Mass Data Protection & Recovery

Hello again,

How do you decide what your most important data is?  I’ve found that you can be pretty clear cut - can your business continue and grow without it?  If not, then it’s critical data!

For most small businesses that means; 1) Quickbooks, 2) Outlook and 3) Some critical Word & Excel documents.  That means that you have a small set of data you truly need to backup.  Protect that data the same way you protect your most critical personal documents.  Your will, insurance papers and bank documents are probably in a safe deposit box at the bank - well, vault your most critical with National Data Protect.

It’s automatic, monitored 24 x 7 and guaranteed!

All my best,
John

Hello Everyone,

I’ve been told many times by business owners that they thought it was too expensive to protect their most important business assets - their business data. It’s just not true anymore! We at National Data Protect (http://www.nationaldataprotect.com) have an industry leading data protection service that costs a little less than $10 per GB (discounts apply for larger data volume). Most businesses can protect their most critical data in 5 GB or less - that means spending only $50 per month.

Here’s the bottom line:

1. Only about $50 per month for most businesses
2. No long term contracts - month to month
3. No minimums - only pay for what you use
4. Continuous protection - sends information offsite every 15 minutes
5. 30 day, 1 year or 7 year retention
6. Award winning technology
7. 100% guarantee

I hope you consider our solution to your backup, and more importantly, +recovery +requirements!

All my best,
John F. Sklavounos

NationalDataProtect.com

Hi Gang, I’m back… Some people have recently said that backing up 100GB is too expensive. I have two things to say to that:

1. How do you define too expensive?  If you lose that data, or are only able to recover bits and pieces of it - which may be worse than losing it all, how much will that cost you? Don’t forget to calculate lost productivity, missed billing opportunities, the hard cost of tech services personnel…
2. Why would you think that only one solution is viable?  Do you keep all of you important financial papers in your safe deposit box at the bank?  You probably only keep the most important stuff there - you can implement the same strategy with NDP.  Protect only the OS, accounting and critical files.  For most of us that will only cost about $50 per month.  Not too expensive to keep your business going when the s*** hits the fan.

There are those who backup - and those who will.

Later,
John

Hey everyone!

I thought I’d go over a couple neat things you may or may not know you could do with the LiveVault Data Backup service.

Imagine this: You have a report due tomorrow which needs to be submitted to another office across the country. You’ve been working all day — you start to feel aches all over as the clock strikes 11pm. As you type the final paragraph and hit the Save button, you get a message that you’ve lost connection to your server. The server has crashed. What would you do?

Anyone who uses LiveVault knows that it’s known for its reliabiltiy in securely restoring your server back to its functional state in a time-efficient manner, but how will you get that report out by tomorrow? Well, this is where the first of the two features comes in: Restoration to another computer. If you log into the LiveVault web portal and choose restore, the only option is to restore to your server. To work around this, you can download the LiveVault Agent on another computer and register it. Now when you choose to restore to another computer, you should see that computer on the places you are able to restore to. Just choose that report you were working on and you’ll have the most recent version of your document on your desktop.

Another nice feature I’d like to bring up is the ability to back up files that constantly change. Just to clarify, LiveVault already backs up files as the data within that file changes. Though, what if the file name changes? For example, a Quickbooks company file in which the last date changed is part of the name: “05.20.09 CompanyData.qbw.” When LiveVault looks for 05.20.09 CompanyData.qbw, it won’t find it the next day because the name changed to 05.21.09 CompanyData.qbw. The best way to always have your data backed up regardless of name is to create a folder and set LiveVault to back that folder up. This way, it will back up all of the files within the folder regardless of name and keep your data safe and off-site.

Well, I hope this information helped in some way. For those of you who aren’t sure about LiveVault or don’t have any disaster plan in place, check out www.nationaldataprotect.com and give our 30-day free trial a shot! Have a great evening guys!

Sincerely,

Ryan

Hi Everyone,

Today I had one of those “down to earth” experiences.  One of our clients had a crash and it took 5 work days to completely recover.  Basically, we miscommunicated about what the backup / disaster recovery solution entailed.  A second issue was that one of our former technicians didn’t review the status of the tape based backup during the last preventive maintenance session.

I guess the real lesson here is that, no matter how technical you are and no matter how “AR” you think you are, when human intervention is involved, you will mess up (usually when it will affect you most).

Use a backup service that completely removes the human element - take it from me…

Good night!
John

Hey Everyone,

I had an interesting issue come up just recently. A business searching for a data backup solution contacted us and challenged our service with another provider they had found over the web. Apparently this provider advertised $50.00 to back up 20GB of data per month. Naturally, I was surprised — there’s no way something could be that affordable AND secure.

I went ahead an made my way to the site to see this for myself. The advertised price was there in big, bold letters. By this point, I’m starting to think I’m in the wrong line of business. Then I get to the actual checkout. This backup provider pulled a fast one on the business that called us earlier. Had they actually gone through with the purchase, they would have seen the charge they slipped in at the end. Yes, the service is priced as advertised: $50 a month for 20GB. *cough* And a couple thousand dollars to buy the equipment it will be backed up to. To top it all off, their “geographically separated” data centers turned out to be in the same physical location. I’ll bet the business wasn’t too happy about that discovery.

Moral of the story: Watch your data but also keep a close eye on your wallet! There are plenty of backup providers out there but only National Data Protect will be able to guarantee the works: full encryption through the entire backup process, data archiving, set-it-and-forget-it ease of use,  afforadble pricing and more!

Sincerely,

Ryan

Hello again,

During conversations over the past few weeks I’ve seen an interesting pattern develop regarding the cost of baking up your data.

Many people assert that the price of backing up data securely and off-site is too high, but the reality may surprise you.

As an example, baking up your Quickbooks file, some important spreadsheets and documents, and maybe an Outlook PST file could be backed up in about 4 GB’s worth of space.  This (at www.nationaldataprotect.com) will cost about $40 per month - $480 per year.

Think about the cost of trying to recover your information from a crashed hard drive…  these services can run into thousands of dollars with no guarantee of success.

Now consider the cost of external hard drives for backup.  These are relatively inexpensive - you can pick up a 250GB backup drive for around $150.  But the problem here is that the drive is sitting right next to the data that you’re protecting.  A bad move if you want to be able to recover after a problem like flood, fire or any other environmental problem.

There are even some backup services that charge you some minimal amount per year, but these are consumer services that frankly don’t cut it for your business.  These services only keep one copy of your files.  Meaning that if you need to recover a specific version (maybe one that has not been damaged by a virus) you’re out of luck.

You can choose a combination of the above mentioned services, but then you’re adding complexity that will come back to haunt you when you need to recover some data.

Take a look at the feature matrix and I think you’ll see that your choice is clear.

National Data Protect is flexible, reasonably prices and feature rich. I hope you consider it.

All my best,
John

Hi Everyone,

I’m baaaack!  Thanks for being patient with my extended absence.  There’s currently alot of buzz about free backup services on the web.  Please try to remember a couple of the following things before you jump into one of them.

1. Is the primary purpose of the service to protect your important information or to sell advertising?  I’d rather have backup experts than marketing experts saving my data.
2. What is the privacy policy of your backup provider?  Many reserve for themselves the right to rummage through your data looking for inappropriate content.  I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sit too well with me.
3. Are there “gotchas” like charges for restores?  I’d hate to be held hostage to a company that is now demanding money for what was supposed to be a free service.
4. What are the data size limits?  Be sure that your Outlook data store (.pst or .ost) file can be recovered.  If it is in use will it back up properly?
5. Where are the data actually stored?  Anyone can call a room full of servers a “data center” - do they have physical, as well as electronic security, in place?  How about environmental factors like power and cooling?

I hope this helps you make an informed decision.  Not all solutions are for all situations.

All my best,
John

Hi Everyone,

When you are looking for a backup service, make sure you know what you’re comparing.  Here is my top 10 ways to make an informed choice.  Sorry Mr. Letterman!

1. Where is your data stored?  No location compares with the original “Iron Mountain” and the secondary “Class A” data centers used by Iron Mountain.
2. Who has access to it?  Believe it or not, some companies actually retain the right to review your data and even limit your access to it if they determine it’s prohibited.  Could you imagine a service provider rummaging through your data?  I wouldn’t keep my data there.  National Data Protect and Iron Mountain Digital cannot scan your information - you keep your encryption key and no-one but you can access it.
3. What kind of encryption is used and where?  You have to make sure that your data is protected all through the process, not just during transmission.  NDP protects with 256 bit AES encryption it from the time the delta is selected, through transmission and even on the destination drives.  There actually are some companies that send your restored data back to you on a CD or external hard drive in a completely open way.  Irresponsible at best!
4. Is the service backing up deltas or on a file basis?  Deltas can make the backup and restore process significantly more efficient and they minimize the bandwidth required to transmit and receive.  Compression can help make delta backups even faster.
5. Is the restore process truly web based?  Would you be surprised to know that some companies allow you to select the files to restore and then send you a CD?
6. How is the price truly calculated?  NDP / IM digital charge you for the data you are backing up.  For example, if you are backing up 5 GB for a 30 day retention at $10.45 per GB per month ($52.25 per month) - it doesn’t matter if the over 230 version actually take 100 GB you still pay only for the 5GB that comprises the files being backed up.  Many competitors charge a lower per GB per month price only to charge you for the back end usage - the same 5GB with a 30 day retention but billed at the back end GB size can quickly and permanently go well above what you expect to pay.
7. Is the service geared towards consumers?  When protecting your critical business data, consumer solutions will not protect you the way you really need - and that’s not something you want to find out after a file, email container, database or other data is lost.
   
8. Everyone hates contracts.  Why lock yourself in for between one and three years?  NDP is a month-to-month service.  What will happen when you start getting billed for that back end utilization at a much higher monthly rate than you expected?  Good luck with that!
9. What regulations and professional requirements are they compliant with?  Ask about Sarb-Ox, SAS-70, PCI & HIPAA.
10. Is there a limit on the size of individual files?  It would really stink if your 1.5 GB Outlook PST file isn’t able to be backed up!
    

That’s my top ten.  Suffice it to say that from just about every aspect, the National Data Protect / Iron Mountain Digital LiveVault service is the best solution for your most important business asset - your data.

Later!
John