to recover it, as well as how current the backup needs to be.
They aren’t easy questions to answer. One way of working through this is to think about what you would need to first to get your business backup and running after a fire destroyed all of it. This categorization will relate to which backup methods are most appropriate.
- For letters, spreadsheets, digital photos, and other documents; you should consider both online backup as well as an external hard drive. Online backup services should be able to chew through smaller files very quickly. The same goes with using an external drive.
- Outlook and other email, online backup will ensure that timely automatic backups keep your latest emails protected.
- For large collections of MP3 files or video files; backing up to an external drive and physically keeping a copy offsite is probably best. Although in both cases online backup can also be used, however the backing up or retrieval of videos can be slow will eat into your monthly download limits.
- For software; making copies of your installation media and maintaining copies in an offsite location is best.
- For databases or software that includes a database eg MYOB; I would use both an external drive and online backup. The combination of both will ensure that data is automatically secure once it has been written or the file closed. Depending on the size of the data, an external drive can be a very quick way to restore it.
The above recommendations are intended to be examples for home computer owners and small business computing. The other considerations that you should make are how organised are you regarding using external drives. Will you or your staff keep the drives plugged in and are you willing to have more than one so that they are rotated. Online backup is a great compliment to a manual backup strategy as it ensures should you or your staff not keep up with regular backups, then the online backup system can take over.
Carbonite is the 9th fastest growing company in the US! They are also the number 1 ranked company in the technology category, and the number 1 company in New England! A big ‘thank you’ to all our customers and the team here who have made this possible!
You can see the full list here http://www.inc.com/inc5000/list and Carbonite’s profile here http://www.inc.com/inc5000/profile/carbonite
We have been running Polls on the Carbonite website for close to a year now and its been a great way for us to get to know our customers and what they are looking for in an online backup service.
What I thought we do this week is review some of the results and see what our customers had to say.
Our first Poll asked: Why are you interested in Carbonite? Is it for:
19% Business, 15% for a client, 51% for home use, 1% was doing research, and 15% for business and home.
So what this says to me is that whilst we thought Carbonite was primarily for home users, in reality more than 20% of our customers are actually small businesses looking for an online solution. This is inline with the phone calls we receive on a daily basis from enquiring customers.
Our second Poll asked: How much data are you looking to backup?
25% said under 25GB, 13% between 25 – 50GB, 15% between 50 – 150GB, 15% between 150 – 300GB and 28% for over 300GB.
This poll was a bit of a suprise, particularly where over 300GB had the highest percentage. The average in the US is about 25 – 30GB. Ours is about the save, however this poll shows that many looking to trial and/or buy Carbonite actually have intentions of backing up quite a bit more. This could very well be the small business community skewing these results, or Australians have quite a bit of data that needs protection.
Our third Poll asked: When did you last experience a PC crash?
21% said this week, 7% said in the last 3 months, 6% in the last 6 months, 14% said this year and 42% said they hadn’t experienced one yet.
The good news here is that Australians are getting organised before the inevitable happens. The bad news is that over 20% are looking for a solution soon after the crash has occurred. There is plenty of work to do to educate the public on why they need a backup plan.
Our fourth Poll asked: Do you have a backup & recovery plan?
47% said they didn’t have a backup plan and 53% yes they did. If 20% of this traffic is small business, then they should seriously get their act together. It also means that our many resellers have a great opportunity to sell their consulting services to them. I can’t say that I am surprised however, as too many small business and households don’t backup, so why would they have a plan?
Our fifth Poll asked: Value the data on your PC
14% said under $500, 10% between $500 – $1500, 13% between $1500 – $3000, 17% between $3000 – $5000 and 45% with over $5000.
The great thing about this Poll is that hopefully it made a few people think about just how much their data was worth and how negligible the cost of backing up is when you compare it. Over 60% thought their data was worth more than $3000.
Our final Poll asked: Are you currently using online backup. This was actually quite and interesting poll because I had also placed it on Whirlpool which they removed claiming I was undertaking research (isn’t that what polls are about) and the results were very much the same. The results said that 64% weren’t using online backup and 26% were. I can’t say I am surprised. The reality is that probably 5% max of PC users in Australia use online backup. Most don’t even know that it is an affordable and easy option for them.
Our current Poll is looking at how much data your internet plan is providing you with. At the moment, the results are showing that most have a plan that offers between 30 – 100GB.
Thanks for your feedback.
A Good Backup System:
Last week we looked at some common misconceptions with backups. This week we look at how we can implement a good backup system?
There are thousands of articles out on how to implement a good backup system and I am sure they all give great advice. What is most important is that you implement something that you can manage without it stressing you out of giving you too much manual work to do (that you will eventually give up on). Best thing to do is to start somewhere, then read some more and improve what you are doing. Being in control is the most important thing.
Types of backups
If you have your data on discs and CD drives stop being available, then how do you access your data? Or, what if all your data is on BluRay discs and your BluRay drive fails? You won’t be able to access that data until you replace your BluRay drive.
A good rule of thumb here is to make sure that you have backups on different types of media – keep some backups on DVD’s and others on external hard drives or online with an online backup system (like Carbonite of course).
You are obviously not going to be able to do this for every single file that requires backing up. It is however important that you do it for the really critical files (e.g. legal documents, accounting records, important pics, home contents database for insurance use). Having all of this data available in a variety of forms is really in your best interest.
Location of backups
I have often written and even tweeted about the risk of relying purely on external drives. They are certainly worth while having and with the prices of TB drives falling to under $200, why wouldn’t you invest in one or even more than one (I have one at home). So sitting beside your computer is a nice little pile of external hard drives that hold all your backups. Now what happens if your home (or office) burns down or gets burgled? Not only are you very likely to lose your computer, you will also lose all of your backups as well.
I have a blog post from a few months back where a shop had two laptops stolen in seconds. All of the data went with the laptops.
If all your backups are in one place, and it’s the same place as your computer, this is not a great backup strategy. A good backup strategy would be to have at least one of your backups somewhere else. So in case of a fire, burglary or some other disaster, all of your backups will not be at risk.
This same principle applies to media types as well. No good have the CDs and the hard drives all sitting under your desk. If you can’t move them to outside of the house of office, then at least keep them in separate rooms. Obviously this is where online backup can play a big role, as its remote. In the cloud is as remote as you can get I suppose.
Number of backups
This next rule is about keeping a master backup. What happens if you’re part way through a backup to an external hard drive and it fails? Or you think it has completed and nothing has actually been transferred and you don’t notice? Should this happen to you, although you may think you now have 2 sets of backups, you really only have one. Rule of thumb is that you should never overwrite your only backup in case something goes wrong.
What software
There are lots of online backup providers available today and luckily enough they are all very affordable. I suggest you trial a few and see how easy they are to backup your files as well as restore them. Compare prices and what other features they have eg online access to your files or even the ability to have one account across PC and Mac and even Linux if you use it. The more flexible the better but be sure to also pick a system on its usability. Having every feature under the sun isn’t everything.
Carbonite is great because it is automated and very user friendly. However it will only cover your offsite backup needs. There are also tools like Acronis that you can use to backup instantly to your hard drive. One piece of software will not do it all for you.
No one says you need to go out there and buy it all at once. Make a plan and start to construct it. Buying and installing each piece of the backup strategy gradually.
What else do I need?
- One large external hard drive (1TB or greater) with either FireWire or USB.
- Some writeable CDs or DVDs.
- A license to Carbonite (giving you unlimited online backup)
- A license to Acronis for instant backup to your hard drive.
Use Acronis to backup to your external drives. You can set this to run daily or every other day depending on how much new data you write.
Configure Carbonite to backup all of your data automatically for you. It will pick up every change up ensure your offsite backup always have the most recent version.
One More Thing…
There’s no point in making backups if you aren’t making sure that your backups work. Get into the habit of check your hard drives at least once or twice a week is recommended. Do a restore of some files from Carbonite on a regular basis to ensure it is working right.
There’s nothing worse than having gone to all the trouble of setting up your external drive to backup weekly and your Carbonite to backup automatically offsite, only to find when you really need to restore some personal data, that your backups are corrupted or aren’t readable.
The personal data we have stored on our computer is for most of us and in most cases irreplaceable. For those that don’t agree, then you woould agree that the effort to replace it would be significant and very time consuming. Think about it, if they are photos that you have lost, how do you go back and take more, maybe scan in printed versions? Not much fun.
Your personal data goes way beyond what you have saved in Documents, or in music or video folders. It includes all your bookmarks,the contacts you have in your Address Book, and the email you have received and sent.
Having a good backup plan and process gives you peace of mind that, when disaster does eventually occur you are prepared.
If you’re aiming to minimise the stress when the time comes where you need your backup, you have to be prepared. Once things start to go wrong, you may not have much time to save the situation.
Misconceptions:
“No problem”, “I keep all my personal data on my external hard drive”.
If you only have your personal data in one place, it isn’t a backup.
It doesn’t matter if your only backup is an internal hard drive, an external hard drive, USB stick, or DVD’s. If you only keep one copy, then you can lose it just through having whatever it’s stored on dying.
So you need more than one method of backing up your important files.
“That’s easy, I back up my computer to an external hard drive once a week with CCC!”
Now here comes the second principle:
A manual backup isn’t as good as an automated backup.
If your backups are done automatically, you know that they will get done (you should always check). If your backups are done manually, there is a good chance that they will get delayed or skipped this week because something more important comes along, you have a busy day, you forget to connect the hard drive, or your busy working on the PC and don’t want to be interrupted.
A backup that relies on you actually doing something to make it happen is far less likely to be truly useful than one that happens automatically.
“I don’t need a backup, all my data is on a NAS and that’s using RAID!”
RAID is not a backup.
RAID will keep your system running and you working even though you have had a hardware failure. Its fantastic technology. You do however require redundancy. Now if your have a hard drive failure not only will your systems keep working but you won’t lose your data.
When you look at this situation it’s easy to see why it could be mistaken for a backup. You don’t lose data when hardware fails.
Even with a RAID, you can still accidentally delete files. RAID will not help you get them back. Making sure its backed up will. RAID helps your systems keep running when hardware fails. A backup, though, is what you need when you lose data.
So there you have it, some common misconceptions regarding your backup. Next week we will go into some of the strategies you can use to built a strong backup process.
Affiliate marketing is one of those things that on the face of it sounds really easy, stick a few banner on your website and make lots of money. Yes some people can do that but for many it isn’t really that easy and most people don’t. Why, consumers are wary of banner advertisements and the more your website has the less likely customers are going to click on them. Truth is, you are more likely to get clicks on your texts links than you are on banners.
Carbonite Australia launched its affiliate program nearly two years ago and since then we have learned quite a bit about what works and what doesn’t. We have several hundred affiliates promoting our products from all over the world (most are local).
When we looked at the program, we opted to join a network to help us market it rather then go it alone with our own private program. Going with ClixGalore has been good from an administration but also promotional perspective.
The most difficult part has been finding the right affiliates to work with. ClixGalore has advertised the program for us through its network and this has certainly helped us build our base of affiliates. However the most successful affiliates have been the ones who have put more effort into aligning Carbonite with their client base. These have been primarily IT online stores or resellers/PC repair sites.
Having seen this, I have spent considerable time personally recruiting website and PC stores with website that I think could do well with our product. This has certainly delivered much better results for everyone.
These are the key initiatives that have worked for affiliates marketing Carbonite:
- By writing articles on online backup (our website is full of them for affiliates to use) and placing them on their sites, affiliates have found that the number clicks they are getting has increased significantly. This is particularly the case where a real story is included or a PC failure.
- Instead of just placing a banner advertisement (that we provide), some have opted to prepare a write-up on the product. This has usually included listing the key features and pricing and then adding the banners to this as well as text links.
- Direct email has also been very effective. Some have included our links within their email blasts to existing customers, offering them a free 30 day trial. With some affiliates who have a sizeable customer base we have even created special landing pages for them (co-branded).
- Others have used our links to simply install a 30 day trial on all PCs that leave their store. This ensures that should the customer purchase at the end of the trial, the affiliate will get paid a commission for the sale (cookies last for 90 days).
- Others have used a similar policy but instead of installing trials, they have actually sold the subscription to the customer and ensured that they have clicked the link before processing the sale.
To further assist our supporting affiliates and resellers, we have also launched the Carbonite DeskTop Shortcut. This is a simple file that resellers and PC stores can use to install an icon on the customers desktop that offers them a free 30 day trial to Carbonite. The icon includes an affiliate ID within it so that when the customer clicks on it to find out what it is, they are sent to special trial page and the cookie is passed. This ensure that should the customer buy, a commission will be automatically paid to them. The DeskTop Shortcut has been particularly popular amongst the reseller community with several hundred now using it.
Although we welcome any affiliate who wishes to display our advertisements on their site, we also recommend that you spend a little time working with the brand to drive the clicks rather than just expecting that they will simply happen.
I was pleased to read this week about one of our most passionate Carbonite Pro users, Richard Gordon of Carlstone Consulting. Richard recently spoke with Gene Marks of Forbes about the importance of small businesses backing up. You can read the full article here: http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/20/carbonite-mozy-internet-technology-backup.html.
I couldn’t have put it any better than Richard did when he said about data loss at a small business, “this WILL happen.” Statistics have proven that a majority of small businesses will face data loss and for those where the data loss is major, they struggle to recover and often end up going out of business.
Richard was so convincing that the writer interviewing him, Gene Marks, decided to give Carbonite a try. He found it to be simple to get up and running, which has always been a goal of ours since we started the company. After his trial, Gene decided to continue and become a paying subscriber. The large majority of those who trial Carbonite end up signing up for it full-time because it’s just that easy and they know their data is now protected.
To all our small business customers, we’re eager to hear your story, too. You can e-mail us at testimonials (at) carbonite.com and please cc me directly at david.friend (at) carbonite.com. And if you are one of the small businesses not yet backing up online, join Richard and many others who have been extremely satisfied with Carbonite Pro keeping their files safe.
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.
Carbonite’s small business version Carbonite Pro was launched in February of this year and since then we have received hundreds of enquiries from small business owners and probably more so from resellers keen to be able to offer their small business customers a solution that is more tailored for them.
To date all we have been able to do is point you to the US site and advise that although you can trial the program for 30 days, you can’t actually buy it at the moment if you live outside of the US. Quite frustrating for all of us.
Well some good news finally on this front with the US advising (following a post I placed on our Facebook page) that residents and small businesses outside of the US can now buy Carbonite Pro directly from the US.
The next step is for it to be made available directly from Australia with Australian pricing and local support much the same way we have it set up for Carbonite at the moment. This is on its way, we just have to be a little patient.
Lets however look at Carbonite Pro a little closer. The backup process and systems behind Carbonite Pro are very much the same as what you would be used to if you have trialled or are using Carbonite already. Its automatic backup and incremental, ie Carbonite will backup the file in full once at the beginning and will then only backup the changes made to it from then on. This means that you aren’t backing up the whole file day in day out and wasting precious bandwidth. It also means that at any time your backup is the latest whole version of the file.
One interesting change however is that there are no restriction on bandwidth made available to business users at Carbonite’s end, this means that your uploads will be much faster. Given you would most likely also have more to backup, Carbonite has given business uers a greater priority.
The everyday version of Carbonite was developed with a licence of one subcription per PC. ie you paid your $71.99 per pc and you could backup as much as you wanted on that PC (as long as it was stored lcoally on the hard drive). Carbonite Pro is a litle different in this regard and once again it has been tailored for the business end and assumes that you are most likely to have mutliple computers in the office and aren’t going to want to manage multiple licences as many small businesses has done so far. Its also very different because you can now backup network folders as well as external drives making it a real business solution.
Once you login to Carbonite Pro you are presented with a Dashboard. This is like your Control Panel for the application. From here you can control who gets access and what they can backup. You also get important information about how much is being backed up.
So the way that Carbonite Pro works is that from the Dashboard you enter a person’s email address and you then invite them to install Carbonite. The installation process is the same as with the everyday version except that everythig you now backup is connected through to the main account. Through the dashboard, the ‘Administrator’ can now see who is backed up and how much. They can also see the total being backed up at the moment and what tier they will fill into this month in terms of their billing.
The Dashboard gives you a few key statistics:
- My Storage Plan – the plan I am on
- Total Storage Used – backup so far
- % Utilization – how much of my plan I am using
- Files Backed Up – files count
- Number of Users – who many users have installed Carbonite Pro via this account
- Number of Computers – the number of computers on the account
- Average GBs/Computer – average GB per PC
- Subscription – Subscription ID
- Subscription Start Date – When it started (remember there is no contract period)
- Next Payment Due – Next bill date
- Last Bill Amount – what you paid last month
The Dashboard gives you an overview of each user, their computer name and alerts relevant to that user/PC eg backups haven’t been run for some time because the computer has been turned off.
Unlike the simplicity of a flat $71.99 per PC pa, Carobnite Pro has tiered pricing based on your volume. Each month, Carbonite evaluates how much data you have and bills you according to the published tiers. Remember you are never locked into these tiers, you simply move up and down as your backup needs change.
One thing to note with pricing is that you should do a simple calculation first before you simply jump straight into Pro. If you had for instance 3 PCs in the office, and each of them was backing up 70GB, using the everyday version of Carbonite you would be charged $216 pa. With Carbonite Pro, you wouldn’t be charged for 3 accounts, you would instead be charged on the total amount of backup that you had. In this case its 210 GB and US$150 per month or US$1800 pa. Take not however that with Pro the 210 GB could be shared across 20 computers if you wanted, it doesn’t need to be limited to the 3PCs (as it does with the everyday version). Therefore as the business grows, you don’t need to buy new licences, you simply invite new PCs and your account gets updated according to how much you are using. The 210GB could also cover external drives. Also important to note is that the Carobnite Pro account doesn’t need to only cover PCs within the office, it could extend to remote staff or even family members. Bare in mind however that an administrator can see what and who is backing up.
Support is also an important consideration. I will be upfront here and say that if you are going to buy Carbonite Pro (via the US), we can try as much as we can to assist you from Australia but your main support point will need to be the US. Once the Australian version comes out and your account is set up locally, we will be able to help you out a whole lot more.
So what do you get in terms of support? You get access to free phone, email and chat support. Phone support hours can be found here and are in US times (Boston times). Chat support is 24/7 and very easy to use. This is what I recommend you start with and then if you can’t get your issue resolved, get on the phone.
So if you are a reseller looking for a solution for small businesses that is simple to set up, then trial Carbonite Pro. If you have had any experience with the everyday version of Carbonite which is used by hundreds of thousands of users around the world, you will be much impressed with what Carbonite Pro has to offer you and your clients.
