iBackup

The Problem

We typically deal with small-medium businesses who have maybe 3 or 4 servers at most and typically only 1.  Many of them had tape backup systems in computers that were sometime 5 or more years old.  We advised them that this was not a good situation to be in because should anything happen to their server even though they might have everything backed up on tape that didn’t necessarily mean they could get their systems back in running condition in a timely manner and that if they could get it back at all.  This is because if some part of the server fails which is no longer available then they may never get that machine up and running again.  If they couldn’t do that then not all data could be restored to another computer which would effectively mean that the data was lost forever.

In addition you have to maintain and switch tapes are necessary depending on the backup schedule that is begin used. Which means there has to be some user intervetion rather than a truly automated system.

The Solution

Given that drive space is relatively cheap it is much easier to simply copy files from one drive to another.  This can easily be automated using a simple batch file and scheduled tasks. But if there is a problem there is no easy way to be alerted. So we created a small piece of software that runs the backup process and then sends an eamil alert of success and some errors. Of course if there is a major problem then the not getting an email on a regular basis is an indication that a problem exists that needs to be invstigated.

So now if a server goes down all the data is backed up on hard drive that can easily be incorporated into a new server. Further if you need to recover only some small amount of data access to a drive is trival compared to with tape.