What Is Online Backup

Last month we introduced the term 'onsite backup' as any backup technology where the backup medium resides on the same site as the computer that is being backed-up (for example tape drives or external hard drives).

These forms of backup are useful, as large amounts of data can be backed-up quickly and cheaply, but they do require the media to be removed from site after the backup is complete. A backup is only as good as the location that the media is stored in; store the media onsite and you risk losing the lot in a fire or break-in.

Online backup is different. With this form of backup your server automatically backs up it's data to another server located somewhere in the cloud (the internet). The backup server could be located in a different city or a different country, the point is that the backup is automatic and to a geographically distinct location.

This form of backup has several benefits. The backup is completed with no user intervention and backups are stored offsite automatically - No more tapes to swap, no more problems with users forgetting to take drives offsite.

With all these benefits you may wonder why all backups are not done online - The side bar explains all! 

Geek-Guru Elastic Backup

At Geek-Guru we started thinking about the problems with online backup and we have come up with an innovative online backup solution that we believe is, as yet, not available from any other supplier.

Utilising the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (We know that's a bit of a mouthful) we have designed a file level backup solution with a small but important difference. In an emergency the remote, cloud based, server can be converted for production use meaning your data can be accessed directly from the cloud without having to pull it all back down to a local server.

Lets say you have an emergency which results in the complete loss of your office. With a traditional backup solution you would need to locate your backup media, purchase new hardware, restore that backup to your new hardware, find a new office to locate the server in and move all your staff to that new office. Potentially this could result in days, weeks or months of downtime - enough to put many companies out of business permanently.

With Geek-Guru's online backup system your data already resides on a fully capable windows server in the cloud. At the flick of a switch we can re-commission that server for remote access and users can carry on working on that data from any location with a net connection.

Geek-Guru online backup enables you to keep working in a disaster with a distributed work-force whilst you put your traditional disaster recover solution in place - enough to keep your critical operations running.

We have built our backup system using Amazon EC2 along with a custom written software application (produced in house by our engineering team).

EC2 provides scalable cloud based virtual servers so we can provide each of our clients their very own server for a fraction of the cost of a physical box.

Our software has been designed and built to backup your data using the bare minimum of bandwidth so we can get more data into the cloud in any given backup window. This means we can backup more data overnight than ever before.

For more info please e-mail us or call the office on 0845 234 0580