Overview
Backups are a critically important part of any business network. They will not only protect your data from accidental deletion or corruption, but also protect your business in a disaster scenario.
SCORE (Counselors to American's Small Businesses) and HP complied a document on IT disasters effects on small business. The report found the following:
- 70% of small firms that experience a major data loss go out of business within a year
- Of companies experiencing catastrophic data loss:
- 43% of companies never reopened
- 51% of companies closed within 2 years
- 80% of companies that do not recover from a disaster within one month are likely to go out of business.
Source: http://www.score.org/pdf/HP_Download_ImpactofDisaster.pdf
Many of our clients and even we use CrashPlan Pro to protect all of our external web servers by copying backups from our hosted servers to our local CrashPlan Pro Server in the office. This provides peace of mind for our web masters and hosted clients as they know they have an offsite backup of their website at all times. It also means you can trust our consultants have firsthand experience with installing, configuring and maintaining the CrashPlan PRO backup solution.
What data can I protect with CrashPlan Pro?
CrashPlan Pro is a file based backup application which can backup files in the following scenarios:
- Local Workstations (on the same network as the CrashPlan Pro Server)
- Remote Workstations
- Local Servers (on the same network as the CrashPlan Pro Server)
- Remote Servers
- Windows Servers and Workstations
- Mac Servers and Workstations
- Linux Servers and Workstations
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- Figure 1 - The CrashPlan Pro client allows you to select what is backed up on the computer
Where can I backup to?
The CrashPlan Pro Server just uses the normal file system to do backups, so all you need to do is give it a folder to store the backups and it will handle the rest.
CrashPlan Pro also compresses backups when they are transferred and stored, meaning you get the best storage utilization possible.
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- Figure 2 - The CrashPlan Pro server backs up to the file system. Just point it at a folder and away you go
How do I know CrashPlan Pro backups are working?
CrashPlan Pro has built in functionality for sending alerts via email when problems arise with your backups including:
- The backup server is out of disk space
- Backups haven't run for a certain amount of days
- Corruption has been detected in the backups
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- Figure 3 - You can configure CrashPlan Pro to alert you when problems arise with your backups
CrashPlan pro is also capable of sending scheduled reports regarding the backups on your server.
How can I take my data offsite?
CrashPlan Pro includes a feature called Multi-Server support, which makes setting up remote backup destinations simple.
Your primary CrashPlan PRO server, known as the master can manage several slave CrashPlan Pro servers, which provides the ability to have an offsite slave server for redundant backup archives. Each slave is an independent backup location, so if one archive became corrupted, this would perverse the integrity of the archive on the other CrashPlan PRO servers.
scheduled reports regarding the backups on your server.
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- Figure 4 - Slave CrashPlan Pro servers can be setup for offsite backups
How do I restore my data in the event of a disaster?
CrashPlan Pro allows the end user to restore files right from inside the CrashPlan Pro client. They can select the file they want to restore, the version of the file (you can specify how many versions of a file the CrashPlan PRO Server keeps) and the location they would like to restore the backup.
This allows the end user to be in control of their own restores which means they can restore a file without having to contact a System Administrator for support.
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- Figure 5 - You can restore backups directly from the CrashPlan Pro client
CrashPlan Pro works on an account system, so if your computer needed to be replaced, you could log back into the CrashPlan Pro client on the new computer using your old account details and be able to restore all of the data that was being backed up on your previous computer.
SSW can provide assistance in helping you restore your data to its backup up state
in the case of an emergency.
Australia Wide
We have consultants available in all Australian capital cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra.