Off-Site Backup

What is a ‘Off-Site backup’

New technologies and Faster Internet connections are no longer limited to large corporate companies; even home users can have fast & well priced internet access. As our demands upon computers to store more and more of our critical information steadily grow, computer failures become more and more costly. Good reliable server solutions are the preventative measure to combat this. Unfortunately the worst can still happen and when it does, good reliable backups are the cure.

In recent times we have been asked to restore data for sites where 98% of their tape library has been destroyed by fire, leaving only one or two tapes from which to restore their entire business. Good backup strategy has not always been enforced and people have become complacent in the reliability of their server solution so much that when the worst happens sometimes there is even confusion as to who’s job it was to store the tapes safely!

Remote backups are a 2nd line of data integrity assurance. Your critical data is stored at a remote location (usually a data-centre), which is physically a considerable distance from your main office. Technically it can be anywhere in the world providing you have the means to transfer data to it over the Internet.

This data can then be restored to your server in the event of a total failure and that your backup tapes are totally unusable. Data restoration can then be performed to a new server in a new temporary location while the main site is being made usable again.

We have created and implemented an off site backup solution designed to meet the needs of our clients, and work with almost any type of internet connection. Our system uses a client/server relationship where both sides maintain a complete list of all the data to be protected on the customers’ network, and then use idle internet bandwidth to transfer the content to our secure datacenters. We can backup complete applications, simple user files, Exchange Servers and SQL Databases reliably and without the need for any user interaction on the customers’ side. The whole solution is fully managed by our dedicated team who ensure that all our backups are current and regularly perform test restorations to confirm data integrity.

In the event that a network connectivity problem (loss of ADSL or router problems) prevents access to the internet, or drops during a backup session, our client software will continue to retry every few minutes until the connection is restored. Then critically, at the point the link returns, our solution will continue from the exact point it stopped – meaning that bandwidth is not ‘wasted’ resending data which has already been transmitted.

We can even also store up to 100 multiple versions of every file, allowing us to restore files which have been changed up to 99 times back to their original state – an essential for users sharing large complex documents and spreadsheets where an accidental change may go unnoticed for some time.