We have a policy to try out any and all services that we are going to resell. This gives us a practical user based experience of the services.
Thus, we can have answers to the questions that our client’s users are bound to ask during their use of the services.
Here is what one of our directory’s upload speed is running at:
Note that our ADSL upload speed is currently around 1.0Mbit though our actual throughput is higher as the CO is a stone’s throw away.
Depending on the types of files being compressed and encrypted, the upload speed has jumped up as high as 8Mbit per second.
Since we have a long weekend here in Canada this coming up, seeding our off-site backup via upload will work just fine.
For our clients that may have a large amount of data to start off with, we can send a USB hard drive down to OWN to “seed” the backup. No additional fees apply to do so.
The backup client is fairly straight forward to operate, though we will be providing the initial backup agent configuration for our clients. The systems where the backup agent will run will have the users trained on its usage so that they can make changes to the backup folders and schedules if there is a need.
All in all, the service will provide peace of mind for our clients and us knowing that our data resides somewhere other than our building that may someday be toasted by fire, flood, or some crazy clown with a huge magnet. ;)
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)
I'd be interested in how you utilise the OWN backup. We have over the last 2 years been moving all our cutomers away from file based backups to images, currently using Shadow Protect (excellent product). Do you have a test situation for handling the images?
ReplyDeleteGeoff,
ReplyDeleteThe long and short of it is the off-site Cloud based backup is great for file/folder level backups. For one large file such as the ShadowProtect images, it will not do unless the office has a full duplexed 100Mbit fibre connection to upload with.
Then, there are the associated costs with the volume of the images.
We provide off-site backup rotation services for our clients both locally and remotely. As part of that service we do quarterly restores of the ShadowProtect or SBS 2008 backup images.
This service works quite well for our clients and for us.
Other than that, there are third party vendors that do provide off-site storage with pickup and dropoff service. Iron Mountain up here in Canada comes to mind.
Thanks for the question and the e-mail reminder! Yes, I have been exceedingly busy as of late so I have fallen behind on the comments.
Philip