ebackup Company

We just renewed our contract in September with E-Backup, after reviewing our options again this year. The first year went very well. We have 3 servers and do an in-house tape backup nightly, this is our redundant off-site backup for emergencies.

We looked at 3 other off-site options before choosing E-Backup. The deciding factor was location, pricing and the ease of working with them. They completely backup our data server changes nightly, and since the program runs in the background, we don't have to log off to complete the run, which was important to us. We have remote users that log in at all times, and when they have to log off for the in-house tape backup, they don't like it!

The module that runs the backup works on my computer, and I have the ability to log into the program and run a variety of reports on the data. I get daily emails (my choice) confirming that each backup worked. Our external tech used to get the emails as well, but we trust the system now, so he isn't monitoring it. We have a T1 connection to the internet. We used to have a buffer partition on my main hard drive to run the data through at a manageable speed, but our data has grown so large we added a second 120 GIG drive to my computer that is dedicated to the Ebackup. Now we have a copy kept on my hard drive as well as in Toronto, for only the cost of the hard drive. All it took was a phone call to the tech at Ebackup and he logged into my machine and set it all up. It's really user friendly, and the personnel are very helpful.

We ran an initial upload of data over a weekend, then we decided that we would keep the next 3 generations of changes. After the third day, the oldest changes are merged into the full backup and only changes for the day are kept separately. We have a static Imageserver with data that doesn't change once it's in place, so when we get enough data to fill a CD, they load the data to CD's, store one in-house and ship us one. As soon as we confirm we got the disk, they delete the data from their active storage, saving us the money of keeping it on their live storage.

I would highly recommend them, we are quite satisfied with the product, the people and the process!

Ms. Shaun Kuffel, IT Coordinator, Corporate 4 Insurance Agency, Inc. MN

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We have been a customer of ebackup for approximately two years. They backup our data over the internet.

By way of full disclosure you should be aware that ebackup has been a customer of ours for about 10 months. We provide them with certain customized administration and accounting services. If we were not satisfied with the people and service they provide to us we would not have taken them on as a customer – we have that kind of flexibility in choosing our customers.

I will address the two concerns you raise first:

Apprehensive about losing control of the process. Our move to ebackup has, in reality, provided us with more control over the process.

i. When we used a tape backup system we were responsible for maintaining the tape library and mounting the appropriate tape each day. This was a challenge when:
    a) The person responsible was on vacation. We then had to ensure someone else was loading and unloading the tapes and updating the log.
    b) There was a problem with backup itself –the person responsible may not exercise good judgment on what was a problem and what wasn’t – they might not even check the backup report to make sure the job had completed without incident.
    c) We had to train new people. Since this task often fell to the receptionist, not the most stable job position in our organization, we often had to train new people. Then we had to monitor the process for several months to make sure they were dealing with the situations that arose appropriately.
    d) There were statutory holidays. In these situations the daily job had to be manually cancelled and the tape sequence adjusted. Again this could be a challenge from time to time.

ii. If someone worked on the weekend their work would not be backed up until the Monday night backup.
  All of this is now automated so we need only look at the daily report provided by email to see the status of the previous day’s backup. It also provides the ability to send error reports to as many people as you choose if there is a backup issue.
  Backups are now done each night, including weekends. We also have the flexibility to back up critical files multiple times during the day, if we choose.

iii. Given the cost of backup tapes, we used a 5 day, 4 week, 3 month, yearly cycle. We did not have the equipment to test a full restore of our system from the backup tapes, so we had to have faith that the tapes would be reliable when needed. On occasion we had files “cycle” off the monthly tapes that we would have liked to have available to us.
  Now we are able to backup on a file by file basis, not a date basis. This allows us to keep as many generations of each file as we want including monthly and yearly copies if we choose.

iv. Recovering files from our tape system was never an easy task:
    a) The Backup Exec software became more complex with each upgrade and if you did not use it on a regular basis you had to relearn it each time you used it.
    b) You had to find and load the correct tape, then had to wait while the software cycled through the tape to find the file, or files, you wanted to restore on the tape sequentially.

  The DS software is much more intuitive to use and is incredibly fast at locating the file, or files, you are looking for, letting you choose which generation you want to restore and then letting you pick where you want to copy them to. In seconds it restores the file and you can confirm that you have what you need – you are not checking every half hour on a restore job running through a tape sequentially on the Server. Since using ebackup I have been able to restore any file I have needed to restore – this being about 12 over the period.

Reliability of an outside vendor to perform that function.

In the time we have used ebackup we have experienced about six problems – that would be six out of the 700+ backups. Two of those were when the ebackup software was being updated at the same time our backup was scheduled to run. This was in the early days and appears to have been resolved. The others were all problems with our ISP service provider being down when our backup was scheduled to run. This does happen from time to time but has never happened on sequential days.

Our backup has become a transparent and reliable component of our overall operation. I don’t see any logical reason for us to revert to a tape backup solution.

Other issues we had with our tape backup solution included:
The cost of the tape drive itself. These drives always seemed to have a much shorter life span than what I believed a piece of equipment of this cost should.
The backup software provider charged for both the Exchange and SQL agents.

These were costs we do not face with ebackup.

Upgrades and new software releases. We were responsible for obtaining and installing Upgrades – or more aggravating and costly, purchasing new releases of the software (often required when we upgraded our operating system) and having them installed, with all of the new issues that come with it.

With ebackup all of the software upgrades and new releases just flow down the pipe. We do not need tech staff to deal with any of it, it just happens. We are always running the newest version and have not experienced any bugs in any of the versions we have run.

Bob Brunt, Chief Operating officer, TotalAdmin Alberta Canada

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