Traditional backup solutions back up data to directly connected storage, our platform is designed around backing up data to a remote, centralised disk-storage server. Our platform offers many of the technologies of much more expensive offerings.
Select from the list on the right to find out more about our backup technology.
Vaulted Backup
Our system runs and holds your data on dedicated hardware, protecting you from hardware failure.
We use dedicated hardware to hold your on-site backups, if any of your servers fail, all your data + the version history is safe on the backup appliance. The backup appliance's disks are protected by RAID, so even if one of the disks in the appliance fails, your data will still be available to you.
Disaster recovery
We replicated your data from the primary Backup Server to a secondary site or to the cloud. This protects you in the event of a site disaster, such as flood, fire or theft.
Should a site wide disaster occur, your data will be safe and accessible at a secondary site or in the cloud. Data held in the cloud can be accessed via a web portal. Data held on a server at one of your sites can be retrieved over your WAN.
Disk Based
Tapes can be unreliable and you only find out when you attempt a restore and it fails, that's why we use raided hard disks to store your data.
In terms of reliability and maintenance effort we believe hard-disks are superior to tapes.
If properly cared for, tested and verified tape backup can be reliable, however this involves extra work. Additionally tapes should be verified on a different tape-drive to the one which took the backup. Over time head alignment issues can mean the tape is only readable on the tape-drive which took the backup, if you lose that drive the tape is useless.
Hard-disks in a RAID configuration mean a hard-disk can fail and the backup is still available. There is no verification, cleaning or other maintenance required.
Optimised Data Transfer
When transferring large amounts of data over slow networks, efficient transfer is essential.
Bit-differencing (also called delta-blocking) is the technique of only sending the changes to files over a network.
Imagine a word document is being replicated over the internet from point A to point B. The document already exists at point A and point B, however in the last hour a user has added a line of text to the document. The file has changed, but instead of sending the whole file again, we just send the extra line. The changes to files are immediately applied at the other end, so that as soon as the process is complete, you have two identical files.
Additionally the changes themselves are compressed when being sent, to ensure the absolute minimum amount of data is transmitted. This becomes crucial when dealing with a slow connection and large volumes of data.
We use bit differencing when transmitting over the internet and, optionally, when backing up data from computers on your LAN.
Flexible Configuration
The system allows backup and replication to be customised to the user's requirements.
The system breaks down the organisations backup into discreet jobs, a file backup for a particular server is treated as a job, an exchange backup for the same server is treated as a separate job, replication of that data to a secondary site is another job again.
All backup jobs can be setup to include or exclude certain data. For example, a file backup might exclude directories or file types, a database server backup can be limited to certain databases or backup all databases on that server.
Replication jobs can also be configured to filter data, so that only the required data is replicated.
Jobs can be scheduled to run on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis. The user also has the option of initiating an ad-hoc backup from the Backup Server's web portal.
Version History
The system keeps a history of point-in-time snapshots, both locally on the backup server and off-site, be that in the cloud or on a secondary server.
The system creates a nightly snapshot. These snapshots are accessible in exactly the same way as the current backup, using Windows Explorer, allowing you to get back data as it was days or weeks ago.
When browsing a snapshot the data is presented as a complete file tree as it was at the time of the backup. Internally, the device uses de-duplication to store the data efficiently. Any number of these snapshots can be kept on the device, space permitting. Typically 20 days are kept on-site with a longer history in the Cloud or on a secondary Backup Server.
Agentless Backup
Our system does not require that you install software on your servers.
For some backup systems you need to install a piece of software, called an agent, on every computer you want to backup.
The only situation in which we use agents is for laptops not connected to the company network, where it is unavoidable.
For computers on the company LAN, whatever the backup, be it disk imaging, email archiving, virtual machines, database or data backups, you will not need to install software on the machine being backed up.
Agentless backup avoids the very major hassle of installing and updating software on each target machine.
Application Support
Applications like Database Servers and Exchange need to be backed up in a specific way to ensure the data is consistent and useful.
For databases we connect to the server and initiate a full database dump, this writes the database to disk in a format that can be easily loaded on another database server. This process also truncates the database transaction logs. We also support incremental (transaction log only) backups.
For Exchange we connect, initiate the backup, which creates the edb file (stm file if applicable) and the log files. We play the log files into the edb and consistency check. The edb is now a complete, ready-to-go, backup of exchange.
Recovery
Retrieving files is as simple as dragging & dropping from Windows Explorer.
By mapping a drive in Windows Explorer to the Backup Server, the user can browse all the backup files including historic versions, then simply copies the files. The process takes seconds.
Access controls can be put in place so that users can restore their own files but not view other user's files.
Should there be the need to restore a large amount of data, the appliance has a web portal which allows data to be written to any network share on the LAN, the web portal can also restore windows ACL security information.
Data held in the cloud can be accessed via an internet site. This will only be necessary in the event that you need a version of a file no longer held on the local Backup Server.
To restore an Exchange server, stop the server, put the edb file in place, if necessary point to the server to the file's location and start exchange.
To restore a MS-SQL database, establish a client login to a SQL Server and issue the Load Database command specifying the location of the database backup file on the Backup Server.
Access controls
Our on-site and cloud based offerings implement sophisticated access controls.
User access to data held on the Backup Server within the client's LAN requires user/password authentication. Different users can be created with the ability to access different data. Alternatively an administrator can have sole and complete access. The backup system can be integrated into Active Directory, allowing the AD administrator to setup or disable users.
Similarly, data held in the cloud is secured by a jailed environment, requiring password authentication. Different users can be granted access to different sets of data. If required the data is encrypted while in the cloud.
Security
All internet transmissions between Backup Servers, Laptops agents or to the cloud are protected using SSH AES 256-bit encryption. Authentication is by public / private key. Data downloads from the Cloud are protected by the https protocol.
Backup Systems internal access to infrastructure is protected by two form factor authentication. This requires possession of a physical token and knowledge of a password to generate the actual password used to access our servers. The password granting access changes every 10 seconds preventing brute force attacks. Our servers reside in an ISO accredited data centre with 24x7 staff presence.
Want to take advantage of our data backup solutions?
Call 0845 671 0290
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