Why Choose Safe Data Storage?

If you or your business still uses tapes to backup your data you should consider using on-line backup. On-line backup companies offer different services of such including the consumer market such as storing home computers or family photos. The SME Business Service Provider providing storage for Exchange, Business critical data and SQL’s. Enterprise Solutions provider offer a disaster recovery.

So why choose SDSL?

Safe Data Storage provides an Online Backup service for small to medium sized companies. With full customer support, SDSL would be the best option for your company.  Choosing Safe Data storage has many benefits including that of you saving money, improved security, reduced risk of data loss, improved reliability, better use of resources and a data guarantee.

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The Advantages Of Bare Metal Backup

Using Bare Metal Backup will prove more efficient than the more complex and confusing manual process of using multiple disks. Bare metal backup provides easy to follow instructions as well as being accurate and a cheaper alternative to manual data restore methods. The advantages of Bare Metal include that of it can be restored on a system easily, is highly automated, reduces the complexity for users and it can also be restored to a virtual environment allowing the user/s to access there account on the original computer which has recently crashed or has been destroyed.

The initial Bare Metal restore will take between 2-3 hours with an image of your original set-up being created allowing you to get back to work as quickly as possible. Compared to manual restore which would take over 48 hours, Bare Metal Backup is seen as a far better product to use and resell.

Is Your Business Fully Protected?

What would you do if your server just failed?

Could you get it back up and running in minutes?

Would it be running in the same state of 15 minutes minutes earlier?

Safe Data Storage can answer all of these problems with one solution, Online Backup. With your data being fully monitored, encrypted and managed your business will be fully protected. With your data being secured in secure location with in the UK and not overseas this initially means your upload and download speeds to the servers will be up to two times faster than our nearest competitors. With multiple waves of security your personal data, which will be stored on one server will be copied into another server meaning in the events of your data being lost on the first your data will be stored on the second server. With Safe Data Storage your business will be fully protected and your data secured.

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Why use Online Backup over Tapes or USB Drives?

Online Backup is far more reliable than Tapes or USB Drives. The problem with USB Drives and tapes is that they can easily be lost or destroyed. When using Cloud Storage none of that happens, your data is stored safely onto servers located in the UK and not overseas.

So why is Online Backup better?

Its better because you, the customer has to do very little except sign up for a free trial in which you can experience the products we offer. USB Drives contain limited space and can be destroyed or lost easily. As well as being expensive the USB Drives don’t last long and have a life span of a couple of years. Tape is an expensive and time-consuming way of storing data. You as a business owner will have to rely on someone who can remember to do it and is able to get the tapes to an offsite location which isn’t as reliable as Online Backup. However if you do use Online Backup its stored onto the “cloud” in which your data in safely stored in data centres.

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Hig Memory Usage in 2008 R2 Servers

I hope this may help someone out there…

A number of our servers run Windows 2008r2 and look after huge data areas containing hundreds of millions of files.

We were finding no matter how much memory we gave the servers, after a week or so, the memory usage would be between 90 and 100% full.  Our only fix at the time was to restart the server each time to free up the memory.  There was no application taking this memory, it was just disappearing.

A very good friend of mine had come across this problem before and suggested using SetSystemFileCacheSize64.exe which clears the system cache and frees up the memory instantly.  The problem was related to the amount of files Windows was keeping in it’s cache.

You can also set SetSystemFileCacheSize64.exe to limit the amount of cache the system uses.

I hope this may help others who have the same problem.

http://www.safedatastorage.co.uk

Do you check your backup reports?

Years ago in a previous Job, I looked after a customer with GBs of new data produced every day. They insisted on backing up the data themselves, though they had a maintenance contract with the company I worked for who offered also an online backup service. Anyway, one of their administrators put a DAT tape into the drive every night and removed it the next morning, labelled it, and stored it in a fire proof safe. One day the servers hard drive crashed. They called us because they couldn’t restore the data from tape for some unknown reason. It turned out that although they put a tape in every night, removed it every morning, label it, and stored it, what they forgot to do was check the backup reports.  If they had, they would have realised that the backups had never rant. They had a year’s supply of backup tapes, neatly dated, and all of them empty.

In the end, they had to send the hard drive off to get their data retrieved and were very lucky to get back a good 90% of their data.  It cost back them thousands of pounds and two weeks without a system.

Online backup companies like ourselves offer services where you don’t need to worry about checking your reports, you can just sit back and relax.  Is it not worth thinking about letting someone else take responsibility for your data?

www.safedatastorage.co.uk

You Backup every evening – Nice, but what if the system crashes at 4pm

So you backup every night to some kind of external device, you take that offsite and use a different device the next evening.  Well done! But let’s say it’s 4pm Tuesday afternoon.  The network / servers have been running well all day and everyone is happy.  Then your phone starts going mad with users unable to open emails.  It’s quick to work out that the Exchange server has died.  You go to the server room and realise that two of your hard drives have died.  Not a problem, you have a backup from last night.  Apart from the question how long will it take you to restore and get the server live (as little as minutes if you were using our bare metal solution) but what about all those emails that have been lost during the day, or the appointments users arranged.  When you restore from last nights backup, you would have lost all of this data.  What if this server had been your main Database server and you had 50 users inputting information all day?

A daily backup is no longer enough when we depend on our computer systems so much.  Downtime is one thing, but the time lost from not backing up frequently throughout the day can be and possibly more costly.

With both our backup products you can backup as many times as you like during the day.  In the above scenario, a Bare Metal Backup would allow you to virtually boot your server on any hardware within minutes and keep it running until you have time to fix the original server.  With our file Backup solution it will take longer, but at least the data lost is kept to a minimum.

If you only backup once a day, see if you can increase the frequency before it’s too late

http://www.safedatastorage.co.uk

Local Kent School implements laptop backups to the cloud

A local Kent Primary school needed a backup solution for all their laptops after one was stolen and all the teachers’ data was lost.  A bit like bolting the stable door, but never the less they needed a solution that they could rely on and could monitor from one central location to make sure all laptops were being backed up.

The solution was simple, an Online Backup client that automatically runs backups, but was clever enough to know when it had missed a backup and would send missing data once the laptop was back online.

We helped the school to implement this and now the school login to our portal to view all of their laptop backups and account status in one area.

Does your school or office require a cloud backup system that can be monitored centrally?  Let us know if we can put a solution together for you.

http://www.safedatastorage.co.uk

Upgrading Shadow Protect from v3.5 to 5.0.2 creates new backup chain

We came across this problem recently when trying to update one of our customers from Shadow Protect (SP) from v 3.5 to v 5.0.2.  The problem is that you have to uninstall v 3.5 with the v5 installer which then removes the backup job.  When you install V5, you have to create a new backup job or try to restore the previous backup job via a registry edit http://www.storagecraft.com/support/kb/article/191 which works fine from v4 but not v3 (last comment in this link)http://www.storagecraft.com/support/forum/upgrade-shadowprotect-v352-v5 So when you create a backup in v5 it will start from scratch and will not continue the chain which forces a new SPF (full file) backup.  When running on a local LAN this isn’t such a problem, but when your customers are uploading a full bare metal image via the internet to our servers, this is a huge problem.

This solution worked for me:-

Upgrade v3.5 to v4.15 – restart server

Upgrade v.4.15 to 5.0.2 – restart server

After restart, open SP and allow to run as normal.  It will continue where the chain left off which means continued small file backups!

V4.15 has an earlier installer and doesn’t request you to uninstall v3.5

I have run this upgrade on 4 servers (2 x 2008 64bit 1 x 2008r2 and sbs2008) and all have worked fine.  I would stress you test this in a test environment first before running on a live system.

I hope this helps others out there

www.safedatastorage.co.uk

Why use Online Backup?

It’s a good question.  If you religiously backup all your data to USB drives or Tapes every day and take that backup media offsite, then do you really need to consider an online backup account? What can it do that you’re not doing already?

Let consider a few questions:-

Can you restore a file from anywhere 24/7 even to a smart phone?

Can you restore any version of a file no matter how many times it’s been modified?

Are the files fully encrypted and kept in a safe place?

If you’re using a conventional backup method then the answers to the above questions are probably all “No”

If your data is important to you, you really should consider an online backup solution.

Online backup is a huge market and new providers are popping up everyday.  Go with a well established provider and not necessarily the cheapest and ask where the data is stored.  Don’t backup to companies overseas, or if you do, just remember that data restore time could be slower, and technical support may be harder to receive.