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What is the SOS Online Backup Service? |
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The SOS Online Backup Service is a brand-new software service that finally delivers pure-software backup. No CDs to change each day, no tapes to swap out, no lost backups due to media failure (did you know that up to 60% of tape-based backups become corrupt or fail?).
SOS comes on each night, selects the files you've told it to protect, encrypts them, compresses them, and transfers them using SOS's UltraSafe technology to remote data-centres.
From there - you can recover your data anywhere in the world! Even better - you can recover any version of any file that you've got under protection.
SOS brings big-business IT best-practice to you the little guy. Your data is Safe OffSite. |
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What if we already have a tape backup system? |
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Using a tape backup system and an online backup system offers the best of both worlds. Critical files, like billing, customer contact files and databases can be kept on the online backup system, while the tape system can be used to create a full backup of the entire system once or twice a month. The tapes and drive will last longer and require less maintenance.
The remote backup system can provide a quick and easy way to retrieve critical files and databases without the hassle of searching through tapes. More importantly, you can access it from anywhere in the world by just installing the FREE software that we give you on that computer. |
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What if we already have a Zip drive? |
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Frankly, we believe that it is not optimal for most users to use a zip or other removable disk media for backup. A remote backup service is completely automated and has the required file redundancy to protect important data. You also have access to all versions of a single file; meaning you can easily retrieve a file’s copy as it stood last week or last month. All the changes are accurately recorded through out a file’s lifecycle when you use our backup system.
The only safe way to use a zip drive for backup is to have three disks and make the same backup three times. That way when one of the disk fails you are still protected. |
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How long will an online backup take? |
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Our backup system doesn’t take complete backups every time. Instead it relies on incremental backup technology: only the difference is backed up every time it runs. Offices with high-speed internet connections should find this service comparable with tape drives. Dial up users will be able to do incremental backups in thirty to sixty minutes.
However, the initial backup can take several nights to complete. We recommend backing up the most important files first and then selecting other files as the backup progresses. Or, the initial backup can be run over the weekend. |
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Onsite, Offsite - What's the difference? |
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Basically, remote backups work like regular tape backups, with one important difference. Instead of sending backups to a tape drive or other media, a remote backup sends encrypted file data over the internet to an offsite computer file storage system.
This usually happens at night while your business is closed and nobody is using the computers. It's completely automatic. In fact, you may forget it's working every night. |
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Why are remote backups considered more beneficial? |
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The data is immediately stored off-site using an automated backup system. Also, only an internet connection is needed, completely eliminating the need for expensive backup equipment and media. Since the system is automated, manual labor is eliminated. Best of all is the data security. You can’t rely to backup your company’s most critical data to be stored on a tape drive or zip drive which can be accessed easily by a human being, if the physical hindrances are overcome. |
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Do I have to install the backup software on every PC that I want backed up? |
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If your computers are connected over a network, you only have to install our FREE software on a machine that can connect to all the computers you want to back up. You then map the network drives that you want to back up, and select the desired files on the network drives. This means you can back up files stored on any computer, if you can view their files over the network. |
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What happens to my data once it is at your remote storage facility? |
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Firstly, we don’t see it as data. All the data are encrypted on your computer using the password you provide and then compressed and transmitted over Internet. Hence, NOT even our system administrators would be able to see your data. It’s you and ONLY you – it’s 100% guaranteed.
The backed-up chunks of your files are stored on our RAID severs in Tier-1 Data Centers. This means that your data is safe – Safe Off Site. |
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How do you protect data on your secure server? Can it be accessed by an unauthorised person (either onsite or offsite)? Is it stored on one hard drive/server or multiple? How do you backup the data? Do you use tapes, hard drives, online? |
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Whether your data can be accessed by an unauthorised person depends on the level of security you select when you sign up. If you select UltraSafe security - then your data is stored so that not even SOS Engineers can access that data.
The downside to this of course is that if you forget your password - then there will be no way of recovering the data that you have stored in the system.
SOS has multiple data-centers and the data is stored on multiple hard-disks at these locations. |
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Is this available for apple macs or is it just pc based? |
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The software is only available for Windows PC at the moment. Do you run virtual PC or anything like that which would allow you to run our software?
We will be porting the software to Mac in the coming months. Please check back with us again soon |
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Can I subscribe for larger accounts (over 10 GB) and/or back up a server using SOS? |
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Yes, you can get larger accounts than 10 GB - and/or you can easily use more than one SOS account.
Depending on how you've got your fileserver setup - there are different ways of configuring SOS. For example - you could setup SOS to run on the server itself and just use one large account. The benefit of this is that whoever has access to that SOS account will then have file access to all the files on your server.
However - in most offices - users have their own folder on the fileserver, and have network drives mapped to those folders. In this configuration - user 1 rarely has access to user 2's files. If you wanted to preserve these file access restrictions - you could take out N accounts - and have SOS run on each of the workstations. That would ensure that all files are backed up - but each user would only have remote access to their own files.
If you would like to have a custom account setup - please let us know by emailing care@hostjack.co.uk and we can make the necessary arrangements. |
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Windows NT backup provides the following backup types - Normal, Copy, Differential, Incremental and Daily. It also provides for file and folder inclusion and exclusion lists. What backup types does SOS support? How sophisticated are the selection criteria? |
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The backup performed by SOS is a full backup, followed by differential backup - and its performed on whatever periodicity you select (daily, weekly, or monthly).
Given that SOS performs backups over the internet - the type of backup performed is deliberately designed to minimise the amount of data transferred. This done by doing two levels of differential backup.
If you have selected for SOS to backup 100 files - on the first day, all 100 files will be compressed, encrypted, and transferred to the SOS Backup Server storage grid.
On the second day - SOS will detect which files have been changed. It will then take that set of files - and actually go inside each file to determine which binary digits - or which ones and zeros - have changed since the last time a backup ran. It then only transfers this data to the backup grid.
This means two things. Firstly - your daily transfer is very small. In many tests - we have seen the daily incremental transfer being in the order of .01% of the backup size. Secondly - it means that an unlimited number of daily versions is kept for each of your files as you backup.
You can choose to backup files, folders, and drives with SOS. When recovering data - SOS allows you to manage backups from multiple workstations all within the same interface - so if you're a network administrator - you can recover all of the files from multiple workstations on your network from one interface. |
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