Welcome to the @ web one blog

On line off site back ups

Posted November 18th, 2007 by peter

With various computers and a server that stores our working data, we @ web one spent some time investigating an online – off site back up solution.

We found a supplier that suits us, and probably most of our clients. At the risk (what risk) of recommending our choice of an on-line – off site back up in New Zealand, we want to tell you about NetRescue.

For our web site hosting, we use the various data centre’s offsite backup resources, so we are only talking about the data that we have on our premises.

This is the first time that we are publicly making a recommendation for a supplier of computer services. In the past some of the odd personal recommendations have come back to bit us on the bum.

We all know about backing up our data. Some say that many businesses who have had a backup fail when they needed it, have gone out of business within 6 months. But finding an affordable reliable secure backup solution that does not involve physically backing up data has been a challenge.

Most off site backup services cost a fortune. 10 gigabyte for $150 per month is just not on for most of us. So imagine our surprise when we found NetRescue, who charge only $25 month for 10 gig or $10 for 1 gig. It did seem pretty cheap to us – too cheap when comparing other NZ based suppliers and it ring alarm bells for us. But there is a 30 day trial for up to 1 gig, so after a phone call to their 0800 number, we were prepared to have a go.

We were impressed. The system is pretty much idiot proof, gave us lots of reports, and not only that, when we tested restoring various files in our backup, the restore worked. It was easy to set up, easy to restore and everything happens daily without needing to push any buttons. We receive confirmation of successful (and unsuccessful) backup reports by email after each backup. In our particular situation we are backing up from 4 different sources throughout our network and it is all controlled by just one of our PC’s. Everything is encrypted, so no one else can access your stuff too.

Brilliant – could not be easier.

After 3 weeks, we concluded our trials, and set up our permanent backup account of 10’s of gigs. Andrew from NetRescue sent us a USB drive to back up our data (10’s of gigs over the net would take a while and is pretty costly – we would have been over our 15 gig data cap pretty quickly), we did the seeding backups and sent the USB drive back to him. Within 2 days, everything was running sweet and has done since – that was 6 weeks ago. The cost of using the seeding backup was around $100, but that included courier to us and back again.

So from our perspective, we don’t need to worry about backing up to storage disks and taking them off site each day to one of our homes – what a pain.

For peace of mind, if you are looking for such a solution, and in business – you should be, we recommend NetRescue.

Note. We have not been paid for this recommendation nor have been rewarded in any way. Heck they are not even a client – we are just happy users of NetRescue wanting to tell you that there is an affordable way of having your valuable data securely backed up – offsite.