Finding the Right Online Backup Provider
With online backup, the toughest step is finding the right provider. If you do a Google search for "online backup," you'll get more than 14 million pages representing literally hundreds of service providers with prices from free to hundreds of dollars per month. To wade through all that choice it's helpful to break down the providers into three classes: consumer, local providers, and commercial.
Consumer-Class Online Backup Services Consumer-class services typically have low prices and most charge less than $20 per month Two of the most visible providers are Carbonite and EMC's Mozy; Carbonite offers unlimited storage for $50 a year and Mozy offers free service for up to 2 TB of data. Both provide backup services for Windows and Macintosh systems, and each machine requires a separate account.
Some consumer services support installing their software on Windows servers but usually don't offer server or application specific backup functions for applications. For example, SQL Server and Exchange should be backed up using the application's backup API rather than as files. These services typically limit the number of versions of a file they will store and how for long. Most providers limit storage to 6o days, so if you didn't notice a folder was deleted until 90 days later -- say, at the end of a quarter -- you'd be out of luck.
Local Online Backup Providers
Another option is using a local provider. Over the past few years, VARs and hosting companies have begun offering their own online backup services using software from an array of companies. Some, such as Asigra, are repositioning software they've sold into the corporate remote office backup market for years. Others, including Ahsay, Vembu and NovaStor, are trying to enter the crowed U.S. backup market and see online backup services as a way to gain market share.
A local provider can setup and support your systems, providing backup as well as management services. If you need your backup, you can send someone over to the data center to pick up an NAS appliance. However, that convenience puts local providers at the same risk from natural and human-caused disasters as your business, and their smaller size makes them vulnerable to downturns in the business cycle.
Commercial-Class Backup Services
Commercial-class backup services are run by big, well-funded companies that are likely to stay in business for as long or longer than you'll need your data. Among the better-known commercial class providers are Seagate's eVault, Iron Mountain's LiveVault, Intronis eSureIt and Symantec Online Backup.
While some consumer-class providers allow you to set up common billing for multiple systems they still treat the process of backing up, restoring, and managing data independently for each protected system. By contrast, commercial-class providers typically let you backup several computers to a single account, charge according to the amount data you store and store multiple versions for a long period. Rates for these services start around $35 per month for 5 GB of data with charges from $5 to $20 for each additional gigabyte per month.
To insure the security of your data, commercial class providers write your data to multiple datacenters so a failure in their infrastructure doesn't keep you from restoring your data. Many also offer features such as continuous backup that allow you to restore from snapshots of your data taken as often as every 15 minutes as well as agents for applications such as SQL Server and Exchange. Some providers will even provide a caching appliance that stores your data on disk on-site for faster restores.
Nine questions you should ask before choosing a provider
Howard Marks is chief scientist of Networks Are Our Lives, Inc!, a Hoboken, NJ consultancy where he beats networks and storage into submission for clients. He also writes the Backup and Business Continuity Blog for InformationWeek.com.
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