Apr 17, 2006

Remote online backup service

I've been looking for an affordable, simple online backup solution for my Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Great Plains) clients. Something that can backup SQL databases as well as your typical Office docs - Word, Excel, PDF, etc. I've experienced too many situations where people have lost critical accounting data. My moto is "You can never have too many backups!"

So in my search, i've started using an online backup service called Dr. Backup . I really hate using tape drives so this is part of my 2-stage backup plan. I use an external USB hard drive for my typical daily full backups and then i'm using the online backup program to grab just the critical, frequently changing data and store it offsite via the Internet. So if my office burns to the ground, i'll have my critical data safely stored offsite. Best part is this is all automatic - i don't have to swap tapes or remember to burn DVD's anymore. Nice.

The interface is much like your typical backup software - you select a schedule, full/incremental/differential backup type, etc. It'll send you an email notification at the end of each job so you know if it was successful or not.

When using this in conjunction with a backup tool like NTBackup (part of Windows Server or Small Business Server), make sure you set the "backup type" of your NTBackup job to a "copy" type, rather than "normal" backup type. This way the NTBackup will not reset the archive flag. The online backup software will need to see the archive flag. There is a command-line parameter for NTbackup - "/m" where you can specify this. Check the help on ntbackup.exe for details.

You can buy the service in different sizes, from 1 GB to 50 GB. That is the compressed size. It compresses the data prior to uploading it. The compression was good on my SQL backups (Great Plains, Sharepoint and Microsoft CRM). I got about 80% compression on the SQL BAK files.

You can get a free trial for 30 days. That's really the best way to check it out and see if it will meet your needs. So head on over to the Dr.Backup Remote Online Backup website and get started. You can use my "Referred by" code of "Triton" to get a bonus 300 MB in your account.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Would Mozy (www.mozy.com) be an option? I have been using their service for some months now and it works perfectly. I'm not sure if it works for backups of databases though.

Anonymous said...

Checkj out this product for starting your own online backup service - it is the software that most of the commercial providers out there are using: http://remote-backup.com

Anonymous said...

If you have not tried IBackup (www.ibackup.com), then you are missing something.

IBackup for Windows allows online backup of MS Exchange Server databases without interrupting the running MS Exchange Server services. It can also back up MS SQL Server databases. You can even backup databases from multiple instances of the MS SQL Server. With IBackup, you can restore the backed up database file into your MS SQL Server.

IBackup provides another application called IDrive with which you can drag-and-drop, edit and save files in your online backup account. It’s very easy to install it and the performance is top class.

To know more about IBackup’s features, try their free trial. It’s worth it.

Unknown said...

Having a backup is only of value if the data is usable, so daily checks are needed to verify this. The data room virtual makes use of an email notification system to inform administrators of the status of the backups.

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