Buy a tape library. Buy tapes for your tape library. Buy a SCSI card for your server. Buy expensive backup software such as Symantec (formerly Veritas) Backup Exec. Load tapes, backup servers, pull tapes, clean drive, insert second group of tapes and repeat, ad nauseum. The challenge for Network Administrators everywhere has been successfully backing up their companies data. Not only is this expensive and difficult task - it is also utterly repetitive and boring. In recent days some of the pain has been relieved by Disk to Disk backup, which is then augmented with Disk to Tape backup for disaster recovery purposes.
Smaller businesses can oftentimes use removable hard drives from companies such as Iomega to perform these backups (e.g. the REV drive). But for larger businesses the choice has largely still been a combination of disk and tape. Disk provides the advantage of random read and writes but lacks the portability of tape.
Online backups have long been the golden dream for Network Administrators. They offer a secure, off-site, pain-free method of performing backups and generally include advanced features such as incremental backups, bit-differential backups, multiple version restores, and centralized management. Still, the difficulty has been in the pricing. My favorite traditional service has been Mozy Pro, but this service quickly becomes uneconomical for larger businesses. Licenses run $3.50 per computer per month while space runs at the more reasonable $0.50 per GB per month. But still, this leaves a mid-sized company with a decent amount of storage (say 500 GB) paying $250/mo., not including licensing fees.
Other alternatives have included Carbonite, which offers more space at a lower price but fails in the features department. Streamload's MediaMax is an attractive service but they seem to be advancing developmentally slower than a snail. There backup software has been stuck at Beta 6 for longer than I can remember. Still, they do support large files and their prices are very reasonable.
Amazon S3 is probably looked upon most fondly. Not strictly a backup medium rather it is a more generic storage medium. It lacks almost any features besides the very basic file handling functionality but numerous vendors are working on various applications - including remote backup applications for S3. Still, none have yet reached a large level of proficiency and while some features are excusable one that is not is Amazon's 5 GB limit per file. Maluke's S3 Backup intends to circumvent this limit in the near future by spanning across buckets files larger than 5 GB but there process in this area has been too slow for the current need.
Today, however, I discovered what may be the solution. For some time now there has been a backup provider entitled IBackup which has offered expensive, high-end remote backup capabilities. What really makes them unique is their aim at the enterprise. While most backup services are more aimed at consumers, IBackup has sought to offer the services enterprises would desire. For example, they are able to perform online, pain-free backups of SQL Server and Exchange - two notoriously troublesome applications when it comes to backups. So what? They are still expensive. Correct, but there is a lesser known alternative created by the same company and appearing to be built on the same basic infrastructure - iDrive. This service is aimed at consumers and small businesses but a careful review of their Terms of Service (ToS) on my part (note: I'm just a network guy, not a lawyer) seemed to suggest that they put no restrictions on who could sign up for the service as long as the service was used legally. I spent some time chatting with one of their representatives who informed me that they didn't recommend the service for more than 200 GB for practicality sake (backing up across the internet) but at the same time, didn't state that one couldn't try. Yes, the software doesn't include the advanced granular backups of IBackup, but it does offer the space that the other services don't. I downloaded the app and gave it a try. The interface is pretty decent - similar to Mozy Pro, better than Carbonite. It began uploading at a speed of roughly 4.5 MB per second, and this was with me throttling it back on my end. We'll see how it does with the several hundred GB of data I am throwing at it.
I don't know if they can make this a profitable model. Will they change their licensing to prevent actual unlimited uploads? Will they be able to turn a profit by allowing a few companies to use large amounts of bandwidth that actually costs them money but having lots of smaller customers that don't use up nearly their available allotment? I know, personally, that by offering a service like iDrive they have interested me more in iBackup, and I would consider purchasing additional accounts of both iDrive (for additional computers) as well as licenses for iBackup (to handle granular, always-online applications).
Overall Rating: 4.9/5.
Reasoning: Has everything you could possibly want, except perhaps the track record that says, "Hey, we aren't going to realize this is unprofitable in two months and restrict the program."