Backing Up is Hard to Do
Several months ago, my state bar association began a search for a vendor to serve the backup needs of its members. With the memory of Hurricane Katrina still vivid, and its impact still being felt by many within the Mississippi legal profession, data backup is an area of great interest to lawyers in my state. I was asked to test drive an online service called CoreVault. I was amazed at their high level of service, and the ease at which backups could be performed.
The service is web based, and sends compressed encrypted data to the company's storage facilities in Oklahoma. The service has remote redundant data storage facilities in the event of failure on their end, and can back up as frequently as required. Locally, the backup software operates on a local workstation with access to the data to be backed up. The software compresses the data and sends it electronically to CoreVault as frequently as scheduled. For my test, I selected 5 Gigs of data from my server. I expected the initial download to take several days, given data throughput rates even on a T-1, and scheduled the software to begin at 6:00 p.m. and to end at 7:00 a.m. To my surprise, the initial download was completed overnight. Thereafter, incremental downloads take only a matter of minutes. The service will retain as many versions of a backed up file as you select. I chose 5, meaning in the event a file ever became corrupted on my machine, I can restore from up the the 5 previous backed up versions.
Set-up was simple. A technician from CoreVault logged into my workstation through gotomeeting and took control. I told him the location of the data to back up, and the times and frequency of backups I desired, and within 15 minutes everything was set. Backup began that evening right on schedule, and was finished by 5:00 a.m. Daily thereafter I receive 2 emails confirming that backup began and was successfully completed. These emails are sent from my workstation. In the event that my machine fails to send data 2 days in a row, CoreVault contacts me to alert me to the problem and troubleshoot.
As my friend Ross Kodner is fond of saying, "We don't back up to back up, we back up to restore." Restoring also went without a hitch. I merely logged in, selected the files I wanted to restore, and the location to which I wanted to restore them, and seconds later, they were restored from Oklahoma to my local machine.
I cannot speak to the highly technical issues of security and encryption. I am told that the data is highly secure, and can only be restored from a machine other than the originating server using a very long password. Frankly, I am deferring to Jim Calloway's due diligence on the security front. The Oklahoma Bar selected CoreVault as its vendor of choice for members after significant investigation, and I am confident that if Jim is satisfied enough to recommend it to his members, it must be really, really secure.
I have tried numerous backup solutions over the past decade, all with unsatisfactory results, and all of which have involved significant time and oversight by me. My current office shares a server room with another business that uses a very sophisticated and expensive tape backup system. Every morning, someone from the business has to remove and replace a tape, and be responsible for securely storing the most recent tape, presumably with some off-site rotation. Every so often, his server maintenance vendor comes in because something is not working with his backup. CoreVault eliminates all of that. I simply set it, and forget it. If for some reason it fails to back up, the company will contact me, log in, and fix the problem remotely. No tapes. No hardware. And no daily involvement by me or my staff. I agreed to test the service as part of an evaluation for my bar association, but I liked it so much that I signed on as a client. Cost varies depending on data size. There are no long term service commitments. Mine runs a reasonable $50 per month.
