Our system sends alerts, whether you have a failed backup, an error or even a missed backup, all via email. Without this feature, you might remain unaware that backups are failing or that larger issues exist. By insisting on selecting a backup provider that supports forwarding e-mail alerts when backups fail or encounter errors, organizations can ensure their IT staff stays on top of backup operations and receive SOS messages when troubles do arise.

To see what some of our alerts look like, check out our post titled ‘How’s your reporting?‘

Our clients, though, are typically (and rightfully so) a skeptical crowd. So they want, or require, more than just a promise that critical data is being backed up, they need confirmation.

With our detailed and accurate backup reporting (see below) you can be sure that systems and data ere being properly backed up.

Daily E-mail Reports

Within an hour of completing your daily backup, our server will assemble and email you a report of the backup set you have scheduled.

The backup report contains an attached ZIP file which gives you file-level details on what operations occurred during the backup process. You can click on this LINK to see an actual backup report – the same thing you’ll see in the image below.

Missed Backup Reports

Our servers will alert you within a few hours of the scheduled start time of a backup if, for some reason, the backup is missed – whether the server is offline or malfunctioning.

Alternately, if you need on-demand reporting, our backup server web-interface can provide you with historical or up-to-the-minute reporting for a currently-running backup set.

You can click on any image to see a larger version at any time.

The network

Running on Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters allows us to deliver the Amazon’s Service Level Agreement commitment: 99.95% uptime and availability.

Our own network infrastructure is hosted with Fusepoint Managed Services which is attached to a 100% network availability guarantee while we provide 99.99% uptime on our systems.

Our ideal client

We’ve sampled and deployed automatic backup services from a number of providers and feel that the following items were most important when choosing our backup software supplier:

Operating system (OS) support – our software runs seamlessly on all late-model versions of Windows and Mac OS X as well as any OS that can run a later version of Java. We’ve tested it, abused it and put it to task on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2003 Server, Windows Server 2008, Small Business Server, Mac OS X Tiger, Mac OS X Leopard, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Ubuntu and FreeBSD.

Scheduling – we’re big fans of the Grandfather-Father-Son backup scheme. With our ODB Advanced and Deluxe, you can fine tune your backup scheduling to suit your every need from retention time to recurrences to even continuous data protection.

Auditing and reporting – our software reports and sends an email to you when a backup runs. The backup report contains information what files were backed up, how much data is stored on the server (see below).

If the backup fails to run, you’ll also get an alert. (You can click on the image to see a larger-sized version.)

Backups are too important to trust to chance. Our ideal client cares that we’ve made sure that the backup software you’ll deploy works on the OS platforms you require, generates human-readable reports and is reliable.

The Software

After lengthy amounts of testing, research and consultation in the area of data backups, we chose to partner with Ahsay Systems Corporation as our primary software provider. We deliver Ahsay’s world-class backup software to our end users.

Ahsay’s software runs on a number of popular Operating Systems (Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, AIX, Novell, etc.) and can backup files and databases (Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Oracle, etc.) alike.

Ahsay’s software is now in it’s fifth iteration (v5.5.5.0 at the time of writing this article) and is unparalleled in terms of its usability and stability.

How does the software work?

The ODB Suite consists of three main modules:

1. Client software – the software you install on your computer and/or server
2. Server software – software we have installed on our servers which accept your data
3. Replication Server software – allows us to replicate backups to a seperate physical location

The client side program uploads the files you select to the Backup server and looks after backup job scheduling. It also provides a user-interface to allow you to configure desired backup sets.

The server side program can serve and store backup data from multiple computers simultaneously and can be used to schedule backups and/or request reporting on backup jobs.

The replication server program is installed in a seperate geographic region than the backup server and provides close to real-time backup for our server. If one of our servers fail, the replication server still has a copy of your backup data.

Your backup data is always encrypted and sent over the Internet to our servers. Only you can decrypt the data with the unique key you provide at the time of installation.