Online Backups For SMB? - Good? Bad? Ugly?

gamesaregood

gamesaregood

gamesaregood

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Hello Guys,

I'm curios to know your opinions of on line backup mainly within SMBs. This is something which seems to be more of a hot topic than it ever used it be and I'm curios to know if anyone's using it and what kind of amounts of data your using it with as well as how you find it etc...

I just still seem to think with most SMBs using ADSLs with 448kbps upload is this really an option? If not what kind of upload speeds are really required for the average SMB?

Also interested in which On-line backup systems are you using, how you find them and how much data is realistic to be able to backup using such methods etc...

Thanks,

Michael
 
I know a lot that use Mozy Enterprise or Pro. Backs up SQL, Exchange and file servers, mapped drives, etc.

They are both small businesses (50-80 people).
 
I'm currently using Asigra Televaulting. It's expensive but it does a great job of backing up our data.

Initial backup of all data can be done on-site and you can keep a local copy of all your backups so restoring large amount of data isn't a problem.
 
Depends on the rate of change as they're incremental block level backups (or at least mozy is...).

I use mozy @ home and it works well, for an SMB with the feature set of the Ent/Pro I'd imagine it's a good "cheap" fit.
 
walnuts said:
I'm currently using Asigra Televaulting. It's expensive but it does a great job of backing up our data.

Initial backup of all data can be done on-site and you can keep a local copy of all your backups so restoring large amount of data isn't a problem.
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I'll echo this, we're a provider of Asigra to various organisations and it can be very powerful and effective. It's amazing how slow a connection it will actually work over in many circumstances...

But it is quite expensive, we're still pricing in the £4 / GB range for it (for stored data rather than protected data though...)
 
If I was a SMB I'd use on-line backup only to backup the critical information. Once that has uploaded any changes should not take to long.

Investing in a good local backup with offsite copies and the appropriate policies and procedures would be more useful as a primary backup source. Always good to have some redundancy though.

In my previous job we kept the MIS database and a few other essential files via on-line and had a decent tape backup system, regular offsite runs and a good fireproof safe.

A lot of compnaies especially smaller ones underestimate how important backup is.
 
LordSplodge said:
If I was a SMB I'd use on-line backup only to backup the critical information. Once that has uploaded any changes should not take to long.

Investing in a good local backup with offsite copies and the appropriate policies and procedures would be more useful as a primary backup source. Always good to have some redundancy though.

In my previous job we kept the MIS database and a few other essential files via on-line and had a decent tape backup system, regular offsite runs and a good fireproof safe.

A lot of compnaies especially smaller ones underestimate how important backup is.
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Interesting, given the costs are probably similar if you're using a cheap solution, why use a tape backup and offsite storage? It's a huge pain to manage as compared to offsite backup and a fireproof safe has limits.
 
One of the reasons I went with Asigra was I wouldn't have to deal with tapes and backup programs such as Backup Exec (I wasn't impressed with support from Symantec and didn't enjoy re-installing agents to fix most issues).

If you don't mind me asking what company do you work for bigredshark?
 
walnuts said:
One of the reasons I went with Asigra was I wouldn't have to deal with tapes and backup programs such as Backup Exec (I wasn't impressed with support from Symantec and didn't enjoy re-installing agents to fix most issues).

If you don't mind me asking what company do you work for bigredshark?
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I work for hSo, we're not the biggest of their UK resellers (I suspect that honour goes to InTechnology) but we have some high profile names using Asigra for backups.

You think symantec support is bad though, Asigra support is terrible, I mean really really bad. The original developers are long gone and their support guys can be a bit slow at times.

We're just signing off on a big upgrade of our platform as it happens, bigger faster SAN backend here we come...

EDIT: And I'd agree with you, customer experience in terms of functionality and not having to deal with tape drives etc is very good I think...
 
Fortunately I never have to deal with Asigra direct as I'm currently with a reseller called Securstore and I've found them to be pretty good.

I've read a few complaints regarding the developers on www.asigraforums.com. Lack of proper knowledgebase, keep changing which linux distro they official support etc but I never have to deal with those issues.

Currently waiting for SP1 for Asigra 8.0 so I can roll-out Server 2008.

I think online backup going to get more populor, EMC who own VMWare have bought Mozy, Symantec have launched Backup Exec online, Carbonite for home backups and there are now loads of Asigra resellers.
 
How much are they charging out of interest? I do think it'll get more popular, Mozy and such are making it a commodity product now and driving prices right down...
 
We use JungleDisk Workgroup edition. It stores everything on your own Amazon S3 account and handles block-level updates for large files (you need to be using a US bucket at the moment for this until Amazon release EC2 in the UK).

We use a custom script with some rsync magic on our Linux servers (JungleDisk uses FUSE to mount S3 as a bog standard mount point) and the normal GUI client on our windows 2003 servers.

Initial upload is s...l...o...w... (30gb from one server took around a week, but that's partly because we limited the outgoing bandwidth so that people wouldn't start complaining about it impacting their systems) but after that an incremental rsync takes no longer than 3-4 hours on each server.

Prices are low, $2 per account per month + Amazon storage, bandwidth and command charges (all three of which are very low).
 
Disk space is so cheap these days there is no reason not to have backups locally. £500 easily buys 4Tb of raid with spare if on tight budget.
 
Another vote for Amazon S3 just started using it this week and backed up my photos and documents. I also have a USB hard drive which I use for local backups.

Will cost me around £3 per month to keep my data safe which is a lot cheaper and reliable than buying hard disks.
 
v0n said:
Disk space is so cheap these days there is no reason not to have backups locally. £500 easily buys 4Tb of raid with spare if on tight budget.
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Except the fact it's local, the point of online backup was never to be cheap, it was to provide easy offsite backup.

Online backup has been around for enterprise far longer than it has for SMB practically.

Even if it was to be cheap, then compare the cost of online backup to enough sets of media for 5 generations of data, kept offsite with someone like iron mountain. Still cheap?

The problem with SMB backups traditionally has been that when people bothered doing them, they either left the backup next to the server or at best took it home with them...
 
rlculver said:
Hi,

I am looking at some remote backup software as well.

I need something which is reliable / safe (encrypted).

Which would you recommend?
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Well I won't pretend to offer a fair opinion, my experience is overwhelmingly with Asigra based solutions as thats what we sell. It's fairly good but very expensive (I'd struggle to say it's good value for money - thank god I don't work in sales).

Encryption wise, for Asigra, the data is encrypted during transmission and is stored encrypted with the provider. You specify an encryption key during setup and without that key nobody can read the data (not even us, ever, we've had a few companies loose the encryption key and get quite upset when we can't reset it for them or something)

I'd be looking for nothing less in terms of security from another product.

There are a great many cheaper options (I'm seriously considering buying mozy for my laptop...) but I can't comment first hand about how good they are yet...
 
Jungledisk also offers encryption that occurs locally before you send anything out over the wire, it also uses SSL for any communication, including (if configured) data transfer.
 
philjohn said:
Jungledisk also offers encryption that occurs locally before you send anything out over the wire, it also uses SSL for any communication, including (if configured) data transfer.
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I think you'll struggle to find a product which does encryption afterwards, it would remove half the point of encrypting the data!
 
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