Cloud based backup for small shops and remote offices.
It also works well as a redundant system for larger installations.
Pay by the GB not the workstation. Pete Ganze (edited for clarity): Hey. This is Pete. I'd like to talk to you about Carbonite and Intronis. They're both apps that run on your computer that will, at a designated time through the day, send your data off-site.
Carbonite has a function that'll send it to an on-site device as well for a BDR (Backup and Disaster Recovery) setup. Both are relatively cost-effective, both work, and we use them in many scenarios a lot of times as a backup to a backup, so we'll have a BDR on-site, but then we'll also have Carbonite going off-site, just in case.
The BDRs are all images, and if you get corruption, you can end up losing some data that way, so we use Carbonite as a last defense. One of the ways that Carbonite is sold is as a block, for the year, of 250 gigs, and you can back up as many PCs as you want under that. For a number of our clients, if they have people that are in the field a lot, like with laptops, we'll put them on the Carbonite, and for less than 300 bucks a year, you can get 15 computers sometimes backing up to their cloud. You can also watch it from the cloud.
I don't know if I've mentioned it, but we do look at backups on the final Friday of every month, which is "Backup Friday," and we go through and we try to give everybody an assessment of what their backups look like.
Carbonite makes it easy because you can just log in and see. You can also set it up so that it sends you emails of the status. Intronis is actually a Barracuda product now that we do use. We set that up on your computer, and then it backs up to the Barracuda cloud, and that works as well. It's a little more expensive. It will send you emails if it's offline, if you're not getting the backup so that you know what's going on.
It's a little more complicated, but it's cost-effective, and we do have an account that a lot of times we use for internal stuff. We resell for clients if that's the direction you want to go. Again, it is probably the base level you would want to consider for your backups just because you have a disaster. You know we've talked about recovery point objective, and we've talked about recovery time objective, so if the thing ran last night at nine and it's 9 o'clock now, you're going back 12 hours. Well, if you have 30 gigs of data and you're getting a gig an hour, it may take you 30 hours to get your data back.
Carbonite absolutely throttles you. I don't know what the number is, but after you've downloaded your first ten gigs, then they basically put you in the queue, and you go super slow. So, we have had many clients that did the math, and when they're looking to do the restore, it's not feasible that they'll ever get their data. Now, Carbonite does have a program where you can pay the money, and they'll send it to you on a drive that you then send back, so they'll accommodate it, but it's maybe not as simple.
Your data is worth what it costs you to produce it, which is the labor spent by all your employees producing that data, so it may very well be your biggest asset that your company has, and if you're down five employees for 3, 4, or 5 days waiting for Carbonite to send you a drive with your data, and then you get that drive you know next week, and then you start the restore process from there, it can take a long time. With that said, you're going to get your data back, which is the important part, and if you can abide some downtime, or if you're not backing that much up and it's not really mission-critical, it would just be problematic if you lost it, and Carbonite is a good way to go. Intronis,
I don't believe they throttle quite as much on the restore, but again that's all online, so if you have somebody who is in someplace without great internet access, and they end up with a data disaster, you're going to need the internet, and you're going to be at the mercy of the company that's sending your data back.
So, those are my views on Carbonite and Intronis. We sell both. We use both. I've had both of them save my life. I love them. I think that if you're serious about corporate data, we need to talk about how far back you're really able to go, comfortably, back in time for a restore, and how long it'll take you to get your data back because those are two pretty big numbers and when the world blows up, those are the two questions that are going to be on your mind, and we can definitely manage those, so give me a call. We can set a time.
We have offices in Rochester and Syracuse. We can meet with you and talk about your different options, different price points, and different levels of what you can expect from your backup. So, give me a call. Thanks.
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