When the CrowdStrike update and associated outage adversely affected Windows devices in July 2024, many organizations were impacted. Just outside Houston, IT operations at the Spring Bank Independent School District (ISD) were among those affected.

Spring Branch ISD has over 31,000 children under its care across 46 schools, spanning 57 buildings and 6,000 staff members.

The organization faced significant challenges when the CrowdStrike outage hit, and it came at the worst possible time, given that summer school classes don’t run on Fridays.

“During the summer, school districts are primarily off on Friday, we work 4-10, so we’re closed on Fridays," Troy Neal, Spring Branch ISD’s executive director of cybersecurity and technology, told ITPro at Pure Accelerate 2026.

“[We] woke up Friday morning, turned on the news, and there’s this banner running across that says ‘CrowdStrike outage’ and I’m like ‘we’re a CrowdStrike customer, is this really affecting us?’

“Outages can be lots of things, so I looked at my phone, had some messages, and [I said] let’s start checking the systems, and [I] notice[d] the phone system was down.”

This posed a problem for the organization, given that these systems are hosted on-prem, Neal explains. Further investigation showed staff members couldn’t access some critical services.

At this point, the scramble to recover, or at the very least establish what was happening, was on.

Disaster recovery with Everpure

Spring Branch ISD works with a range of hardware vendors for storage, recovery, and backup purposes, Neal explains. Among these are Hitachi, Dell, Veeam, and Everpure, formerly Pure Storage.

High-capacity, high-performance storage is critical for the organization, which manages more than 60,000 endpoints spanning Chromebooks, iPads, and various Windows devices at schools across the district.

When Neal started at Spring Branch ISD some seven years ago, the organization was in the process of refreshing its storage capabilities due to the sheer volume of CCTV footage they stored.

“We have 4,400 cameras in our school district,” he explains. “We store about four to six petabytes of data on just CCTV, so we started doing our due diligence.”

This exploratory process saw Neal and colleagues scour the market for options, eventually narrowing the field down to Dell, Everpure, and Hitachi. Budgetary constraints were a concern, he notes, particularly given that Spring Branch ISD is publicly funded.

An initial offer saw Neal faced with a $7.1 million price tag for six petabytes across two locations over 10 years. He felt this was actually good value, but it was outside of his budget, which was just over half that amount.

Hitachi ultimately met Spring Branch’s requests, and the organization secured vital storage infrastructure to meet its increasingly demanding data needs. But it was here that the relationship with Everpure blossomed.

“We were really impressed with Pure at the time,” he says. “In the cyber space, 3-2-1 is the standard for backup strategies. I like 4-2-1, [as] you can never have enough backups.”

“I’m a layered defense kind of guy for everything we do, and so we had an opportunity with some extra bond funds to bring in another solution to be our secondary backup.”

That deal saw Spring Branch ISD adopt FlashBlade//S and FlashBlade//E solutions, which provide users with high-speed, scale-out backup storage. Notably, Neal says that when the CrowdStrike outage hit, these proved vital.

The road to recovery

After the initial furore of the CrowdStrike outage and the impact on Spring Branch ISD dissipated, Neal says he was in some way glad that it was a “CrowdStrike outage, not a Spring Branch ISD outage, and caused by an adversary.”

Focusing on the task at hand, Spring Branch found itself in a similar situation to many organizations elsewhere in the world: dealing with a botched patch.

“We’re in the office by 6.30 am that morning,” he says. “We pulled out our incident response plan, and [said] this is a live exercise.”

“Our first thing was their patch,” Neal adds. “That didn’t work too well.”

The initial workaround saw Neal’s team revert to a Veeam backup, which he says was “just a regular-sized virtual machine (VM) that we had”. This was expected to take around 45 minutes for a single VM.

Spring Branch ISD has over 200 VMs across its IT estate, meaning the recovery time could take days. With summer school students and staff expected back in on Monday morning, this could prove disastrous.

“We [said] this isn't going to work, let’s try Pure too.”

The resulting backup “took minutes,” Neal notes, adding “this is the performance we paid for and why we chose Pure.”

Leaning on Everpure backups, Neal says critical services were back up and running within around four hours. Thereafter, ancillary services were up by around noon.

“About six hours later, we were up and running, and then we did some cleanup work over the weekend. We also had to wait on some of our owners of some of these systems to test them, validate them, and then by the end of the weekend, we rank a whole other snapshot of every single VM,” he says.

“We had some good clean states going forward, and Monday came around, and summer school went on. Nobody knew the difference.”

Looking ahead, Neal says Spring Branch ISD plans to continue - and expand - on its relationship with Everpure. The organization is going back to a 3-2-1-style cluster, and recently brought in another FlashArray//C solution for additional backup.

Notably, the school district is also moving to EverGreen//One, the company’s storage as a service (STaaS) platform. This aims to unify on-prem and cloud storage resources, providing users with a single data storage platform based on a subscription. Neal notes that the flexibility and ease of use associated with this setup were particularly appealing.

“I’m going with a subscription-based model. So I don’t care what the hardware is, because that’s Pure’s problem to figure out and manage,” he jests.

Most businesses would fall apart after three days of total downtime, according to Veeam, and executives are woefully unprepared for AI-driven risks.

According to its latest Data Resilience survey of more than 4,000 C-Suite and senior IT leaders, Veeam said data outages are now a bigger concern than the threat of a recession.

More than eight-in-ten organizations have experienced outages that weren't resolved immediately in the past five years. External cyber attacks were the most widespread cause, at 26%, closely followed by human error at 23% and system or hardware failure at 16%.

IT leaders are conscious of growing risks, the survey found, with 67% citing ransomware as their biggest threat looking ahead. AI-related risks, however, are starting to cause concerns.

Data leaks, algorithmic bias, and uncontrolled automation were cited by 29% of respondents as a key challenge for many moving forward.

The fallout from cyber incidents isn't just technical, either. More than half (57%) of leaders said employees had resigned, threatened to resign, or experienced burnout following major cyber incidents, with lost productivity and wellbeing among the top unexpected impacts.

Firms aren’t confident of data recovery

While nearly half (47%) of organizations expect they'll fall victim to a significant data breach or cyber attack, only 32% believe full recovery of critical data and business operations is very likely.

As a result, 62% of leaders see data outages as a bigger financial threat to their business than an economic recession.

“In today’s AI-powered world, trust in data is every organization’s most valuable asset. Backups are the last line of truth in a world where AI can fabricate, ransomware can encrypt, and a single misconfiguration can cascade across an entire infrastructure in minutes,” said Dave Russell, senior vice president and head of strategy at Veeam.

“In the AI era, it’s not just about recovering your data – it’s about keeping your business functioning and thriving with the trusted data it needs. Too many organizations are still managing risk reactively, when real innovation – and real trust – begin with a foundation of resilient, secure data.”

Nearly half (44%) of IT leaders said they weren't confident that their organizations could recover all critical data within 24 hours of a major cyber attack or data loss event, according to Veeam.

Despite this, though, 38% of boards or leadership teams surveyed have never formally discussed AI-driven or emerging attack types.

Only 31% of boards review resilience readiness, such as recovery KPIs or failover results, on a quarterly basis, and responsibility for resilience is often split across CIOs, CISOs, Heads of Risk, and COOs.

Meanwhile, fewer than half of organizations surveyed (49%) link executive KPIs to resilience outcomes, and only 24% of leaders regularly take part in crisis simulations for data loss or disruption.

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Data protection and management software provider Arctera has had a busy year. Cohesity's acquisition of Veritas saw it spun out as an independent company at the start of 2025. Subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions, it will now join Cloud Security Group (CSG) and operate as a separate business unit within a portfolio that includes Citrix and Tibco.

Backup Exec (BE) is Arctera's flagship data protection solution. And after unshackling itself from Veritas, the company assigned it a dedicated software development team – something it hadn't previously had. They haven't wasted any time, as the latest BE 25.1 on review delivers a wealth of updates.

It supports Windows Server 2025 and offers improved Microsoft 365 protection. Along with facilities to secure Teams private channels and restore Exchange items to PST files, it now provides Microsoft Entra ID tenant data backup and restore services.

MS365 full consolidation backup performance has been enhanced, and SharePoint Subscription Edition is supported for backup and GRT (granular recovery technology) item restores. A restore administrator role has been added, and the integral malware detection scanner now supports the Symantec Protection Engine (SPE) along with Windows Defender.

Arctera Backup Exec 25.1 review: Easy deployment and backup

We installed BE 25.1 on a HPE ProLiant Windows Server 2022 host and were ready for some backup action in 20 minutes. The informative widget-based console dashboard can be customised to suit, and BE now automatically creates a self-protect media server backup job which secures essential data such as catalogue files, the BE database, encryption keys, and job logs.

MS365 protection is quick to configure as you use the console's backup and restore panel to add a new tenant, click on the link provided, and enter the unique device code it generates. During backup job, creation you can choose from any or all MS365 services with the selection window in BE 25.1 offering an extra tab for Entra ID components.

Virtualization host protection is equally simple to create, as we used the console to deploy an agent to our Hyper-V systems to enable agentless VM backup. Agents aren't required for VMware VM protection, as we declared our vCenter hosts to BE by providing their IP addresses and credentials.

For VM backups, you have a forever incremental strategy that automatically starts with one full backup followed by partial backups, multi-stream backups within a VM are supported, and it can secure virtual disks in parallel. If you have VMs hosting business apps, you may want to deploy an agent inside them, as this enables features such as GRT for item-level restoration.

Backup job creation is swift; after selecting sources, you assign a job from a list of predefined ones, add multiple stages for duplicating backups to off-site storage, set a schedule, and enable backup set encryption for extra ransomware protection. Backup destinations can be local disks, network shares, deduplicating stores (which you'll need for MS365 backup jobs), tape drives, and a wide range of cloud providers, with BE 25.1 now supporting immutable OVHcloud WORM storage as well as Azure, Amazon S3, and Google.

Arctera Backup Exec 25.1 review: Data recovery

Restore features are excellent as you select a source, pick a recovery point, browse its files, folders or volumes and decide where to send items. GRT can be used to restore items such as SQL databases, you can recover individual Hyper-V and VMware virtual disks and create a simplified recovery disk for bare metal recovery of physical servers.

If time is of the essence, you can use the Instant VM Recovery feature to quickly create a new VM from an existing backup. Choose a VM from the source list, select this option, pick a backup set and decide which virtualisation host to send it to. It's fast as it only took us one minute to restore a SQL Server VM to a new VMware host.

We created a protection job for our entire MS365 account and found the recovery processes easy to use as a restore wizard guided us through choosing a component and selecting a point in time or backup set. For Exchange Online, we could choose individual emails and restore them to the original user or another mailbox while the new Entra ID protection service offered options for recovering any entity including our users, groups and enterprise apps.

Arctera Backup Exec 25.1 review: Ransomware protection

BE provides valuable ransomware protection services as it offers AES-256 backup encryption and support for backup devices such as LTO tape drives that use T10 hardware encryption. Access to the media server can be locked down by enabling RBAC (role-based access controls) and assigning one of five roles to permitted users.

Anomaly detection is enabled by default and comes into play after 30 backups have run. It compares criteria such as backup image sizes, item counts, job times plus the amount of transferred data and posts alerts in a dedicated console widget for review.

For malware scanning, you choose either the Defender or SPE engines from the main BE settings page and run them manually on selected backup sets or include them in VMware and Hyper-V VM restore jobs. We tested Defender on a Hyper-V VM backup that had malware preloaded which it identified and created an alert.

We did find it can be quite demanding for media server CPU resources but you can reduce its impact by modifying the default settings to allow Defender to apply throttling and use fewer threads. Scan times may also be an issue if you want to check a business-critical VM before restoring it as our tests took between 30-40 minutes to complete.

Arctera Backup Exec 25.1 review: Is it worth it?

Arctera's BE Simple Core Pack subscriptions are easy to understand and available in instance or capacity metering options with both enabling every Backup Exec feature and option. Instance metering will appeal to smaller businesses as it's based on compute instances which can be a physical system, a virtual machine or ten Microsoft 365 (MS365) users with the base price including an extra bonus instance for ten MS365 users.

Value looks good with Senetic UK listing a base one year 5-instance licence for £625 excluding VAT rising to around £2,600 for five years. You can upgrade at any time using Simple Add-On packs with a one year single instance pack costing £125.

SMBs seeking a reliable on-premises data protection and recovery solution for physical and virtualised server environments will find Arctera's Backup Exec 25.1 a top candidate. It can easily manage a hybrid backup strategy, includes full MS365 protection services, offers good ransomware protection and its flexible licensing schemes neatly avoid any hidden costs.

Kaseya has detailed its latest product innovations at DattoCon 2025, which include enhancements to its backup portfolio and the acquisition of email security vendor, INKY.

With these new capabilities, the vendor said it is equipping MSPs with the necessary tools to deliver critical services to customers while simultaneously driving meaningful business growth.

As part of its backup portfolio expansion, Kaseya announced the arrival of its next-generation Datto SIRIS 6, which it said represents the most powerful backup appliance in the industry, offering speedier recovery times at the "lowest cost on the market."

The firm also announced Datto Backup for Microsoft Entra ID, a new purpose-built backup and recovery solution designed to protect identity data. The offering promises rapid restoration times following accidental deletions, misconfigurations, and attacks, enabling MSPs to recover users, groups, and roles to keep businesses running.

Datto Backup for Microsoft Entra ID will be available as a standalone product as well as included as a free addition to Kaseya 365 User.

Elsewhere on the backup front, Kaseya unveiled its Cyber Resiliency Platform, which is scheduled to begin delivering features from April 2026. The solution has been designed to simplify vendor stacks, reduce operational complexity, and utilize advanced security and AI capabilities to enable fast recovery times. According to the vendor, MSPs will benefit from a unified view, flexible pricing, and pooled storage to help support the spectrum of backup cases.

INKY acquisition

As well as expanding its backup portfolio, Kaseya has also moved to enhance its email security capabilities with the acquisition of INKY. Founded in 2008, the vendor combines generative AI, behavioural analysis, and real-time user coaching to protect against advanced phishing and impersonation attacks.

INKY will be offered as a standalone solution, as well as included as a part of Kaseya 365 User, to enable deeper threat correlation, faster response times, and smarter AI-driven insights over time.

"With INKY joining the Kaseya family, its powerful AI-driven email security becomes even more effective – informed by our platform's data, integrated across our ecosystem, and available through Kaseya 365 User," commented Kaseya CEO Rania Succar. "Together, we'll deliver the most connected and proactive security experience in the industry."

Additional highlights

Elsewhere, Kaseya shared details of its new AI-powered intelligent automation solution, Digital Workforce, which will leverage an agentic learning system to solve common MSP challenges.

The offering consists of digital specialists that use agentic reasoning to understand MSP environments, and then "think", assess, and act as a technician would to resolve issues. A native addition to the Kaseya platform, MSPs will gain access to a single view across all components as well as the unified data stream that flows between them. Limited availability for Digital Workforce will begin in Spring 2026, the vendor revealed.

Additionally, from December 2025, Kaseya is ending its High Watermark pricing policy for Datto RMM, SaaS Protection, and Autotask, with the products to transition to a Committed Minimum Quantity policy. The firm's other tools are expected to receive the same treatment by the end of June 2026.

Enterprise-caliber protection

Kaseya said these latest updates will enable MSPs to take "enterprise-caliber protection" to smaller businesses at an accessible cost, with support across the spectrum of application types and protection across multiple threat vectors.

According to Succar, MSPs now stand at a "once-in-a-generation crossroads" as they continue to navigate the ever-changing digital transformation landscape.

"They have the opportunity to become indispensable in this next phase of AI-led innovation with security, intelligence, and automation," she elaborated. "Kaseya is investing with urgency to arm our MSP partners with the data, insights, and tools they need – packaged and priced for margin-expanding growth."

Businesses worried about managing a hybrid data protection strategy will find a lot to like about Barracuda's Backup appliances, as they do everything for you. Offered as physical or virtual appliances, they provide on-site backup, cloud replication, and full data restoration services. Plus, optional site-to-site replication with everything managed from a single cloud portal.

They're about to get more appealing, too, as Barracuda has introduced a completely new family of appliance models and moved from complex capacity-based licensing to a pure subscription model. Choices have been simplified as the old range, which comprised around ten different models, has been reduced to four.

The new appliances overcome the capacity limitations of their predecessors, which required you to migrate to the next model up if you ran out of backup space. They come with much higher capacities, allowing you to pay for what you want now and apply a licence upgrade when you need more.

In this review, we test the entry-level Backup 3004, which targets small businesses and edge scenarios and replaces the Backup 190, 290, 295, and 390 models. Delivered as a compact fan-less desktop box, it comes with a pair of 2TB SATA SSDs and supports environments that require around 1TB-2TB of backup capacity.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Subscriptions and prices

The two SSDs are configured as one non-redundant 4TB logical volume at the OS level, and it's worth going over the new subscriptions as Barracuda has radically updated them. There's no longer a charge for the appliance as this is now included with the new licences.

Starting at £110 per month for local backup support, a 1TB licence generously provisions 2TB of local storage, and adding another 1TB licence enables the full 4TB. If you want cloud storage, the 'CLD' licence starts at £210 per month, which includes the appliance, 2TB of storage for local backup, and all the cloud storage needed to replicate everything offsite.

Even better, these prices include full technical support plus the Energize Updates and Instant Replacement services, which all used to be separate purchases. For £260 per month, you can upgrade to Premium Support, which assigns a dedicated engineer, provides monthly check-ins, and regular reviews of your configurations.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Easy deployment

The Backup 3004 comes with dual Gigabit ports, but you only need to connect the first one for initial installation – the second can be configured later on as a redundant network link. There are also HDMI and USB ports, and it's worth connecting a monitor and keyboard at this stage to view the appliance's local console and, if required, give it a static IP address.

All further action takes place in the Barracuda Cloud portal, where we entered the appliance's serial number and linking code and waited two minutes while it registered with our account. From the local console, we could see that the LAN, internet, and cloud connections were up, and the appliance duly appeared online in our portal.

The portal provides a single point of access to all Barracuda cloud-managed products, and selecting the Backup option shows all registered appliances. It presents an informative dashboard with donut graphs for backup source status, used and available appliance storage, and data reduction efficiency, with further charts showing subscriptions, backup status for the last five jobs, storage allocation, and current active tasks.

We had all licences enabled for our appliance, so the storage chart showed the full 4TB, and with the appliance performing efficient variable block-level deduplication, actual capacity will be significantly higher – our tests returned an impressive 78% reduction. Essential ransomware protection is also provided as Barracuda's cloud repository is air-gapped and immutable.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Backup management

The price includes unlimited client support, and backup sources are declared to the portal, which provides download links for small footprint agents for Windows, macOS, and Linux hosts. These take seconds to install and automatically encrypt communications between the host and appliance.

To declare our VMware hosts we only had to supply the IP addresses and credentials of our vCenter hosts, while for Hyper-V hosts, you have two options. If you load the agent only on the host, it'll run storage-hungry image-based VM backups, while loading it in each VM enables more efficient incremental backups and full protection for virtualised apps.

Sources are assigned to a default backup schedule, which automatically backs up everything in them once a day with Barracuda employing an 'incremental forever' strategy, which runs one full backup for each source, followed by regular incrementals. We found it simple to create custom schedules, assign specific sources, choose items to back up, and repeat jobs as often as every 15 minutes.

Enabling cloud replication couldn't be easier, as you check one extra box when defining your schedules. The Backup 3004 can also function as a sender to a remote Barracuda receiver appliance for site-to-site replication, which also requires one tick to activate.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Recovery features

Data recovery options are plentiful, as we could select systems from the portal's restore browser, choose files, folders, and SQL databases, and recover them directly from the appliance or download them from our cloud repository. More ransomware protection is provided as you can apply custom retention policies, which determine how many days, weeks, months, and years you want backup copies to be retained.

VM recovery options are equally good as they can be restored back to the original host or another system with the LiveBoot option, restoring VMware VMs back to the host and using the appliance for datastore duties. The Cloud LiveBoot feature can run them in the cloud repository for up to 7 days, and another bonus is that it's now included in your subscription.

Failed systems can be brought back to life by downloading the bare metal recovery kit from the portal and using it to restore them from the appliance. Barracuda has you covered if internet access goes down, as the appliance has its own local web console, which can be used to run restore and LiveBoot operations.

Barracuda Backup 3004 review: Is it worth it?

Barracuda's new subscription models look like good value and simplify the acquisition process immensely, as the multiple options presented by the older licensing system made it difficult to manage costs. Providing the new appliances with spare storage capacity that can be enabled with upgrade licences as required also provides superior future-proofing.

These new features make the Backup 3004 a great choice for smaller businesses seeking an affordable on-premises data protection solution for physical and virtualised environments. It's easy to install, simple to manage from the cloud portal, and makes light work of managing a hybrid backup strategy.

Barracuda Backup 3004 specifications

Almost a third (30%) of IT professionals are losing sleep over their organization’s backup and recovery strategies, according to a survey from Kaseya.

Less than half (40%) of respondents feel confident in their backup systems’ ability to keep critical data safe in a crisis situation, while 30% worry that their company’s backup solutions are not good enough.

“So much is out of your control, it’s not surprising that nearly a third of IT professionals have had nightmares about their backup,” said Frank DeBenedetto, general manager at Kaseya.

“From human error to natural disasters to ransomware attacks, the only way to know your systems work is to test them repeatedly,” he added.

The report uncovered troubling statistics about the testing of organizational backup systems as well, finding that few businesses test regularly enough.

Just 15% test their backups daily and 25% test them weekly. Disaster recovery tests are undertaken by only 11% daily and 20% weekly, while 12% said they test disaster recovery systems on an ad hoc basis or not at all.

This represents a significant lack of preparedness, Kaseya warned. Especially considering that while 60% of respondents believe they can recover in the space of a day, the reality is that only 35% could.

Similarly, with just 10% of businesses reporting no IT outages over the last year, the importance of being prepared should be top of mind.

Backup preparation is key

Backups are a non-negotiable aspect of any security strategy, according to Matt Hastings, VP of product management at NinjaOne. Cloud-first backups can be useful in alleviating strain on IT teams through automatic backup procedures, he added.

“It can also simplify IT’s job to include backups as part of a broader endpoint management strategy. Automated endpoint management in particular can help IT teams minimize vulnerabilities, gain visibility and control, and maintain compliance with regulatory standards,” Hastings told ITPro.

Crucially, businesses must follow best backup practices, according to SolarWinds tech evangelist Sascha Giese, including encrypting database backup files, storing immutable copies of backups, and testing recovery processes.

“This is also an opportunity for organizations to assess how and where they are storing their data while ensuring they run the most modern performance monitoring and optimization solutions to protect data over the long term,” Giese told ITPro.

Assured Data Protections’ Rob Mackle echoed this point on immutable backups, calling them the ultimate safeguard against data loss in the event of ransomware attacks or other data-related incidents.

“Immutable backups should be a critical component of an organization’s cyber resiliency plans as they help ensure that backup data is tamper-proof and can be restored to its original state, minimizing the risk of data loss in the event of a cyber-attack,” Mackle said.

“Seeing that data is the lifeblood of most organizations, and the loss of your data or access to your data would affect the running of your business, we suggest that you beg, borrow and steal from other budgets in order to ensure you have a good backup and DR solution in place,” he added.

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The ActiveProtect products signal a new direction for Synology as they're designed to deliver a purpose-built backup appliance solution to mid-sized businesses and enterprises. Powered by Synology's new APM (ActiveProtect Manager) OS, they claim to deliver up to a 30-fold reduction in TCO compared with other solutions as they are preconfigured with a high storage capacity and avoid complex and costly licensing as their one-time purchase allows unlimited workloads to be secured up to the limits of the storage.

ActiveProtect offers unified data protection and recovery for a wide range of environments. It supports Windows and Mac endpoints, Windows and Linux servers, Oracle and SQL Server databases, SMB, NetApp, Nutanix and Synology NAS file servers, VMware and Hyper-V hosts, and all Microsoft 365 services.

The ActiveProtect family currently comprises three members – the 2U rackmount DP7400 plus the desktop 4-bay DP340 and 2-bay DP320 – and it's important to understand their target markets and the relationships between them. We discussed this with Synology which advised us it is not currently offering the DP340 and DP320 as standalone backup appliances for smaller businesses.

These two appliances are designed primarily for deployment in remote locations where they provide fast local backup and recovery services and are centrally managed as cluster members by a DP7400. The base price enables support for three cluster members (including the DP7400) with further three-year cluster licenses costing €1,800.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Hardware and deployment

The DP7400 is powered by a 12-core 2.9GHz AMD EPYC 7272 CPU teamed up with 64GB of DDR4 field-upgradeable to 512GB. You get a dedicated Gigabit management port and dual 10GbE data ports with two spare PCIe slots for further network upgrades using Synology's adapter cards.

The system is supplied with ten 20TB Synology HAT5310 SATA HDDs and two 3.84GB SAT5221 SATA SSDs. Deployment is swift as we followed the appliance's web-based wizard which installed APM and automatically configured a RAID6 array with hot-spare using all HDDs and a RAID1 SSD read/write cache with the whole process taking a shade over 15 minutes.

The web console presents a smart dashboard view with details on all protected workloads, total data size, the efficiency of APM's source-side deduplication plus backup copy status. It provides a job calendar view that's similar to the DSM Active Backup for Business app but goes much further with status details of cluster members along with graphs for backup duration, data increase, and storage usage trends.

Synology also provided us with a DP320 appliance which we set up as a remote backup device. After declaring it to the DP7400, it appeared in the main APM console and advised us it was under new management.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Protection plans

APM includes two default protection plans for general use and Microsoft 365 backups but it's easy enough to create your own. Ransomware protection kicks in immediately as all plan creation tasks start by offering you the choice of standard or immutable local storage where the latter stops any backup versions from being deleted until the retention period you've set has expired.

Jobs can be scheduled to run at regular intervals, you can decide how many versions to retain, make plans application-aware, and customize how they handle databases. An outstanding feature is backup verification for virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers as with this enabled, the plan runs test restores to APM's internal hypervisor, confirms they work, and records the processes as downloadable MP4 videos.

The last step is to decide if you want backups copied to a secondary location. You can define other remote APM appliances and we used our Synology C2 and Amazon S3 cloud storage accounts to assign buckets to APM which enhances ransomware protection by only accepting immutable buckets with Object Lock enabled and can enforce client-side encryption for secure transmissions.

We also created plans for the DP320 that backed up Windows clients locally at the remote site and copied the backups to the DP7400. More ransomware protection is provided with an air-gap feature that can be applied to backup copy appliances that for the specified periods, isolates them by denying connections. It also deactivates all network cards and, if required, shuts them down.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Declare and protect

Adding Windows PCs, macOS clients, and physical Windows and Linux servers requires the ActiveProtect agent to be installed locally. You create a connect key from the APM console by selecting the appliance you want to assign the workload to, enter the appliance's local IP address or remote FQDN along with the key in the client's interface and it will link up and offer to start the assigned backup plan.

Declaring our Hyper-V and VMware vCenter hosts only required their IP addresses and credentials and we could assign individual VMs to plans or use the auto backup feature at the host level so all newly created VMs are included. Backup performance over 10GbE is good as our first backup to secure three Hyper-V Windows Server VMs totaling 900GB only took 13 minutes.

Adding our Microsoft 365 tenant was a piece of cake as APM asked us to authenticate and accept its permission requests after which it created a new Entra ID APM app. We opted to use the default Microsoft 365 backup plan and apply it to all Exchange, OneDrive, Chat, Microsoft 365 Groups, SharePoint, and Teams components.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Recovery features

Data restoration features are in abundance as you choose a workload, load the recovery portal, view its files, folders, or volumes, pick a recovery point, and decide where to send them. Database recovery is a little more involved as we selected our SQL Server host VM, viewed its databases, downloaded the relevant MDF and LDF files and manually moved them to the target for restoration.

Another option is the recover to VM option which can be applied to any supported workload and can use VMware, Hyper-V or APM's built-in hypervisor. For our SQL Server host, we created a new VMware VM which took 24 minutes over a Gigabit connection while recovery to APM's own hypervisor took 6 minutes.

For Microsoft 365 recovery, we used the portal to select components plus a point in time and restore them to their original location or, for items such as emails and OneDrive files, to another user. APM also provides a self-service portal so authenticated users can carry out recovery tasks without pestering support staff.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 review: Is it worth it?

The market for purpose-built backup appliances is intensely competitive and Synology's ActiveProtect offers a solid alternative to the established names. With an MSRP of €39,999, the DP7400 is offering a lot for your money and you don't need to worry about client or capacity-based licenses either as everything is included in a one-off purchase.

The full house of 20TB HDDs delivers around 122TB of usable backup capacity and Synology's deduplication algorithms are very efficient as our 7TB of test backup data was squashed down to only 1.2TB representing a 1% usage. The DP340 and DP320 aren't such good value as they have MSRPs of €4,125 and €1,650 respectively but integrating them as cluster members is easy and they simplify remote site backup and replication.

We found it pleasingly easy to deploy and combining all the features offered by APM's plans allows you to create a fully managed 3-2-1-1-0 strategy. Larger businesses that want an affordable all-in-one solution for their entire data protection strategy will find Synology's ActiveProtect DP7400 is a strong contender.

Synology ActiveProtect DP7400 specifications

SMBs are faced with a huge choice of data backup products but Nakivo's Backup & Replication (NBR) adds extra appeal as it supports more host platforms than any other solution. Along with versions for Windows, Linux, VMware, Nutanix and AWS EC2, Nakivo provides packages for all the main NAS appliance vendors including Qnap and Synology plus generic ARM-based models.

Client support is good as although macOS support is still missing, NBR can protect Windows and Linux servers and workstations, VMware, Hyper-V and Nutanix hosts and business apps including Exchange and SQL Server. NBR secures all Microsoft 365 (MS365) components with v11 on review adding support for MFA-protected MS365 accounts and options for direct cloud-to-cloud backup to a wide range of public clouds.

There's more as NBR 11 has real-time replication of VMware vSphere 8 virtual machines (VMs) currently in beta testing and introduces agentless backup for ProxMox Virtual Environment (VE) to eliminate the need for guest OS agents. Nakivo improves data security further with source-side backup encryption so it's protected in-flight and at rest in the backup repository.

Nakivo Backup & Replication 11 review: Synology deployment

Nakivo offers a 14-day trial with all features unlocked and we opted to install NBR on a Synology DS1823xs+ desktop NAS appliance running DSM 7.2. We immediately hit a glitch as the latest version isn't available in the DSM Package Center app as it is still undergoing Synology verification.

Nakivo had us covered though, as it provides an excellent online tutorial showing how to upgrade the available v10 app to the latest version. We used PuTTY to SSH to the appliance and followed the CLI instructions to download v11 and apply it in 10 minutes.

NBR comprises three service components with a Director for browser-based management, Transporters to handle backup, replication plus recovery operations, and Repositories for storing backups. A repository was automatically created on our Synology NAS but there are plenty of other choices as you can use local folders or CIFS/NFS network shares plus standard and immutable cloud storage from Amazon EC2 and S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, Wasabi, and Backblaze B2.

Ransomware protection goes further as during backup job creation you can enable encryption and immutable recovery points which cannot be deleted for a set number of days. Malware scanning is also available as NBR can employ a separate server hosting Microsoft Windows Defender, ESET, Sophos Intercept X or Clam AV to scan backups prior to recovery.

Nakivo Backup & Replication 11 review: Data protection

The NBR web console is well designed and systems to be protected are added to the NBR inventory with our physical Windows servers and Hyper-V host automatically receiving the Transporter service. Adding our VMware vSphere host just required its admin credentials and all its VMs were presented ready for agentless backup.

A minor change to the console now groups backup jobs under a new Data Protection tab. These cover all protection essentials as you choose systems from your inventory, select a repository, apply a schedule, set the number recovery points you want retained, decide on how many days you want them to be immutable, and enable features such as network and backup encryption.

You can also create jobs for backup copies, VMware, Hyper-V or Amazon EC2 replication and the new real-time VMware replication. When creating jobs for VMware vSphere, you can select individual VMs but we chose the top-level host system so any new VMs created would be automatically added to the backup job.

Protecting MS365 accounts requires a special SaaS repository and we had no problems creating this on our Synology NAS using a share path name. The MS365 authentication process is really simple as it only requires three steps, after which we created a single scheduled job to protect all four components.

Nakivo Backup & Replication 11 review: Data recovery and malware scans

NBR provides a wealth of restore features and for files and folders you select a recovery point and choose the data you want restored. Application-aware backups ensure Active Directory (AD) and hosted SQL Server and Exchange apps are automatically included and recovery services extend to restoring AD, SQL databases and Exchange objects.

MS365 granular recovery allowed us to select any component, choose items, and restore them to their original location or to another user. Disaster recovery features are excellent and include replication of VMs as clones and using a Flash VM Boot recovery job to quickly create a new VM directly from the backup repository without restoring it first.

To test malware scanning, we declared a Dell PowerEdge R760xs host running Windows Server 2022 to NBR as a Windows Defender scan server. During a Hyper-V VM recovery job creation we enabled the deep scan option although you can choose a quick scan which only checks the OS disk.

The deep scan process was undemanding as the job took 43 minutes with the dual 2GHz Xeon Scalable Silver 4416+ CPUs in the nominated scan server registering a very brief 60% utilisation at the start and then settling down to around 5%. We'd pre-loaded the test Hyper-V VM with malware prior to backing it up and NBR identified it, aborted the recovery job as requested and highlighted it in the job overview page as failed.

Nakivo Backup & Replication 11 review: Is it worth it?

NBR licensing is completely transparent and very flexible with Nakivo offering a wide choice of perpetual licences or per-workload subscriptions. It provides a handy online cost calculator with an Enterprise 10-server perpetual licence and a 2-year 24/7 support contract costing £1,874.

MS365 licensing is separate with the minimum 10 user subscription costing £252 per year. Real-time replication for VMware comes in at £971 for a single-socket perpetual licence and NBR also offers a separate VMware host monitoring service with a perpetual license costing £464 per socket.

Nakivo's Backup & Replication 11 is ideal for SMBs that want the freedom to choose their host system. It supports an incredible range of hardware platforms and OSes, offers an impressive range of system and data protection features and it is very competitively priced.

Backup Exec has always been a great data protection choice for SMBs and it starts a new chapter in its life as Cohesity closes its acquisition of Veritas. Cohesity keeps the NetBackup enterprise backup software with Backup Exec now spun off to the new company Arctera along with Veritas' InfoScale and other products in its data compliance and governance group.

This could be the best thing that's happened to Backup Exec as in terms of development, it has always languished in NetBackup's shadow. It now becomes Arctera's flagship product with the company saying it will have its own dedicated product development and marketing team.

In this review, we look at the latest Backup Exec 24 (BE24) which offers a complete on-premises data protection and recovery solution for physical and virtualized environments. It has a sharp focus on value as it builds on the BE Simple licensing plans introduced a couple of years ago which aim to simplify the procurement process for SMBs.

Arctera Backup Exec 24 review: BE Simple plans

BE24 continues the Simple Core Pack subscription service and now offers two options based either on the number of protected instances (instance metering) or the amount of production data to be secured (capacity metering). You can upgrade it with Simple Add-On packs at any time and you don't need to worry about purchasing the right components either, as all BE24 features and functions are included in both subscriptions.

An instance is defined as a physical system, a virtual machine (VM) or ten Microsoft 365 (MS365) users with the starter five instance Simple Core Pack including a bonus instance for an extra ten MS365 users. Capacity metering is based on front-end TB (FETB) capacity prior to deduplication and compression and capacity-based licences can be shared amongst multiple BE host systems.

Think carefully before you choose as you cannot currently combine instance and capacity licenses on the same host. Also, existing customers on an FETB plan can only swap to an instance plan by buying the licenses and deploying them on a new host server.

Arctera Backup Exec 24 review: Deploy and secure

As with all previous versions, BE24 requires a Windows Server host and we installed it in 20 minutes on an HPE ProLiant rack server running Windows Server 2022. The console dashboard is very informative as it provides everything you need to know about your backup status and can be customised to suit by dragging the various widgets to the desired position.

To protect our physical servers, we used the console to deploy agents to them while for our Hyper-V systems, we used the preferred method of pushing the agent to the hypervisor hosts for agentless VM backups. VMware VM protection is even easier as we just had to declare our vCenter hosts by providing their IP addresses and credentials.

BE24 streamlines backup job creation as you choose your sources, assign a job from a list of predefined ones, add multiple stages if required, set a schedule and for extra ransomware protection, enable backup set encryption. You can secure sources to local disks, network shares, a deduplicating store or a wide range of cloud providers with BE24 supporting immutable Amazon S3 buckets with Object Lock enabled.

Protecting our MS365 cloud account was a breeze as we added our tenant using the link provided by BE24 and entered the unique device code it generated. MS365 backups require a deduplicating store and the best practice is to apply encryption at the store and not the job level otherwise data reduction may not be as efficient.

Arctera Backup Exec 24 review: Anomaly detection and malware scans

The automated anomaly detection feature kicks in after 30 backups have run, monitors backup jobs and warns of suspicious activity by comparing a range of criteria including backup image sizes, item counts, job times and the amount of data transferred. It posts alerts in a dedicated console widget and provides a link so you can see what triggered them and downgrade them as false positives those that are of no concern.

Malware scans can be run on an ad-hoc basis or prior to restoration of VMware and Hyper-V VM backup sets with BE24 currently using the Windows Defender service residing on the backup host. To run on-demand malware scans, you choose a backup set and select this option from the drop-down menu.

Use it with caution though, as it can be very CPU intensive. Our host had dual 2GHz 16-core Xeon Scalable Platinum CPUs and during the scan we recorded utilisation averages of around 20% and occasional peaks of 70%.

If this is an issue, you can change the BE24 default scan settings to use fewer parallel threads and stop it overriding the Windows Defender CPU throttling feature. The good news is we had preloaded malware on a Hyper-V VM prior to it being secured and the scan job spotted it, issued an alert and completed the job in 49 minutes.

Arctera Backup Exec 24 review: Restore features

Data recovery features are plentiful as you can select a source, view its files, folders or volumes, pick a recovery point and decide where to send them. The GRT (Granular Recovery Technology) feature allows you to restore individual items such as SQL databases, creating a simplified recovery disk brings bare metal recovery into play and BE24 now has the ability to restore individual Hyper-V and VMware virtual disks.

For our MS365 test, we created one backup job to protect our Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint sites plus Teams data. Recovery is simple as we used the MS365 restore wizard to choose a component and select a point in time or backup set.

Instant VM Recovery uses an existing backup to create a new VM on the same virtualization host. It's fast as we used it on our SQL Server VMware VM and BE24 had the new one up and running in only 60 seconds.

Arctera Backup Exec 24 review: Is it worth it?

Arctera's Simple Core Packs are a great idea as they include all Backup Exec features and look very affordable. A starter five instance licence costs less than £500 per year and more protection can be easily added by purchasing extra Simple Add-On packs with one instance costing around £80 per year.

Backup Exec 24 is a top on-premises data protection solution for SMBs as it combines extreme ease of use with a wealth of backup and restore services for physical and virtual environments. It's easy to deploy and manage, the licensing plans are simple to understand and this latest version delivers valuable ransomware protection.

Eon, an Israeli-US cloud software firm, wants to usher in a "new era of cloud backup storage and management" after raising $127 million in funding.

The company, founded by Ofir Ehrlich, Gonen Stein, and Ron Kimchi, says it can offer the first cloud backup autopilot, creating easy-to-manage assets.

The team already has one big success under its belt, having built CloudEndure and sold it to Amazon Web Services for around $250 million in 2019.

And despite launching as recently as January this year, Eon has now raised a $20 million Seed led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Vine Ventures, Meron Capital, and Eight Roads; a $30 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and with participation from Sheva; and a $77 million Series B led by Greenoaks with participation from Quiet Ventures.

It was at AWS that the team apparently realized there was a gap in the market, with enterprises losing control over their backups. Current backup management methods, they point out, require time-consuming, manual data classification and tagging processes, agents, and appliances – leading to high costs and backups that aren't always easily accessible.

"Eon has reimagined what backups can be for enterprises by introducing a new era of cloud backup storage and management," said co-founder and CEO Ofir Ehrlich.

"We are fortunate to have supportive funding partners who deeply understand the value of unlocking cloud backups to be truly automated, globally searchable, portable, and useful."

Eon is designed to autonomously scan, map, and classify cloud resources continuously, providing backup recommendations based on specific business and compliance needs, and making sure the appropriate backup policy is in use.

Backup storage is fully managed and portable, with global search capabilities that allow customers to find and restore individual files and run SQL queries on backed-up database snapshots seamlessly, without any resource provisioning.

"In an industry where file restoration can take weeks, Eon's novel backup solution pinpoints data instantly, saving time, money, and compliance headaches for customers," said Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital.

The global cloud infrastructure market is showing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.5% from 2024 to 2034, when it's expected to reach $838 billion, according to Precedence Research.

And, says the firm, the enterprises it surveyed estimated that between 10 and 30% of their total cloud bill was being spent on backup storage and management.

"Storage and backup are among the largest parts of the IT budget. Yet customers are stuck with frustrating, outdated options, leaving them with poorly optimized costs; incomplete data inventories; and shallow classification," said Patrick Backhouse, partner at Greenoaks.

"Eon has the team, the expertise, and the ambition to develop an entirely new product that we believe will become the cognitive referent for cloud-native backup."

Architecture and engineering firm Leo A Daly got an early proof point of why moving to cloud file storage was a smart approach when a member of staff accidentally deleted the entire marketing drive – and the company was able to restore it again, almost instantly.

“We were mid-implementation when we realized how valuable the snapshot recovery was,” says Stephen Held, CIO at Leo A Daly.

“Someone in our marketing department deleted their entire marketing drive and it took us eight minutes to restore that.”   

The company had embarked on the move to the cloud as part of a new backup strategy.

Held's team were weighing up spending on a new on premises storage backup system, with costs estimated at $500,000 to $700,000 (£402,000 to £562,000). Simultaneously, the firm was staring down a storage proliferation challenge as teams working across different offices found it time-consuming to share files for collaboration.

“We would copy them overnight in order to have them ready for the location the next day, so at worst you had a 24-hour old copy and at best [it was] 8-10 hours depending on the location of the file,” Held explains.

“And you were duplicating everything, so our ability to share work had this time delay on it that was real challenging for us if we were trying to work effectively.”

A hybrid approach for improved backup efficiency

To address these problems, the company adopted Nasuni as a hybrid cloud file storage provider in 2016 and has worked to improve services in the interim. Through Nasuni’s Continuous File Versioning, Leo A Daly drastically reduced recovery times and eased the budget necessary for on-premises backup systems.

Since adopting Nansuni’s services, Leo A Daly has been able to reduce these times to between 45 and 90 minutes, depending on the site. It has also continued to innovate by implementing Nasuni’s Global File Acceleration, which has pushed the time down below the three-minute mark. 

Global File Acceleration makes rapid snapshots of data after it has been created, which helps with restoring data to a specific point and is an essential part of data recovery following a ransomware attack.

“It’s not real-time but it almost nearly negates those file sizes and those updates, because of how it delivers the full model and then the dynamic changes,” Held says.

Another significant impact of this has been to reduce the amount of physical storage hardware the firm has needed to buy for its offices. Whereas it had required 20 or 30TB of long-term storage, it now doesn’t have to buy more than 10TB.

“We’ve collapsed our print server, our Active Directory server, our 2TB cache - we’ve been able to collapse all of this infrastructure down to a single server environment because the storage demands are so much less for our actual project files,” Held says.

It’s also made it easier to move offices, if needed, by reducing the infrastructure needed at each location. “That physical footprint that we have in our technology is always problematic because of what you have to build out in the way of a network closet … so it’s helped from that regard,” he adds. 

That also means that, because all the information is now in one global file system rather than locally, regional data center outages don't mean the entire company still has to deal with extended periods without IT systems.

Improved scalability in the cloud

Moving to the cloud has helped the company better manage its data growth. “I replaced our data center storage twice in my early years of being with the organization,” Held tells ITPro.

“The second time I did it, we bought something that should have lasted us five years and it was barely on the two-year anniversary and we were already having to look at adding physical storage to it. That’s infuriating as a CIO.”

While the company’s data growth continues to be substantial, he says, it’s software and applications that are driving the real demand for expansion. “I can only imagine if we were still duplicating those files across our environment in the way that we were doing it before that we would be three or four times what our current data growth has been,” Held says. 

When Leo A Daly was hit by ransomware, its cloud-first approach also paid off in a major way. Leaning on its regular backups and snapshots as the cornerstone of its disaster recovery strategy, Held says it restored all encrypted data to normal. As a result, the overall effect on the business was tiny. 

“It greatly minimized the repercussions, the impact”, Held says, explaining that if it was more reliant on its on premises storage the business would have faced a lengthy server rebuilding process across various locations and manual wipes for all infected devices. In such a scenario, the recovery of files could have taken a week or two to fix, if not longer.

The move to cloud storage also meant that the company was better positioned when the COVID pandemic forced staff to work from home.

“We were positioning for road warriors, our people that wanted to go client sites or project sites and wanted to be able to function the same way they were in the office ... that was real challenging before technology like this,” he says. While using the cloud file system to support more than 800 remote workers was something Held's team hadn't accounted for, it nevertheless worked as a concrete foundation to keep staff operating remotely.

The switch to the cloud has also supported the broader culture at the company, Held explains, as colleagues could now collaborate without having to rely on slow file sharing and collaboration software.

“We went to one mapped network drive. Everyone had the same project drive, everyone had the same marketing drive because we had the recoverability," Held says.  

“We have a big ‘one-firm’ mentality and just taking some of those technical barriers out of the equation really helps with people unification."

Held recommends that companies considering a shift to cloud storage go for it, as it’s now a tried and true technology. “We had to think differently,” he says. “They don’t have to take near the leap that we took years ago to gain the benefit. 

“In the last nine years, I’ve only seen real benefit.”

All businesses have to have a storage strategy for their data and it’s not unusual for contracts to stipulate a data retention period in terms of decades. Holding onto data for this long presents challenges for archiving, where information needs to be stored and more later retrieved in a readable format.

There are many industries in which the long-term storage of data may be required, including healthcare, infrastructure, nuclear, mining, and legal. Long-term data storage presents significant challenges for both end-users and storage providers.

Archiving, the long-term storage of information, has become an important aspect of many modern enterprises. Even when the information is no longer needed for day-to-day operations, there may be legislative or project requirements for it to be retained for reference.

In some sectors, data may need to be stored for decades or even longer.

“I looked at the industries of our clients, and for the US we provide long-term data storage for local governments, hospitals, energy companies, and construction companies,” says Jakob Østergaard, chief technical officer at data recovery firm Keepit. 

“We even have a food bank and a synagogue.”

For example, the pharmaceutical industry records the research and development of new treatments to protect their intellectual property (IP) and prove due process. “IP lasts for twenty years and can can still be legally held twelve years after that, as well as another year for good measure. That’s thirty-three years,” says Lasse Thomsen, information systems manager for Oxford University Innovation.

Archives need to be searchable and information has to be easily retrievable, in a readable format. This can be challenging for file formats that are no longer supported, or for data stored in an older medium that is not compatible with current systems.

Benefits and drawbacks of long-term storage mediums

Choosing the right storage medium for backups, particularly over time frames of years or even decades, is easier said than done. A range of options have been available in the past, with many still to choose from today, but there is no one perfect option.

Microfiche used to be a popular choice for archiving data. It offered compact and stable information storage but was very difficult to search and required a bulky micro-fiche reader.

Organizations later turned to optical disks or magnetic tapes to archive their projects, often with off-site storage. While magnetic tape’s lifespan of 10-50 years has served it relatively well so far, the increasing age of companies in the industry has led many leaders to search for better data storage alternatives. Data stored on magnetic tapes is also very slow to access. 

It is claimed that DVDs can last up to 200 years (in ideal conditions), but this has not yet been proven. DVDs also have a limited capacity, so large projects may need to be stored on multiple discs, an additional complication. Some might be tempted to archive projects on external hard disk drives (HDDs), but these may only last three to five years. 

Flash storage has pros and cons, but is most useful in the short-to-medium term. Even the best solid-state drives (SSDs) are unsuitable for long-term storage. This is because SSDs store data using electrical charge in semiconductor cells and charge can dissipate in drives that aren’t powered for several years.

Having the appropriate hardware available to read optical discs or magnetic tape may also be a challenge. Thirty years ago, 3.5” floppy disks were widely used but, with the exception of Japan, they are now only found behind old filing cabinets or in dusty lofts. Floppy disk drives are even rarer, so businesses would struggle to read the old format even if disks were found.

Software is constantly evolving alongside file formats. As specialist software is unlikely to be supported in thirty years, it’s important that archives are future-proofed to ensure information remains readable.

For example, Adobe’s PDF/A format which embeds all of the information within the file, so everything is preserved “as printed”. Consequently, PDF/A formats are much larger than the typical PDFs, which means they take up more space, but they do offer future-proofing that normal PDFs do not.

Some cloud storage providers are now offering storage contracts guaranteeing file storage for a hundred years. This solves a lot of problems for end-user organizations, such as no longer having to worry about the storage medium.

But when considering storage providers, leaders in IT need to consider where archives will be physically located. Storing multiple copies of information in the same location is not recommended, in case the area suffers a disaster, such as fires or flooding. Even with multiple secure locations, leaders need a tight disaster recovery strategy.

If the data is export-controlled, storing an archive in another country would count as an export and this also needs to be factored into plans.

Regional data protection regulations also need to be considered. The protections afforded by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can make Europe an attractive location for data storage, but the right to be forgotten could be a challenge. “I wanted our archive to be co-located somewhere different, ideally in Europe,” says Thomsen. “GDPR was also ticking the box for us.”

Investing in the right storage infrastructure

Depending on the quantity of data to be stored, having sufficient bandwidth for upload may necessitate a telecommunications infrastructure upgrade to accommodate the increased usage. The initial cloud migration may take several days, or even longer. 

“We have over eight TB of data, which is a massive amount of data to keep,” says Thomsen. “It took a while for data to sort of get to a synchronized state – after maybe a month we had pretty much caught up.”

Even if a contract offers data storage for a hundred years, this is dependent on the company’s ability to stay afloat for a century or more. All a storage provider can ever guarantee is that they store information during their company’s lifespan. 

“The average lifetime of a Fortune 500 company is 21 years now and it's been dropping since the 1960s, so there's no hard guarantee,” says Østergaard. “There are no special measures in the contracts where we commit to storing the data someplace special, and no one can guarantee that.”

As such, any organization relying on a cloud storage provider for long-term storage solutions retains the ability to export its archives or migrate them to a different storage provider, should the need arise.

Whilst cloud storage is currently a popular storage solution, research into optical discs is offering an interesting alternative. Scientists in China have created an optical disc that can store up to 125 TB of data, as reported by LiveScience, with a combined storage capacity of about 15,000 DVDs. 

Although this condenses an archive into a single disc, making data retrieval simpler, having devices that can still read the optical disc in several decades will be a challenge. Also, the long-term stability has not yet been proven.

Microsoft’s ongoing research into glass data storage, dubbed Project Silica, aims to produce a low-cost storage medium that could hold securely hold data for hundreds or even thousands of years. If realized, the solution would see enterprise data etched onto plates of quartz glass using an ultrafast laser and then stored on an archival wall like a huge record collection. While the project is ongoing, it could be many more years until we see businesses adopt this as their first choice for long-term data storage.

Long-term data storage, especially when required to meet contractual or legal obligations, can be challenging and require careful research and selection. Above all, businesses must recognize that legacy file formats and hardware are likely to be phased out. Ultimately, some firms may decide that information deemed too important to trust solely to electronic storage should still be stored within paper copies. As the sector continues to innovate in this space, enterprises will be first in line to adopt technologies that can offer even longer, more stable data storage.

As technological innovations happen, it can be easy to forget that even the most complex systems rely on large networks of basic infrastructure to operate. At the most fundamental level, all tech products rely on effective data storage 

But this is easier said than done. Each byte of data has to be stored somewhere, on a rack, disk, tape, or flash device. As the world embraces hardware and software that creates data at an even faster rate, businesses will be forced to push the frontiers of data storage and evaluate their data management strategies.

In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Tom Coughlin, president and CEO of the IEEE, to learn more about how data storage will continue to evolve and what organizations can do to keep up with innovation in the space.

Highlights

“[T]he growth of data is what's enabled things like machine learning to have the data to be able to train on so it's a fundamental component of making that possible. And as the data has grown, as demand has grown for processing that data, that’s put requirements on data and memory, especially on memory’s side where you're processing the data. You need a lot of it and it needs to be fast.”

“I suspect that the end result is going to be what it has been developing into, which is that if you've got your memory you’re using for immediate processing SSDs will be the primary storage for stuff that you need quickly, because there's high read performance, but it wears out over time and it and it's more expensive. That's the big issue.”

“One thing it’s kind of interesting to keep in perspective is most of 2022 [and] most of 2023 was a real slump in the storage and memory market. And a lot of it had to do with recovery from COVID. During COVID, there were a lot of supply chain issues and a lot of data centers and enterprise storage companies basically bought a lot of stuff. It took them a while to consume that, so even though the requirements for data are growing it was basically not until the end of 2023 that we started to see recovery in the prices and these products.”

Footnotes

• ​​​​Best SSDs 2023: The top NVMe and SATA drives around
• 10 things to consider when buying an external hard disk-based storage device
• What is machine learning and why is it important?
• What is generative artificial intelligence (AI)?
• Who owns the data used to train AI?
• How to choose the right storage medium for your organization’s backup strategy
• Three keys to successful data management
• Structured vs unstructured data management
• 5 things to consider when selecting your next online storage provider
• How close is glass data storage to scaled enterprise use?

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A comprehensive, reliable, and secure backup strategy is critical for all businesses. As storage media technologies have expanded, choosing the right backup platform has become more complicated. From tape to the cloud, companies must ensure they use the right technology to minimize data loss and platform obsolescence.

Using hard disks has been the foundation on which businesses have built their backup strategies for decades. However, cheap and plentiful hard disks could soon become a legacy backup technology according to Pure Storage, who have publicly stated hard disks will be dead by 2028, as high-capacity flash storage becomes just as affordable.

Of course, Pure is in the memory business. It’s continued to innovate, announcing its 75TB DFM (DirectFlash Module), which should be available in 2026 – with this technology projected to reach 300TB of storage capacity. This is a bold claim as current flash dives aren’t anywhere near that capacity at an affordable price.

Cost will be the guiding factor when it comes to ample capacity storage. Today, hard disks cost pennies per GB. If flash storage is to unseat spinning disks, a similar price point must be achieved – currently, the price differential is too large for most businesses to consider a wholesale shift to solid-state drives (SSDs).

What factors come into play when choosing the best storage medium?

When making decisions around backup, businesses must make several considerations, most notably failure rates. Last year, Backblaze revealed it experienced eight hard drive failures every day across its own hard disk-based storage services. Granted, this relates to an estate of over 230,000 drives, but this clearly illustrates that the longevity of hard disks may push businesses to consider alternative technologies.

Businesses are awash with data, with this information expanding exponentially. But all this data doesn’t need to be backed up. Data backups must assess the quality of the data and its value to the company. 

Recovery Point Object (RPO) and Recovery Time Object (RTO) come into play as measures used to decide which data could be lost without strategic implications for the company, and how long a data recovery could take. A data audit is essential to identify these datasets and associated applications. With this information, a comprehensive data backup process can be created.

An organization’s approach to data backup needs care, planning and deployment, says Stew Parkin, CTO of global Rubrik MSP Assured Data Protection. "With ever-growing change rates, data sizes, and data generation, the amount of data needed to be protected is growing, and growing such that traditional SATA or HDD just can't keep up. 

“Of course, the advantages are around speed, but not just of ingest, in de-duplication rates, indexing speeds and other post-backup processes, and live-mount or instant restore I/O caching. Of course, all of this comes at a cost, modern backup solutions will enable data tiering as part of their solution so that only the most critical data resides on SSD.”

A clear driver to ensure backups are active and reliable is the expansion of ransomware. “All businesses need to pay more attention to their backup and recovery processes,” James Watts, managing director of Databarracks, tells ITPro.

“In our 2022 annual Data Health Check, only a third of respondents who experienced a cyberattack recovered from backups and didn’t pay up. The majority – two-thirds – did pay the ransom.”

Watts continues: “We've seen that continue this year, if not increase a little, from speaking with those in the industry. That's a concern for us because it suggests that organizations believe there's a lack of other viable avenues available in dealing with an attack. Paying the ransom only serves to fund the bad actors and incentivize further attacks.”

Comprehensive, robust, and secure data backups are an essential business tool that combats cyber threats and enables businesses to improve their resilience vastly. Recovering quickly from a data breach is just as important as having the right data backup infrastructure in place.

Should you choose just one, or a combination of storage formats?

Various backup formats have been developed over time, from tape to CD-ROM, but hard disks have remained the mainstay of on-prem and remote backup services. Most businesses will have a mix of backup technologies as one size does not fit all.

“20 years ago, online backup vendors were announcing that ‘tape is dead,’ Databarracks,’ Watts says. “It's 2023 now, and tape still isn't dead. Pure might make the HDD vs SSD argument, but tape is still the lowest-cost storage. The ‘cloud' isn't just HDD; the hyperscale cloud providers don't advertise it – or even confirm it – but their lowest cost, cold archive storage tiers, is almost certainly based on tape storage.

“It’s all a matter of scale,” Watts expands. “Tape has now been phased out in the majority of organizations that take advantage of the benefits of disk-based backup (speed, reliability, compatibility). 

“But organizations with enormous data volumes to protect still seek whatever medium offers the lowest cost per GB, TB, or PB. Smaller organizations may move entirely to a single storage type – and they will be the first to adopt SSD entirely.”

Businesses are generally seeking a blended approach to data backup and recovery, adds Kunal Purohit, chief digital services officer of Tech Mahindra. “Businesses seek an all-encompassing data protection strategy based on current technologies and cloud advantages, including size, security, reliability, simplicity, and cost reduction. Modern data security systems can provide rapid data recovery with optimal application availability in the event of a disaster and can seamlessly integrate with the cloud.”

Jon Fielding, managing director, EMEA, Apricorn, meanwhile, points to a lack of automation and a general absence of comprehensive and applied data backup processes. "Our last survey found that while 90% of companies had been forced to turn to their backup system, only 27% were able to recover all of their information and documents. Compare that with the 45% that fully recovered their data last year, and it's clear we've actually gone backward in terms of the efficacy of our backup strategies and business resilience.”

Best practices for configuring your organization’s backup strategy

“I can comfortably say that backups, and more specifically immutable air-gapped backups, have never been a hotter topic or more in demand as they are today,” says Parkin. “That said, I think businesses are really struggling to decipher what it is that they need to pay attention to. The 'marketecture' has never been as prolific in the space as it is right now.”

From tape to SSDs – the media that a business chooses is just one component of its data backup strategy. Understanding the data quality and whether all data needs protection is vital. A hybrid approach is often taken with on-prem and cloud services to deliver a resilient backup and recovery environment.

Charly Batista, PostgreSQL Tech Lead at Percona, outlines some best practices when it comes to choosing the right storage format for your backup strategy – and configuring your strategy more broadly.

• Identify your critical data: Only some data is created equal, and we want to save time, effort, and money with irrelevant data that doesn’t need backing up. This should be documented and planned, as you may find data that you personally thought was less valuable is more critical in recovery.
  
  
• Create backup documentation: You should create and maintain thorough documentation of your backup strategy, including the databases and types of data being backed up, the backup schedule, and recovery procedures. This documentation should be updated and available to everyone involved with the database administration. You should also keep a paper copy offsite.
  
  
• Set up a regular backup schedule: Data changes constantly and finding a good regular schedule to back up that data is critical. Should you take this backup daily or weekly? The business continuity plan built on top of the specificities of the system or company handling the backups should determine the frequency and type of backup you carry out – from full system images to incremental or differential backups, but consistency is key here.
  
  
• Automate your backups: Alongside standardizing backups, you should automate the process as much as possible to make it more robust and reliable and minimize the possibility of errors.
  
  
• Create multiple copies: We used to say, “who has two has one, and who has one has none”. Having multiple backup copies on different sites makes the recovery process faster. Having one copy close to the compromised instance and another version further away is more reliable, as it will protect against natural disasters and attacks.
  
  
• Use diverse storage media: This goes together with having multiple copies. You should have copies in a combination of multiple media formats to improve redundancy and reliability. For example, if you are running in the cloud, you may want to run a cloud backup and a second backup to another location.
  
  
• Establish powerful encryption: A good encryption strategy will help to keep data secure during transmission and storage. This is mandatory when storing backups offsite or in a cloud environment. Remember that hard drivers will fail; we need to know how the providers dispose of them.
  
  
• Test, test, test, and test: I can’t stress how important it is to test the backups and ensure they’re reliable and recoverable. You must regularly test the whole restoration process to ensure your backups are functioning correctly and your process is up-to-date and accurate. Don't wait until a disaster to discover that your backups are corrupted, or your backup process is faulty.

Data protection has taken many forms over the years, with organizations transforming their approaches to best meet their changing needs. Be it to reduce the impact of a security incident, maintain constant uptime, or any of the myriad other reasons for modernizing a data protection strategy, businesses must find a solution that meets every one of their goals. This is something that’s often easier said than done, however.

All data protection is not created equal. The age of local-only backups is long over; while they still have their place, organizations are increasingly coming to appreciate the benefits of cloud-based backups and data protections. This doesn’t mean making a hard choice between the two. Approaching data protection from a hybrid cloud perspective is by far the optimal choice for most organizations, marrying the benefits of local and cloud infrastructure to bring the fastest, most secure backups to your business in a cost-effective way.

The consequences of bad backups

The cyber security landscape is forever in flux, with threat actors continuing to evolve their tactics to secure the biggest payout for their efforts. Ransomware continues to be the prevailing threat against businesses and despite the security industry, for many years, loudly repeating the need to implement the fundamental controls that help to prevent the majority of attacks.

Data from Recorded Future shows that in the second quarter of 2023, ransomware attacks were consistently higher than they have been at any other point in the past two years. The months of April and June 2023 both saw more than 400 organizations posted to ransomware victim blogs, and May’s figures, while not quite as high, were still well over 300. 

Data from HPE’s 2022 Getting ahead of modern data threats report tells an even bleaker story. A total of 91% of organizations were vulnerable to cyber attacks in 2021, and 47% experienced ransomware attacks on at least a monthly basis. In other words, a business’ data has never been more at risk than it is right now.

If a ransomware gang gains access to an organization’s data, there are any number of options available to them. They can encrypt it through ransomware payloads, steal it and hold it to ransom, a combination of the two, or simply wipe it all - perhaps to make a name for themselves. The typical ransomware scenario, however, sees cyber criminals encrypting important files, demanding payment in return for a decryptor. The reality is that very rarely is a full recovery possible using the criminals’ own decryptor key. Horror stories abound of victims paying ransom demands, only to realize the criminals put a lot more effort into developing the encryptor than the decryptor. It’s just one of the many reasons why paying the criminals is rarely the best course of action.

The most reliable and effective form of recovery from a ransomware or data-destruction incident is to preempt an attack and invest in a robust data protection and backup strategy. This will provide IT teams with a sense of certainty that they have everything they need to react and recover quickly in the event of a disaster.

Why hybrid cloud forms the backbone of any great recovery strategy

While backups form just one part of any organization’s data protection strategy, it’s still a hugely important piece of the puzzle. The traditional approach has been to store everything in a centralized location, keeping it close to the business. This can help hasten recovery times, but it can be costly and runs the risk of local disasters such as a flood or fire destroying everything that’s valuable. Backups hosted in the public cloud can be more scalable, remotely accessible, and more easily managed, but often lack the control organizations need and often incur high costs of retrieving data.

Hybrid cloud backups marry the best of both on-premise and public cloud backup models, making for the most reliable tool in a recovery war chest. At its most basic, it refers to keeping the data your business needs in both on-prem environments and in the public cloud too.

Hybrid cloud backups offer the greatest resistance to adverse fallout from cyber attacks and thus better value for money. Even if an attack on the on-prem storage infrastructure means data is destroyed, it will still be recoverable from the public cloud. This means that, in most cases, businesses can benefit from the speed of backing up from on-prem storage, but also default to downloading all the files they need from their public cloud should they need to.

Alternatively, for a more cost-effective approach, you can keep just the ‘mission-critical’ data on-prem for fast backups of the most important files and systems in the event of an attack, and keep everything else in public cloud storage to be retrieved at will. This minimizes the need for spending big to have everything in two places at once, while also making use of the marquee benefits of both on-prem and public cloud at the same time.

The data protection partner every business needs

The breadth of a business’ data estate can be intimidating. Choosing the right hybrid cloud backup partner can be crucial in creating a strategy that makes an attacker’s job as difficult as possible, while keeping operational costs low.

HPE GreenLake for Data Protection offers businesses the opportunity to meet all of their service-level agreements (SLAs) while keeping costs low and flexibility high. The setup means businesses can benefit from elastic scale and a pay-per-use structure, allowing them to spin up all the resources they need, when they need them, and only pay for what you use. 

HPE is also on hand to help guide you through the process, backing up all your data from edge to the cloud. Unlike other solutions, HPE GreenLake’s continuous data protection (CDP) allows customers to back up their data in a concurrent way, rather than choosing allocated, scheduled times to initiate backups. It means that no matter when an attack happens, you can be sure that your data is secure in a place that allows it to be utilized again in the most efficient way.

With years of experience in helping IT teams harness the power of hybrid cloud, HPE  GreenLake experts can help customers create the perfect backup strategy that works around the clock with optimum efficiency and flexibility. For those that want to fortify their defenses further, experts can also consult on complementary services like those from Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company and disaster recovery specialist, which remove the complexity associated with recovering from a cyber attack and restore normality in minutes.

For more information, visit Turn your data into intelligence with HPE GreenLake | HPE United Kingdom

TD Synnex has announced it has been named as the exclusive distributor for Synology’s new BeeDrive backup solution in the UK.

Released back in June, BeeDrive is a compact data hub designed to back up personal files and photos from multiple devices simultaneously. 

Available in 1TB and 2TB capacities, Synology said the offering protects files at fast local transfer speeds, while also providing complete data privacy and ownership.

The BeeDrive hub is now available exclusively via TD Synnex, which will provide sales, financial, and logistics support to customers in the UK. 

Adam Lee, TD Synnex’s UK business unit manager for Global Computing Components, said the deal’s exclusivity will enable the company to provide strong support to partners in taking BeeDrive to market.

“As hybrid working becomes the norm, more people need reliable, high-performance storage solutions that are simple to use and manage,” he said. 

“The BeeDrive fits the bill exactly. It’s an ideal backup solution for mobile and home users who need to take data backup seriously and we’ll be doing everything we can to ensure our partners can maximize the excellent opportunities it brings.”

Alongside the exclusive distribution agreement, TD Synnex says its existing strength in the SMB and prosumer sector means it can place a strong focus on supporting partners in driving their sales.

“With Synology’s solid reputation and competitive end-user pricing, we expect the BeeDrive to be a popular choice for smaller businesses and home workers,” Lee added. 

Data management provider Synology specializes in solutions for data storage and backup, file collaboration, video management, and network infrastructure. 

With its new BeeDrive offering, the company says it is looking to bring its expertise in backup technologies to a larger group of users – specifically those that may not have the time or networking knowledge to host a 24/7 server for backup. 

Instead, BeeDrive offers a local, private alternative that can automatically back up file changes in real time, with better recover point objective (RPO) than scheduled backups. 

In the event of data loss, the hub can be connected to a different device to access the stored files without any time-consuming recovery process. 

By overcoming bandwidth limits imposed by internet or cloud service providers, Synology said BeeDrive can work up to 11 times faster than backing up large files to the cloud from a PC, and six times quicker than backing up from a mobile device. 

Jeremie Francois, UK channel sales manager for Synology BeeDrive, said the company’s close relationship with TD Synnex was key in selecting a distribution partner that would help drive adoption of its new solution. 

“We have a really good and well-established working relationship with TD Synnex, and that’s one reason we are working with them exclusively on BeeDrive,” he said. 

“They also have an excellent and extensive portfolio of other products and solutions that partners can offer alongside the BeeDrive in addition to flexible logistics and financial services.”

Retrospect Backup is exceptionally good value. A range of licence packs covers the needs of single users right up to large businesses, with the Multi-Server edition on review costing £2,167 for a perpetual licence that supports an unlimited number of server and workstation clients.

The software can be hosted on Windows or macOS systems and client support extends to Windows servers and workstations plus macOS and Linux endpoints. Optional agents for SQL Server and Exchange are available for £829 each, and the Multi-Server Premium version adds open file backup and Windows bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware.

Backup 18.5 supports Windows 11 and Server 2022 as hosts or clients and has a focus on ransomware protection. Retrospect already supports Amazon S3 cloud storage with user-definable retention periods, and has now added Microsoft Azure version-level locking.

An anomaly detection engine helps Retrospect sniff out ransomware attacks. Enabled on selected backup jobs, you set a percentage threshold and if the number of new or changed files in the backup set exceeds this, it alerts you to a potential attack.

Installation on a Windows 10 Pro workstation took five minutes but the client component must be manually installed on each protected system. It doesn't take long, and the host's discovery service spots the clients as soon as they have been installed.

A big shortcoming is the lack of support for agentless backup of virtualisation hosts so you'll have to treat their VMs as physical systems and load the client inside each one. You can use the separate Retrospect Virtual solution, but businesses with a mix of physical and virtual systems won't be impressed as this increases costs and management complexity. Microsoft 365 (MS365) backup is also only available with Retrospect Virtual. Most competing products in the SMB space provide a single solution for protecting physical, virtual and MS365 environments.

Protection strategies are easy to set up. You create backup sets to define destinations, which can be a local disk, tape, DVD, removable drive or NAS share. Plenty of cloud storage destinations are on offer, with support including Amazon S3, Backblaze, Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure Blob and Dropbox. You can run immediate backups or use scripts to automate them and select sources such as local disks and remote clients, assign a backup set and apply a schedule. The anomaly detection threshold requires you to swap to the advanced script setup and enable it from the options panel.

SMBs with a mix of local and remote users will like the automatic onboarding feature as this creates a custom client that links up with the host and backs up their systems. Configured from the Retrospect web management console, you create a package, assign it to a backup host, share the link with users, and backups start with no further intervention.

Data restoration is swift. A wizard guides you through choosing a backup set, selecting drives, folders or files and deciding where to restore them. Users can restore their own data from the client interface and, if you need to recover an entire system, the host console creates a bootable flash drive.

Requiring a separate product to secure virtualised environments and MS365 accounts adds a lot of cost and complexity, but Retrospect Backup is a solid choice for SMBs that want to protect physical systems. It provides smart job automation tools and stiff ransomware protection, and flexible licensing plans that make it great value for money.

Many backup solutions need a dedicated Windows Server host, but Nakivo's Backup & Replication (NBR) can be deployed to just about any platform you care to name. It will run happily on a Windows host, but also supports Linux, VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, AWS EC2, Raspberry Pi, and all the main NAS appliance vendors, including Qnap and Synology.

On review is NBR 10.9, which includes bare metal recovery where you use its new Bootable Media Wizard to restore physical Windows and Linux servers from selected backups. Malware protection is now available, with NBR integrating with a range of third-party antivirus products, and all Microsoft 365 (MS365) components, including Teams, can be protected.

Licensing is equally versatile. Five versions are available, with options for perpetual licenses or per-workload subscriptions. Nakivo cuts through any confusion with a cost calculator on its website. We've shown the price for an Enterprise 10-server perpetual license with a two-year 24/7 support contract here.

Nakivo Backup & Replication 10.9: Setup 

For testing, we chose Qnap's TS-855eU-RP short-depth 8-bay rack NAS and used the QuTS Hero App Center to load the NBR package. NBR comprises three service components, with a Director for browser-based management, Transporters to handle backup, replication, and recovery operations, and Repositories for storing backups.

After adding protected systems to NBR's inventory, it pushed the transporter service to our physical Windows servers and workstations; note that Mac clients are still not supported. For Hyper-V, the service just needed loading on our host, while for our VMware vSphere host, we only had to provide its credentials for agentless VM backups.

Our Qnap appliance received a default local repository but this was on its system SSDs, so we created another on a large-capacity RAID5 pool. During creation, you must enter the absolute path, which can be found in an SSH session using the Linux List command. Other possibilities for repositories are local storage, network shares, or cloud stores. 

Ransomware protection comes into play with NBR supporting immutable cloud storage from Amazon EC2 and S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, Wasabi, and Backblaze B2. Creating backup jobs is simple as options are based on the systems in your inventory. Just choose those you want to protect, assign a repository, set a schedule, and decide how daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly recovery points you want retained.

For our Hyper-V host, we chose the VMs to be included, and protecting our VMware vSphere system only required the host to be selected so any new VMs would be automatically added to the schedule. To use malware protection, you declare a "scan server" to NBR, which has the required antivirus software running on it. 

MS365 licensing is separate, with ten users costing £252 per year, and it requires a special SaaS repository to store backups, which we found isn't currently supported by QuTS Hero 5.1. Nakivo's attentive support suggested creating an iSCSI target on the appliance and mapping it to a Windows system running the transporter service – hardly elegant, but it does work.

Recovery features are outstanding. Along with files and folders, granular restores can be used for MS365 items, SQL databases, and on-premises Exchange objects. Disaster recovery is just as good, with Flash Boot jobs creating new VMs directly from the backup repository and facilities for replicating VMs as clones.

SMBs that don't want their backup software tied to a Windows Server host will love Nakivo's Backup & Replication 10.9 as they can run it on almost any hardware platform and OS they want. It's good value, MS365 protection is handled well and it provides extensive data recovery services.

This content originally appeared on ITPro's sibling magazine PC Pro. For more information and to subscribe, please visit PC Pro's subscription site. 

Veritas Backup Exec (BE) has always been one of our top choices for on-premises data protection thanks to its comprehensive range of backup and recovery services. The BE Simple licensing plans make it very affordable for SMBs, and BE 22.2 on review introduces plenty of new and welcome features. 

Microsoft 365 (MS365) backups now support SharePoint and Teams as well as Exchange Online and OneDrive. Microsoft Azure Object Lock provides ransomware-protected immutable cloud storage, backups to ReFS volumes can be accelerated, anomaly detection protects backup scripts from tampering, and BE now uses the FIPs-compliant deduplication engine from Veritas' enterprise NetBackup product.

The simple yearly subscription service is based only on compute instances, which can be a physical system, a virtual machine, or ten MS365 users. The starter five-instance Simple Core Pack costs an agreeable £489 per year, and Veritas generously includes a bonus instance for an extra ten MS365 users.

Veritas Backup Exec 22.2 review: Setup

Deployment is swift; we installed BE on a Dell PowerEdge R760xs Windows Server 2022 host in 20 minutes. After declaring our physical servers using their IP addresses, BE pushed the remote agent to them while for our Hyper-V systems, we just needed the agent loaded on the host to secure all its virtual machines.

Adding our VMware vSphere host was simple, and we only had to provide its IP address and credentials. MS365 couldn't be any easier, either: we added our tenant using the link provided by BE and entered the unique device code it generated for us.

Backup job creation is simple, too: you just select sources from the list presented and choose from a range of predefined strategies. These include backup to disk or cloud, and you can add extra stages in the job for local and offsite backup, replication to other disk stores or conversion to VMs, and add an essential air gap by migrating backup data to tape drives attached to the BE host.

BE supports plenty of storage locations, including physical and virtual disks, cloud, tape, deduplicating stores, and network shares. For our tests, we created a local store on the BE server, used a multi-TB share on a Synology NAS appliance, and added immutable cloud storage using an Amazon S3 bucket with Object Lock enabled.

Veritas takes data protection very seriously, and the job wizard always advises you to enable encryption. You can choose from 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption and, if required, only allow the user that created the key for a job to recover data from it.

Data restoration is another pleasant experience: you select a source, view its files, folders, or volumes, pick a recovery point, and decide where to send them. Creating a simplified recovery disk brings bare metal recovery into play, BE's Instant GRT (granular recovery technology) is used to restore items such as SQL databases and the Instant VM Recovery feature takes seconds to create a new VM from a backup set. 

MS365 backups require a deduplicating store, and the best practice is to apply encryption at the store and not the job level otherwise data reduction may not be as efficient. We created one job to protect our Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint sites, and Teams data and used the restore wizard to recover data by choosing a component and selecting a time point.

SMBs that want every data backup and recovery angle covered will love Backup Exec 22.2. It offers a superb range of features, is a strong candidate for protecting virtual environments, cloud support is excellent and it's very competitively priced.

This content originally appeared on ITPro's sibling magazine PC Pro. For more information and to subscribe, please visit PC Pro's subscription site. 

Small businesses that want a complete hybrid backup solution will find Barracuda’s Backup 295 appliance appealing, as it looks to have every angle covered. Easily managed from a central cloud portal, Barracuda provides on-site and off-site cloud backup, full data restoration and disaster recovery services, as well as optional site-to-site replication.

Aimed at SMBs and remote offices, this fan-less desktop appliance has a single 2TB hard disk and a recommended backup capacity of 1TB. This may seem stingy considering the price, but Barracuda’s efficient variable block-level deduplication increases available capacity significantly; our initial backups totalled 1.4TB, but were scrunched down to only 365GB.

You won’t need to worry about extra costs for platform support and clients, either, as they’re all included with the appliance. The list price we’ve shown above adds a one-year subscription to Barracuda’s Energize Update service for technical support plus firmware maintenance, and hardware protection can be extended, with yearly Instant Replacement subscriptions at £456.

Barracuda’s cloud storage for the 295 costs £756 per year for unlimited capacity and, as you can only replicate data already residing on the appliance, you won’t have to worry about buying more later on. If you’re already paying for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that’s fine too, as the appliance can replicate to this cloud storage instead.

Installation is swift. We connected the appliance’s Gigabit Ethernet port and gave it a static IP address using the local console. All further action takes place in the Cloud Control portal, where we entered the appliance’s serial number and link code and waited two minutes while it registered with our account.

You start protecting your hosts and applications by declaring each system in the portal. An agent needs to be installed on Windows, macOS and Linux hosts and can be downloaded from the portal, while our VMware vCenter host was added by providing its IP address and administrative credentials.

For Hyper-V, you can load the agent just on the host but as it runs image-based VM backups, storage usage can be higher. If you want storage-efficient incremental backups and full protection for virtualised apps such as Exchange and SQL Server, the agent should be installed in their respective VMs.

It’s easy to enable cloud replication: you simply check one extra box when defining your sources. The Backup 295 can also function as a sender to a remote Barracuda receiver appliance for site-to-site replication, which also requires a single tick to activate.

Sources are assigned to a default backup schedule that automatically backs up everything in them once a day. We found it easy to create custom schedules, assign specific sources, choose items to back up and repeat jobs as often as every 15 minutes.

Restore operations are equally undemanding. We selected systems from the portal, and chose files, folders or SQL databases and recovered them from the appliance or the cloud repository. Download the bare metal recovery kit from the portal and you can use it to fully restore a dead system directly from the appliance.

We could recover our Hyper-V VMs to the original host or another system, use the LiveBoot option to restore VMware VMs back to the host with the appliance providing datastore duties, or use the Cloud LiveBoot feature to run them in the Barracuda cloud store. And if you lose your internet access, the appliance has a local web console which provides restore browser and Live Boot management tools.

The Barracuda Backup 295 will appeal to busy SMBs as it makes light work of managing an entire data-protection strategy. It’s very easy to deploy, the price includes unlimited client support and it provides excellent data and system restoration features.

Barracuda Backup 295 specifications

Acronis’ Cyber Protect puts a different spin on data protection to most rivals, as it combines hybrid backup with AI-driven cybersecurity measures and endpoint management. This will appeal to SMBs that want to avoid the expense of separate solutions, since it means they can pay a single subscription fee for all their data backup and workstation protection services.

Platform support is impressive and includes Windows, macOS and Linux systems, all popular business apps and almost any virtualisation host you care to name. You can choose from on-premises or cloud-managed versions; we’ve reviewed the latter as this extends protection to home workers and mobile devices.

Acronis offers Essentials, Standard, Advanced and Backup Advanced editions. We tested the Advanced version, which activates features such as deduplication, backup malware scans and security posture reports. All security services are enabled and include malware protection, web content filtering, patch management, remote desktop services and vulnerability assessment reports.

Subscriptions are based on the type and number of protected systems, with workstations priced at £79 each per year and one VMware or Hyper-V host and unlimited VMs costing £729. This includes 250GB of cloud storage, with further 1TB chunks costing £379 per year, while the optional cloud disaster recovery service starts at £389 for an extra-small cloud VM.

The web portal presents detailed overviews on protected systems, backup repository status, alerts, detected malware, blocked URLs and patch status. It can get very busy but each chart and graph is widget-based so you can easily customise it to your own requirements.

Protection plans combine backup requirements, encryption passwords, schedules and security settings. Primary and secondary storage locations can be assigned to a plan, and we used local Synology NAS shares for fast local backups and the Acronis cloud repository for our secondary, off-site store.

Within workstation plans, you can enable real-time malware scanning, apply URL filtering using up to 44 categories, schedule vulnerability assessments and run patch management remediation tasks. A data-protection map reports on unprotected files, while device controls can be used to block access to USB ports, removable storage, printers and screenshot activities.

No email invitation options are provided so agents must be copied to each workstation, installed manually and logged in to the cloud console. This can get tedious but, once registered, they can be assigned to a plan that automates all further backup and protection.

A separate agent is provided for Hyper-V systems while for VMware, we downloaded the agent VM, installed it on a vCenter host and configured it with our cloud credentials. Once the host agents were deployed, the portal listed all their VMs, and using a plan to protect them at the host level ensured newly created VMs would be included.

Along with swift file and folder recovery services for remote workstations, the portal provides excellent restore functions for Hyper-V and VMware. We were able to recover entire VMs to their original location, as a new VM on the same host or another location while for even faster recovery, it can create a temporary VM on the host from a local backup.

An Advanced Backup subscription adds Microsoft 365 protection with facilities for Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and Teams. It’s included in the free 30-day trial, and we had no problems authenticating it with our live Microsoft 365 account and creating protection plans for cloud-to-cloud backups of all four components.

Acronis Cyber Protect takes data protection to another level with its clever partnership of hybrid backup and endpoint security. Agent deployment could be further improved, but the whole package is easily managed from one cloud portal and it provides extensive platform support.

Purpose-built backup appliances are a great choice for businesses that want all their data protection and disaster recovery services in one place - and they don’t come better equipped than Arcserve’s 9000DR series. On review is the high-end 9288DR Appliance, which combines a quality Dell PowerEdge R740xd rack server platform with a high storage capacity and all the backup and recovery features you can eat.

The 9288DR Appliance has Windows Server 2019 at the helm and comes with Arcserve’s UDP (Unified Data Protection) software preinstalled. The latest UDP 8.1 adds plenty of new features including multi-factor authentication (MFA) for tighter access security to its management console and an increased focus on protecting Microsoft 365 users with added support for OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups.

Every business requirement is covered, as along with support for physical and virtual environments plus a wealth of business apps, UDP provides global deduplication and replication as standard features, plus optional high availability. Malware gets short shrift too, as Arcserve includes the Sophos Intercept X Advanced for Servers endpoint protection software on the appliance.

Arcserve 9288DR Appliance review: Setup and configuration

Deployment is swift. On first boot, the system sets up Windows Server 2019 and then runs a wizard for UDP that helps configure the network ports, join the appliance to an Active Directory (AD) domain, add member nodes and create the first protection plan. We opted for a standalone recovery point server (RPS) after which the wizard created a default data store on the appliance’s RAID6 array for backups and enabled global deduplication, compression and AES-256 encryption.

Individual nodes have the UDP agent automatically pushed to them and to declare our virtual machines (VMs) for agentless backup, we used the import option to browse our Hyper-V and VMware vSphere hosts and add selected VMs. Protection plans make it easy to manage your backups as you define schedules which can be as often as every 15 minutes and set the number of recovery points required.

Plans are provided for agent-based backups of Windows and Linux systems, host-based agentless backups, securing UNC or NFS shares plus Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, OneDrive and SharePoint Online services. UDP’s infinite incremental strategy is easy to manage, as it defaults to running a full backup followed by incrementals which only copy changed blocks.

Arcserve 9288DR Appliance review: Task management

Protection plans are extremely versatile, and we could add extra tasks to them as and when required. These include options for replication to a remote RPS, provisioning a virtual standby VM, running an assured recovery test, copying recovery points to a network share or cloud storage account and migrating data to a tape drive attached to another host running the Arcserve Backup software.

When copying recovery points to cloud storage, you can currently choose from 14 providers including AWS S3, Microsoft Azure, AppScale, Nutanix and Cloudian. The optional Arcserve Cloud storage service can also be used to create a remotely managed RPS for replication.

We used our live Microsoft 365 Exchange Online account for testing but authenticating it with UDP is a laborious process and we ended up requesting a remote support session to save time. Once this was correctly configured, we could then create a new plan, browse our Exchange Online users and groups and select those we wanted to protect.

The appliance’s Sophos endpoint protection agent is remotely managed from the Sophos Central cloud portal and takes all its security policies from here. Suffice to say that we’ve used the Central portal and Intercept X software for a number of years to protect our lab systems and rate it highly.

Arcserve 9288DR Appliance review: Recovery process

For file and folder recovery, we loaded the UDP agent’s console for the selected node, chose a recovery point, picked files and folders and restored them back to the node or another location. Users can also do this themselves as from the UDP console, we could mount node recovery points as local drives on their system for drag and drop restores.

When the agent was installed on our SQL Server host, it automatically added its databases as backup sources and we had no problems restoring these back to the host. We had no issues with Exchange Online recovery either; we chose a user from the local UDP agent, browsed their folders, selected the required items such as a specific email in their inbox, and restored them back to the user’s account.

The Instant VM feature is great for fast system restores, creating on-demand VMs from node recovery points. Using our SQL Server node to test this, we selected the Instant VM option, chose a recovery point, used the appliance’s Hyper-V services and had a new VM up and running in only 210 seconds.

And if you want to know that Instant VM will work when you need it most, you can add an assured recovery task to a plan. After each backup, it loads a temporary VM on the designed virtualization host, confirms it’s working correctly, closes it down and deletes it.

UDP’s global deduplication and compression are also very efficient: over a one month testing period, we secured a total of 1.9TB of data from all our nodes. We could see from the console’s data distribution reports that this had been squashed down to only 304GB, returning an impressive 84% data reduction.

Arcserve 9288DR Appliance review: Verdict

Microsoft 365 authentication needs simplifying, but Arcserve’s 9288DR Appliance delivers perfect protection for any physical and virtual environment. Presented on a quality hardware platform with a big backup capacity, it’s swift to deploy and simple to manage - any product that makes enterprise backup and recovery this easy deserves our Editor’s Choice award.

Arcserve 9288DR Appliance specifications

Wherever you look in the world of modern business, digital transformation is all but inescapable. In every sector, organisations are reinventing their IT stacks from the ground up and rolling out cutting-edge technologies to deliver brand new capabilities.

Although ambitious projects to roll out next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) analytics or omnichannel collaboration platforms are laudable efforts, the importance of IT fundamentals shouldn’t be overlooked. Ensuring you’ve got the basics sorted will provide a strong foundation on which to build a transformation programme – and there are few elements of an organisation’s IT estate more essential than backup.

Managing business data backup is hardly the most stimulating of an IT leader's jobs, but, like getting your car serviced or buying insurance, it's easy to dismiss it as a boring, low-priority chore until it suddenly reaches a crisis point. Building a solid backup strategy, in fact, is a core part of IT best practice, and we asked our panel of expert leaders how they approached this crucial business task.

Size matters

When dealing with backups, one of the first considerations is going to be size. The quantity of data involved will govern a number of things, including what kind of infrastructure is required, how expensive it is, and how long it will take to restore that data in the event of an incident. There are many factors that inform how large a given organisation’s backups will be, including its size, the specific industry or vertical it operates in, and the composition of its IT estate.

As an illustration of this, the size of our panellists’ backups varied wildly; accounting firm Kreston Reeves stores around 100TB, according to CTO and operations director Chris Madden, while Rooster Money’s CTO Jon Smart reports its backups only total 6TB, split across multiple backups.

Director of IT and change for Melton Building Society Rita Bullivant says a complete tally of all of its backups is around 25TB. She does, however, point out many back-office and line-of-business systems are backed up separately by the partner that provides them, which are roughly double the size.

Despite all three panellists working in the financial services sector, the amount of data backed up across the three firms is distinctly different. Part of this disparity is the result of what kind of data they have to back up, and the specific configuration they use to do it.

As CTO of Hello Magazine, for example, a large portion of Andy Macharg’s 20TB backups consist of 20 years worth of large files, including high-resolution photographs, print design templates and other rich media that organisations in different sectors may not have to contend with.

Kreston Reeves, by contrast, stores full images of all virtual machines (VMs) including system states, data and drives, with multiple copies to enable point-in-time restores. The nature of its business as an accounting firm means this includes vast reams of customer information, while a building society such as Bullivant’s generally holds less data on a per-customer basis. This is on top of the fact Melton’s customer data is backed up by its systems partner.

“We took the view to back up everything,” Madden says, “as it’s in our system, so it must be required by someone – and if data retention policies are in place to ensure compliance with GDPR, then that all joins together.”

As with Smart and Bullivant’s architectures, the regulatory requirements involved in the finance industry mean Madden needs to hold onto certain parts of his data for up to seven years, which can further increase scale requirements. To meet these needs, Kreston Reeves has chosen to host all of its backups using a cloud provider, Redstor, which Madden says offers a number of advantages.

“One of the cool things they can do is we can mount a virtual drive on their system and attach it to our VM in order to review or copy a file, without the need to do a full backup. It also helps should a server ever go down, as we can attach the data drives to another machine.”

Host with the most

The flexibility of the cloud proved to be popular with our panellists, and many of them report that their backup systems are, or soon will be, hosted on the cloud. Macharg’s backup infrastructure is currently hybrid, with NetApp providing a large portion of the company’s on-prem storage, but he’s in the middle of refreshing the organisation’s IT across the board, and says he plans to be “100% cloud” within 12 months.

“It’s part of a wider web platform rebuild,” he explains. “We’re looking for a CMS-as-a-service provider to simplify part of the work, with a front end based on AWS Amplify, GCP Cloud Run, or Vercel. The first site is scheduled for the summer. After that, the time frame is going to be governed by the content migration – we still have static HTML files and two different CMS systems with different data structures.”

“The vast majority of our estate is in the cloud,” says Moonpig CTO Peter Donlon. “For the small amount of physical infrastructure we have, mainly related to our factories, we backup encrypted to AWS S3. For our cloud infrastructure, most AWS services have a backup option that we utilise. For example, we use DynamoDB quite extensively and use its built-in point-in-time recovery as a backup option.”

Rooster Money’s infrastructure is 100% cloud-based, and Smart says the key factors he looks for when evaluating backup systems is the granularity of its point-in-time restore functions, as well as how long it takes to restore from backups.

“We have had a failure of service in the past, which caused the outage to be as long as it took to restore, and then rebuild items that may have missed the window. Our latest solutions (to the key data) offer restore points to the fraction of a second. It required specific technology choices for how the data is stored, which play out in other decisions. We only use that technology for key operational data; for other aspects of the business, we accept that we could experience data loss or longer periods of time to restore.”

The top items on Madden’s shopping list include ease of use, simplicity of maintenance, alerts for failed backups, and reporting, as well as some of the quality of life features such as those offered by Redstor.

“In addition, a further point to consider is whether they back up the backups to a secondary data centre, which is geographically separated,” he notes. “Of course, cost versus benefit also comes into the equation too.”

“I agree with Chris,” Bullivant adds. “It’s important to evaluate time for restore, should it be required – and for us, it’s a balancing act. We want it all, but we need to consider affordability.”

For Bullivant, this aspect is perhaps more pressing than most; Melton Building Society is in the midst of an ambitious – and long overdue – IT renovation project which has seen many systems needing a complete overhaul. Rather than acting as a silver bullet for affordable transformation, she says that moving its backups to the cloud is not currently feasible, partly due to the higher ongoing OpEx costs that cloud platforms bring with them.

“Being blunt, we haven’t found cloud to be more affordable than on-prem in practice,” she says. “We've had to modify our approach to change because of costs; we’ll mitigate the risk with the solution we have now, then after a certain period of time, we’ll move to cloud if we can achieve the necessary level of business growth.”

“Mine is a business in transformation mode, trying to address legacy debt across the board… Once you've picked one thing to fix in a legacy scenario, it leads to a domino effect. The programme to address our legacy has been in flight since January 2021, and finishes completely in May this year - and I’m so looking forward to it!”

Schrödinger's backup

All of these elements must be taken into account when planning how to implement backups, but putting a backup system in place is only the start of the process. Once you’ve configured your backup schedule and got the process up and running, it’s essential to make sure that it’s actually working as intended. All of our panellists agree that, although it’s definitely not a fun job, regularly running tests on backup systems is a key part of ensuring resilience. Without it, organisations have no guarantees their backups will protect them in the event of an incident.

“I have seen a number of times that testing shows issues which, in a real emergency, would delay recovery times significantly,” notes Madden. He recommends organisations keep a ‘run book’ – a detailed guide for how to run particular processes or systems – which will allow backup and restore processes to be carried out even if key personnel aren’t available.

This also goes hand-in-hand with robust failover plans, providing business continuity when services or applications are disrupted. Kreston Reeves uses a full disaster recovery service with a third-party data centre the organisation can fall back on if it needs to, while Rooster Money’s cloud infrastructure allows systems to be spread across multiple territories.

The question of how regularly tests should be carried out is somewhat down to preference. Bullivant, for instance, thinks they should be done at least once per quarter, while Smart aims for bi-annual testing. Madden, Smart and Bullivant all reported that full system tests generally take around half a day to complete, but while it might be tempting to put that time towards more directly productive use, Smart notes that it’s a valuable time investment in the long run.

“It can be a pain in the arse, but we do have to be disciplined to make sure we do it,” he admits. “I usually convince myself that I would rather do it when it’s not required, than do it when it’s critical and many people are chasing for status updates – it’s far less stress.”

With a release history going back to 1989, Retrospect has plenty of experience with SMB data protection, and its Backup product continues to evolve. One significant update in this latest release is support for immutable cloud storage, with user-definable retention periods to ensure that offsite backups can’t be tampered with by hackers or ransomware.

Reporting has been improved, too, with more detail on protected clients and storage usage and the option to regularly email the information to multiple addresses. A clever addition is a readout of the percentage of files changed in the latest backup – a high value could indicate suspicious activity. The web console has also had an upgrade, to accommodate these enhanced details, with a new geo-tracking feature showing where remote backup clients are located.

The standard package doesn’t back up data from apps such as Microsoft Exchange or SQL Server – that can be added with optional plugins – but all versions come with full cloud backup support. Over 20 providers can be used, including Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage.

The software can also be installed on a wide range of hosts; we loaded it on a Windows 10 Pro workstation and had it running in five minutes. The web console helps by offering an onboarding assistant that creates a custom installation package.

Although the backup host provides a discovery service, the client app has to be manually installed on each system. This is painless, though, and if you define your jobs before adding clients, you can create a customised package that will start backing up the user’s system as soon as it’s installed.

As for backup destinations, there are plenty of options to choose from, including network shares, cloud storage, a tape drive, an optical disc writer and a local disk vault. For testing, we selected an Amazon S3 bucket with versioning enabled, and applied an immutable storage policy. We noted, however, that while this feature was also available for Google Cloud Storage and Wasabi, it was greyed out for Azure.

Retrospect keeps your options simple: all jobs are created with a daily schedule, and start with a complete backup followed by progressive passes that copy only new and changed files.

Retrospect Backup has just one real shortcoming: it’s always focused on securing physical servers and workstations, and doesn’t support agentless backup of VMware and Hyper-V hosts and their associated VMs. For this, you’ll need the separate Retrospect Virtual product. It’s rumoured that these features will at some point be integrated into the main Backup product, but there’s been no official word on that, so we strongly recommend that you find a different solution, for now at least.

When the time comes for data recovery, a helpful wizard guides you through source selection; you can choose an entire system or individual volumes, folders, files, databases or mailboxes, and decide where to restore them. For disaster recovery, the wizard can also build a bootable flash drive or ISO image, which can be used to start up a defunct system and restore it from a backup.

Retrospect Backup 18.1 makes light work of protecting physical servers and workstations. The lack of virtualisation support means it won’t suit every business, but it’s easy to use and a good spread of licensing schemes make it economical, too.

Over the past decade or so, the cloud has become a turnkey part of all businesses’ operations. Whereas in the beginning it was regarded by IT departments with something between scepticism and outright hostility, there’s now an acceptance that cloud services provide something that on-premises solutions can’t – especially when it comes to collaboration.

Indeed, if there were any questions as to whether the cloud – and particularly SaaS applications – had moved from the realms of “shadow IT” to being an integral part of the way any organisation does business nowadays, the COVID-19 pandemic put an end to them.

As we slowly but surely emerge from 18 months of health crises and on-and-off lockdowns, a “new normal” centred around flexible working and hybrid workplaces is emerging. This is all underpinned by the cloud, with productivity suites like Google G Suite and Microsoft Teams sitting at the heart of it.

However, these suites have a vulnerability that you might not have considered – one that services like Synology Active Backup can help protect against.

Proceed with caution

One of the benefits of the cloud, aside from allowing people in different departments, offices and even geographies to work together frictionlessly, is its reliability.

If you’re storing your files and data with a reputable provider, then the likelihood of a hardware catastrophe wiping all of that out is vanishingly small. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google all run their own backup and recovery systems in the background, using best practices like data replication across multiple locations to ensure if one hard drive or SSD is damaged or fails, there will still be a safe, up-to-date copy available.

For IT managers, this has relieved some of the pressure associated with running everything on-premises, when one instance of flooding or a drive failure could spell disaster.

It’s tempting to become complacent in the face of all this; why would you worry about backup and recovery if you’re effectively paying someone else to do it for you at a greater scale than you can and probably more cost effectively, too?

This attitude overlooks one of the biggest points of failure of any system, however – human error.

Recoverability in the cloud

It’s true that accidentally deleting a document or file in the cloud isn’t quite the catastrophe it would be if there was only a single, locally stored version. Normally files stored in the cloud are recoverable for a few weeks to a month after they’ve been deleted, which gives you more grace to undo any “whoops” moments.

This knowledge can lead to complacency, though. First of all, it relies on someone realising that the file needs to be recovered before it’s no longer an option – person A could have deleted a file they thought was no longer needed but which person B still had use for. If the second person only realises what’s happened when they try to access it on the 31st day after deletion, that’s too bad.

Second, the person deleting the file could, for reasons innocent or sinister, speed up the permanent removal process by deleting it from the bin. If that happens, then once again there’s no way to reclaim this data.

If you’re relying on the cloud productivity suite provider to be your sole source of backup, as well as your software provider, then for critical data in particular you’re playing some very dangerous odds.

Mitigating the risks

The answer to the problem of backup and recovery from cloud productivity suites is in many ways remarkably simple: Rather than hoping that users won’t accidentally delete their files, or that it will be caught quickly enough if they do, use a secondary backup in the same way you would have traditionally.

A network-attached storage appliance, or NAS, is an ideal solution for businesses of all sizes and resources. They come in a range of form factors and are highly scalable, meaning you should be able to easily find the right NASes for your organisation.

Not every NAS is created equal when it comes to backup and recovery from cloud productivity suites, however. Indeed, you may incur additional expenses in software licensing or struggle with compatibility issues.

One provider that won’t cause such headaches is Synology. Customers who buy any of its NAS products get access to its Active Backup for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace included, with no extra fees attached or license purchases required.

For organisations using Microsoft 365 on Business, Enterprise or Education plans, this means they can back up all their critical data on OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Teams to their on-premises NAS.

Active Backup for Microsoft 365 offers the ability to schedule backups to minimise disruption, flexible file versioning, and both single instancing and block-level deduplication, so you don’t have multiple copies of identical items taking up space unnecessarily.

Advanced recovery options include the ability to restore items with their original access permissions when restoring to OneDrive or SharePoint, as well as the potential to enable self-service recovery, allowing users to restore files themselves.

Active Backup for Google Workspace, meanwhile, backs up My Drive, shared drives, Gmail, contacts and calendar. This includes faithfully retaining labels, label structures and attachments in Gmail, and copying the relevant file and folder metadata from Drive.

If they wish to, businesses can implement continuous backup and the service also allows for flexible file versioning, as well as making use of single instancing.

Both versions of Active Backup also support Snapshot Replication, meaning users who want a second copy of their data on a separate storage device can do so.

The idea that the cloud is unsafe has largely dissipated, but a belt and braces approach to productivity suite backup – rather than hoping for the best relying on just your provider – is best practice. A service like Synology Active Backup makes taking this step intuitive and pain free.

Learn more about Synology’s Active Backup

Backup Exec is a well-established data-protection solution that’s recently been updated. In this case, Backup Exec 21.3 (BE21) brings more a sprinkling of new features than a deluge, but the improvements are still welcome.

In particular, it’s great that data deduplication services now extend to cloud backup repositories, to help you get the best value from your storage. There’s support for more cloud storage regions, too, and BE21 can now use Windows Server 2022 systems as both host and target.

There’s a choice of three licensing tiers, each one priced according to the amount of data backed up, prior to deduplication and compression. The price shown above is per terabyte of data on a Bronze subscription; this supports all physical, virtual and cloud servers, while a Silver licence adds Linux and app support, along with granular recovery for individual objects such as databases. The Gold licence, as you’d imagine, activates everything Veritas has to offer.

Installing BE21 on a Windows Server 2019 host took us around 20 minutes, and we were then able to use the console to deploy agents to the physical servers in the lab. For virtual systems you can use agentless backup, or install the remote agent to enable full granular recovery from Windows VMs. We added our VMware vSphere host by providing its IP address and credentials, while our Hyper-V host received the remote agent as soon as it was declared.

BE21 gives you plenty of options for backup storage, supporting physical and virtual disks, cloud services, tape drives, deduplicating stores and network shares. We used an iSCSI target on a Synology NAS for our test vault, which we added by simply providing its local drive letter.

For cloud storage, we merely had to provide our Amazon S3 account ID and key and choose a bucket. BE21 doesn’t currently support the Object Lock option, but it applies home-grown ransomware protection by blocking any other process from writing to its data stores.

If you want to use the new cloud deduplication feature, you’ll need a Silver or Gold licence and a local folder to serve as a cache. We had no problem setting this up, and after enabling encryption and providing an Amazon S3 key, our deduplicated cloud repository was presented as a new backup destination.

When it comes to creating backup jobs, you can get started by selecting your source systems in the console, then choosing a predefined strategy from its drop-down menu. Multiple stages can be added to implement a hybrid strategy that backs up to both local and cloud locations, as well as replicating to other disk stores.

For restoration, you can browse the files, folders or volumes of a selected source, pick a recovery point and choose where to send them. Instant GRT takes care of SQL databases and Exchange items, while for bigger recovery tasks you can use the instant VM Recovery option, which turns a backup into a new VM. We selected a backup of our SQL Server host and had it running in VMware in only 80 seconds. BE21 also integrates with Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, allowing VMs to be replicated to the cloud and restored in seconds. For physical clients, bare-metal recovery can restore a system onto new hardware,

Backup Exec really covers every data backup and recovery angle, with a superb range of features. It’s great for protecting virtual environments, cloud support is excellent and you can choose exactly the capacity and features you want to pay for.

When it comes to backups, there’s a whole host of different strategies companies can adopt, and a vast range of services and platforms that need to be protected, but luckily Nakivo’s Backup & Replication (NBR) software will fit into almost any backup role.

It can be run on either Windows or Linux, and Nakivo also offers downloadable VMs for VMware hosts or Nutanix AHV clusters, plus a cloud machine image for AWS EC2. Alternatively, you can run the server on a NAS: packages are offered for Asustor, Netgear, Qnap, Synology, Western Digital and FreeNAS appliances, as well as generic ARM-based devices and even the Raspberry Pi.

On the client side, meanwhile, it provides full backup services for Windows and Linux workstations and servers, along with VMware vSphere and Cloud Director, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2, Oracle databases and Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint data stores. Make no mistake, it’s the most versatile backup suite we’ve seen – the only thing that’s missing is support for macOS.

The range of licensing options may seem slightly confusing, but it means you’re not paying for more systems than you need to, or for applications you’re not using. The price above is for a perpetual five-server Enterprise licence, which includes application support, backup to Amazon and Wasabi cloud repositories, and policy-based backups.

For testing, we went down the NAS route, installing the NBR software on an eight-bay Qnap TS-873A appliance running QuTS Hero. Once installed, this presents a local web console, which prompted us to create an admin account and add clients to the inventory. There was no need to interact with our test systems at all: as we selected Windows servers and workstations, the backup service was pushed to each one, while providing admin credentials for our VMware hosts brought their VMs up in the console, ready for agentless backup.

All host installations create a default local backup repository, but you can easily add local, network or cloud stores and enable features such as data reduction, encryption and self-healing. To create backup jobs you simply select systems from the inventory, choose a repository, create a schedule and select the number of recovery points to be retained.

There’s a lot of versatility here: policy-based backups let you filter backup sources according to search rules such as characters in a physical machine or VM name, datastore location, power state and IP address. On the virtual side, we were pleased to see the option to back up not just individual machines but entire vSphere hosts, ensuring that any new VMs subsequently created would be included in future backups.

For the purposes of secure archival and ransomware protection, NBR also supports immutable destinations. When we selected an Amazon S3 bucket with Object Lock enabled, an additional option appeared, allowing us to specify for how many days our data should remain immutable. Other options include application-aware backups, change tracking, network encryption and network acceleration for backups running over slow links.

Restoration options are just as comprehensive, ranging from simple file and folder recovery to GRT services for recovering SQL databases and Exchange objects. If you’re backing up virtual machines from VMware or Hyper-V, NBR can provide up to 30 recovery points for rapid restoration as needed: you can optionally reinstate any one of these as a new VM, or launch it directly from the backup repository without having to restore it to the original server. We tested the latter option on a VMware VM running Windows Server 2019, and saw our temporary VM up and running in 45 seconds.

Nakivo’s Backup & Replication 10.4 impresses on many levels. It supports a huge number of platforms and backup options, yet it’s a cinch to use, highly flexible and exceedingly good value. As long as you don’t need Mac support, it’s a superb choice.

Commvault Metallic is perfect for businesses that only want to pay for the backup services they need as it offers eight distinct modules. These provide protection for VMware, Hyper-V, Azure VM and Kubernetes virtualisation hosts, databases, file and object storage, Windows, macOS and Linux endpoints, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Salesforce and Active Directory (AD).

This hybrid solution combines on-premises with cloud backup and you can use Metallic’s cloud storage or your own Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure accounts as off-site backup destinations. There are no hidden costs either, as Metallic provides a price calculator on its website for each module.

Managed from one cloud portal, it presents a dashboard overview of each module along with links for user management, documentation and support cases. The advanced section provides full configuration access, information on storage status and job activity, along with report generation and alerts.

Starting with the Endpoint module, we used it to email invitations to our users with a download link for the Metallic Edge app. After they’d logged in with their Metallic credentials, the app grabbed our predefined plan, automatically backed up their systems to the cloud, created a local drive letter for drag-and-drop restores and provided a link to their personal Metallic cloud portal.

Microsoft 365 support is superb, and Metallic provides swift account authentication that requires only a couple of clicks and then loads the relevant Azure Enterprise apps for you. We created cloud-to-cloud backup plans for Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business users along with our Teams account and could choose five-year, seven-year or infinite retention periods for Metallic cloud storage.

To recover items from the portal, we selected Exchange users, chose a recovery point and restored entire mailboxes or individual messages. For OneDrive, we browsed files and restored them to their original location or sent them to other users

Hyper-V and VMware virtualisation host protection require the Metallic gateway component to be installed on a Windows Server 2016 or 2019 host. Downloaded from the portal, this looks after communications between sources and destinations and expertly handles all caching, deduplication and hash tables. Hybrid backup comes into play here. During the creation of our VMware and Hyper-V backup plans, we declared a Synology NAS for our primary backup location and used Metallic’s cloud for secondary storage. Each plan started by backing up selected VMs to our NAS appliance and, on completion, ran an auxiliary job to replicate the local store to the cloud, so no further interaction with the host was required during this phase.

Recovery services are excellent; we were able to restore individual guest files, the VM configuration, the entire VM or its VMDK files. The live recovery and live mount services can quickly reinstate a failed VM, with the latter loading them directly from a backup on primary storage.

Strong ransomware protection is provided as Metallic’s Azure-based cloud storage is air-gapped and immutable, and you can also choose from Azure hot GRS or cool LRS storage, depending on the levels of durability required. Metallic’s new Security IQ feature provides a posture rating along with options to require authorisation for restores and deletions, while its unusual file activity service alerts you if it sees anything untoward such as a ransomware attack on a client, and presents the last good recovery point for swift data restoration.

Commvault Metallic is a slick hybrid backup solution that supports a wide range of business workloads, all easily managed from one cloud portal. It’s very easy to deploy and offers great recovery features, while the modular design and clear pricing structure make it simple to keep a firm grip on costs.

Backup is a fundamental part of a complete data security strategy and IT administrators that fail to implement a hybrid backup strategy properly are putting their company, their own jobs, and those of their staff on the line. Data is one business asset that is not expendable as once it's gone, it's gone for good.

A backup plan isn't just about keeping a few copies of files to hand on the off-chance that one goes missing. It's about providing a full business recovery plan in the event of a disaster. By this, we mean anything from an accidentally deleted file, a corrupted database, or a sickly server to a ransomware attack, burglary, fire, or flood.

This doesn't need to be challenging as there is a huge choice of top-quality backup products on the market that are suitable for a wide range of business environments and budgets. The most effective backup strategies employ a 'hybrid' approach that combines on-site and cloud backup and the good news is there are plenty of solutions that provide both essential data protection and easy management.

The theory behind a hybrid backup strategy

A hybrid backup strategy allows multiple copies of data to be maintained in different physical locations so it's always available regardless of any mishap. The easiest way to understand this is to use the '3-2-1' principle where you retain three up-to-date copies of your data, back it up to two different types of storage media, and keep one copy off-site. 

This type of strategy gives you the best of all possible worlds as your onsite backups provide fast recovery services for lost or deleted items. If for reasons such as theft, fire, or flood, you can't access your main office or IT equipment gets stolen, you'll have the third copy safely stored off-site.

The cloud is a natural contender for off-site storage and all good backup products either include their cloud storage in the price or offer support for public providers such as Amazon and Microsoft Azure. You don't have to use the cloud though, as many products offer replication services that can copy backups to your own remote storage devices such as NAS appliances and other storage servers.

It's important to use a single backup product to protect all your systems and applications as multiple products will increase costs and complexity. Backup strategies that rely on manual human intervention are guaranteed to fail so only choose products with full scheduling services that allow them to run jobs regularly to a predefined schedule.

Hybrid backup costs

Ransomware attacks are now so common that businesses of all sizes need to take precautions to mitigate them and avoid paying for data to be decrypted. Backup software can't protect against these attacks but those that offer file versioning allow you to retain multiple copies of files going days, weeks, and months so if you get hit by a ransomware demand, it's possible to browse them and restore files to a state before they were encrypted.

The latest ransomware attacks attempt to infiltrate the software itself and will delete all backups to prevent recovery of data that it subsequently encrypts. A good defense against this is immutable cloud storage that once written to, cannot be changed, modified, overwritten, or deleted.

A prime example of this is Amazon's S3 buckets with Object Lock as enabling this feature turns them into WORM (write once read many) storage devices so existing data can't be modified or deleted until the retention period you've set has expired. This is often referred to as a '3-2-1-1' strategy where the fourth step is backing up data to immutable cloud storage.

Backup recovery

Running backups once a day may not be enough and two factors will determine their frequency – recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs). RTOs determine the period your business can comfortably survive without access to its systems, applications, and data. 

An RTO in hours will require a backup strategy that delivers much faster restore services than an RTO measured in days. You may also need to define multiple RTOs – a critical mail server, for example, will need to be restored much quicker than basic file sharing and print services.

The RPO defines the amount of data loss your business can tolerate and will define how frequently backups are run. If you can't afford to lose all the data created during the previous 24 hours then running one backup per day won't be sufficient.

This is where backup software scheduling services pay dividends. You can create multiple jobs for different RPOs and RTOs, define your backup frequencies, and leave the software to run them at the appointed times.

Disaster prevention within a hybrid backup strategy

When your data protection solution is up and running you must test all its restore facilities for files, applications, servers, and virtualization hosts. Schedule tests for regular pre-arranged times and not when convenient otherwise they won't get done.

Make sure you set the backup software to provide notifications and alerts by email or SMS and if you receive warnings that a backup job has failed, find out what the problem is and address it. All these safety measures will confirm that your backups are working, data is retrievable, your RPOs and RTOs can be met and all unforeseen problems are ironed out before you need to use them for real. 

You should document the entire process by creating a 'run book' and keeping it up to date. This will provide contact details of all key personnel and include clear recovery instructions for all systems and services so any type of data recovery can be run even if key staff members are unavailable.

There's now a new strategy for just this situation. Termed 3-2-1-1-0, this calls for all the standard copies of data maintained in different locations, additional immutable cloud storage, and zero errors for all your recovery processes.

No two hybrid backup products are the same so you should conduct rigorous testing to make sure they have the features to match your requirements. Look for vendors that offer time-limited free trials of their full solutions so you can try them out before parting with any cash.

StorageCraft's ShadowXafe is an all-round backup solution with a particular focus on VMware and Hyper-V environments. Hybrid backup comes as standard, with SMB shares and iSCSI targets supported as destinations alongside StorageCraft's own cloud services.

The software can be bought either on a subscription basis or as a one-off purchase; the price above is for a perpetual two-socket host licence covering unlimited VMs, although note that backing up physical systems costs extra. Cloud storage starts at around £120 per VM per year, with the premium service providing full disaster recovery.

ShadowXafe's various functions are all managed from StorageCraft's OneSystem portal. If you want to manage backups for remote workers, you can access this in the cloud or run it privately on a local server – the console is identical either way.

We found ShadowXafe very easy to install on our VMware vCenter host system. The deployment utility can be run from any Windows system, and it swiftly set up a new ShadowXafe VM for us. As we'd opted for a private portal, it loaded this as well. An agent needs to be installed on any desktop systems you want to protect, but that's not needed for VMs.

The OneSystem dashboard shows your system protection status at a glance, along with data usage, throughput and rates of change. It's also where you create your protection policies; for each one you can set a desired backup frequency along with hourly, daily, weekly and monthly snapshot retention requirements.

This is also where you assign a destination and set preferences for on-site backups and off-site replication. For local backups, we simply had to point the software to an SMB share on a Synology NAS appliance and opted to enable the optional compression and password-protection features for our archives.

Cloud storage will normally be provisioned by a StorageCraft partner, but for testing we used our MSP account to create our own cloud repository and then declare it to OneSystem. This worked perfectly, although we noticed that OneSystem can't report on cloud storage usage, so MSPs will need to keep an eye on this from their partner portal.

Once you've created a policy, you simply apply it to the desired systems: we provided details of our vCenter host to OneSystem and our protection started immediately. If you're running a hybrid strategy, ShadowXafe replicates your backups to the cloud once each local job has finished.

Recovery services are as versatile as you could ask for. You can browse available recovery points on both local and cloud repositories, and extract selected files and folders or restore an entire system as a new VM. This is impressively speedy thanks to StorageCraft's VirtualBoot tech, which lets you boot backed-up images without having to go through a full restoration or conversion process. On our Hyper-V host it brought a Windows Server 2019 VM back to life in just 242 seconds.

Cloud recovery is also available to MSPs, allowing you to view a customer's protected systems and recovery points from the partner portal. We selected a cloud-protected machine, chose a recovery point and had a cloud-hosted VM ready in 95 seconds.

While home workers can be protected using the cloud portal, busy branch offices may be better served by StorageCraft's OneXafe Solo unit – a mini-PC that functions as a remote ShadowXafe service node and can be managed from OneSystem.

Any SMB that's reliant on virtual environments will find StorageCraft's ShadowXafe a great choice. It's very easy to manage and provides a wealth of smart data-recovery features.

If you’re looking for visual polish in your backup client, you may want to avoid IDrive’s service; the desktop client isn’t exactly ugly, but it looks like it was put together by a programmer rather than a professional designer. However, it makes up for this with an admirable focus on functionality: nearly all of its tools are accessible directly from the main window, via an obvious button with a clear text label.

It helps that IDrive isn’t overloaded with features. It’s first and foremost a cloud backup system, and that means the specifics of backup strategies, compression and so forth are handled invisibly by the service. Indeed, once you’ve chosen which files and folders you want to back up, IDrive immediately starts quietly uploading them without asking any further questions at all. Even multi-computer deployments are effortless to set up: simply install a second copy of the software on a Windows PC or Mac and IDrive will then automatically create a separate archive within your cloud account for that device.

If you prefer to take a more hands-on approach, there are a few settings you can tweak, including the backup scheduler. By default, IDrive continually watches your nominated backup folders and uploads all modified files smaller than 500MB as soon as changes are detected, with a full backup every day. You can change the frequency of (as well as disable) both processes; there’s no option to perform a full backup less often than once a week, but you arguably shouldn’t be backing up that infrequently anyway.

As is usual in cloud backup software, you can also exclude specific files and folders from your selection, as well as limit IDrive’s bandwidth and CPU usage to a percentage of your choice, and enable email notifications to confirm successful or failed backups. Really, though, that’s about it, and for everyday backups that’s probably all you’ll need. IDrive automatically stores up to 30 historical versions of modified files, and if you get low on cloud storage you can use the Archive Cleanup wizard to remove old files that are no longer present on your local hard disk – but we’d recommend that you use this with caution, as you could end up purging accidentally deleted files, leaving you with no way to recover them.

At any rate, you shouldn’t find yourself too short on space. The $52 annual subscription – equivalent to around £41 – gets you a roomy 5TB of storage in IDrive’s data centre, and while this is located the US, we found file transfers were surprisingly swift: our 2GB test archive zoomed across the Atlantic in 29mins 5secs, which was more than five minutes ahead of Carbonite. And if you’re worried about US agencies spying on your data, you can optionally specify your own private encryption key – subject to the usual warning that, if you lose it, there’s no way to recover your backed-up data.

If this were all that IDrive did, it would still be a decent choice for online backup. What distinguishes the program is that it also – unlike most other cloud backup services – supports local destinations. This means you can conveniently manage your on-site and off-site backups from one place, and set both to execute at whatever intervals you see fit.

Admittedly, the program’s local backup capabilities are rather limited. You can only create one local backup job, and the destination has to be the root directory of an internal, external or network drive (a subfolder named IDriveLocal is automatically created). You get exactly the same stripped-down set of options as you do when backing up to the cloud, which means that encryption and compression are always on. This has implications for performance: a full backup of our 2GB test folder was compacted down to 1.91GB, which is a decent saving, but it took 58 seconds to write to our USB 3 external drive. For subsequent runs, IDrive is smart enough not to re-copy unchanged files, but historical versions of files aren’t kept, nor can you set your own schema of full, incremental and differential backups.

IDrive has a few other features worth mentioning. The sync tool lets you use your cloud storage as a sort of proto-Dropbox, automatically synchronising files across all computers with the IDrive client installed; you can also use IDrive’s web restore capability to easily grab individual files from wherever you happen to be. The Clone and Computer Backup button lets you make an image of your hard disk or operating system, which can be stored either locally or in the cloud and restored to the same PC or onto different hardware. For advanced users, there’s also a surprisingly sophisticated set of server backup options, which permit one-click data store backups from Microsoft 365, Hyper-V, SQL Server, VMware and more.

IDrive isn’t flexible enough to suit every role, but for small teams seeking set-and-forget protection, it could be just the thing: it’s very easy to set up, supports multi-computer installations and comes with enough storage to protect a whole team for a very reasonable price.

Like Backblaze, Carbonite does one job: it quietly and continually uploads your personal files to the cloud, ensuring they’re recoverable no matter what befalls your computer. Also like Backblaze, it offers unlimited storage for a single PC or Mac, and by some curious coincidence the annual price for the basic service is identical too.

There are some differences, however. One is speed: Carbonite uploaded our files around 40% faster than Backblaze, backing up two gigabytes in just 35mins 27secs. Carbonite also distinguishes itself by overlaying a green dot onto each file’s icon as it’s backed up, with yellow dots indicating items whose upload is pending. This provides a great at-a-glance view of your backup status – and any dot-less files can be instantly added to Carbonite’s backup set by right-clicking on them and selecting “Back this up” from the contextual menu.

Carbonite also provides a nicely polished way to get your files back, adding a virtual drive to the Windows Explorer from which you can browse and extract your backed-up files. Right-click on a file and you’ll see up to 12 previous versions, any of which can be restored to the local file system with a click.

While all of this is very agreeable, the experience is soured by some mean restrictions on what can be uploaded. Carbonite will back up a single external drive, but if you want to protect two drives you’ll need to step up to the Plus tier, which costs a distinctly stiff $112 per annum. With a basic subscription, the software won’t automatically upload video files either, even if they’re located in a folder that’s marked for backup: you’ll have to manually mark them for protection.

Lastly, it’s a minor grizzle, but we’d appreciate it if Carbonite’s encryption options were more flexible. You can configure a private key at the point of installation or choose to let Carbonite manage it for you – but once you’ve made your decision, there’s no option within the program to revoke or change it later.

Still, as long as you don’t need to back up video files or multiple external drives, Carbonite remains an attractive choice. It won’t help with local backups or disk imaging tasks, but with its speedy uploads, handy coloured dots and integrated restore interface, it’s the slickest cloud backup service around.

When it comes to cloud backup, it doesn’t get much easier than Backblaze. There are only three buttons, and you needn’t touch any of them: it comes configured to scan your system for personal files, no matter where they’re located on your network, and automatically upload them to Backblaze’s servers. Continual updates occur whenever you make a change or create a new document. For most people, that’s ample protection with zero configuration.

Of course, if you want to get your hands dirty, there are a few things you can customise. Specific file types, locations and drives can be included and excluded – you’re even able to back up external drives – and you can optionally switch from continuous operation to daily or on-demand backups. And if you don’t trust the automatic encryption, you can also set your own encryption key.

For the most part, though, you shouldn’t need to interact with Backblaze until it’s time to restore a backed-up item. Even then, the client stays in the background because your uploaded files are browsed and downloaded from the publisher’s website. Here you can also rescue lost or overwritten files from the past 30 days, and if one of your computers is stolen, you can bring up a map showing where it was when the Backblaze software last touched base.

On that note, be aware that your subscription only entitles you to back up a single PC or Mac. That’s a necessary restriction: each account comes with unlimited storage to ensure that even the biggest files get protected. And remember that if you work with big video files or the like, they will inevitably take a while to reach Backblaze’s servers. Our 2GB folder took 49mins 35secs to upload. That’s a step up from some of the most sluggish options we’ve seen, but it’s still a drag if you want to back up your day’s work before leaving the office.

The final thing to be clear about is that Backblaze is very much a single-purpose tool: it doesn’t handle local backups at all, nor can it create an image of your hard disk for disaster-recovery purposes. That means it’s only one component in a backup strategy, rather than a complete solution – but as cloud components go, it’s terrifically convenient and effective.

Whenever we look at backup software, Acronis True Image is never far away from the top of the pile. And there’s a good reason for that: it really does do everything. The standard package handles local backups of files, folders, disks and partitions, while the clear, tasteful front-end makes it both quick and easy to set up any number of backup sets, each with its own schedule and destination.

For those who like to take full control of their backup strategy, meanwhile, there’s plenty to configure. Want to alternate between full, differential and incremental backups? No problem: you can use a predefined scheme or create your own, with fully configurable cleanup rules. Backups can be secured with a password, and you can even create an entire encrypted virtual volume on a local drive to protect your archives and other personal data.

True Image is speedy too. It took just 25 seconds to mirror our 2GB backup archive to an external hard disk, and a very reasonable 97 seconds to transfer it to our NAS drive. The light compression that’s enabled by default only managed to squeeze our folder down to 1.98GB, but it didn’t add a single second to the total operation time.

The suite is rounded off by an Active Protection feature, which preemptively blocks suspected ransomware processes from accessing your files, and a sprinkling of system maintenance tools, including a wizard for creating Windows or Linux-based disaster-recovery media.

The one thing that’s not included in the basic package is cloud backup. If you want that, you can instead opt for an Advanced or Premium annual subscription, which respectively include 500GB and 1TB of storage on Acronis’ servers. Again, performance is a strength: while Acronis couldn’t keep up with IDrive’s speedy upload rate of 1.23MB/sec, it averaged a creditable 0.9MB/sec, securing the whole folder in under 40 minutes.

It’s also impressive how elegantly cloud support is integrated into the mix. Acronis Cloud appears in the application just like any other target device, and while you can’t set a single job to back up to both local and remote destinations, it takes mere moments to clone a local backup job and point it to the cloud instead.

Dig into the settings and you’ll spot a few differences between local and cloud tasks. Compression and scheme options are preconfigured for off-site backups – which makes perfect sense – and to make the most of your cloud storage allowance you can specify how many old versions of files to retain, and how long they should be kept before being purged. The password-protection option remains, meanwhile, with all encryption performed locally so your data is only ever transmitted and stored in protected form. Uniquely among its rivals, Acronis also lets you choose which locale you want your data to be stored in: the company’s US data centre is the default, but we switched this to Germany, and you can also choose sites in France, Japan, Singapore or Australia.

If you’re looking for a catch, it’s the price. £34 is a lot to pay for a local-only backup suite. The likes of Ashampoo Backup Pro 14 tick a lot of the same boxes for less than half the price, and those with more modest needs may well find everything they need in a free package. The £29 annual subscription option is even less enticing: it could be a decent deal if it yields a significant upgrade every year, but at this point there’s very little that needs adding. Compare this 2021 edition to the 2019 release and you’ll find that two years of progress equates to little more than some new system tray notifications and customisable battery settings.

The cloud-enabled subscriptions also feel uncomfortably expensive, at £52 per year for the 500GB Advanced package and a whopping £73 per annum for the 1TB Premium service - excluding tax. To be fair, in addition to online storage, these packages now include the company’s antivirus and web-filtering engines, freshly transplanted from the company’s Cyber Protect Cloud product. These have achieved strong scores from independent security testers, so a True Image subscription could allow you to ditch your third-party antivirus software. Even so, there’s no escaping the fact that IDrive’s personal plan offers 5TB of storage for a lower price.

None of this diminishes the software itself, though. Acronis True Image is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive personal backup system out there, and its user-friendly interface, strong performance and decent set of secondary tools don’t hurt at all. With the pricing structure as it is, you’ll probably want to examine some of the cheaper options on the market before splashing out on True Image 2021 – but if you do end up investing in Acronis, you’ll be getting a first-rate backup solution.

At £20 after tax, Ashampoo’s Backup Pro 14 is one of the cheapest professional backup suites around – and it offers a strong set of features. While there’s no native cloud backup, the client makes a great impression right away with integrated support for nine third-party cloud platforms (including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive), as well as WebDAV connections.

There’s also support for backing up disk images along with individual files – although the job definition wizard doesn’t make a song and dance about this, only asking which you want to protect after you’ve already chosen a destination and given your backup set a name.

Successive dialogs then ask you all of the key questions one by one: do you want compression, do you want encryption and so forth. Truth be told, the process feels a little pedantic, but it’s not something you’ll go through on a regular basis. Unusually, you can apply multiple schedules to the same job, meaning you can (for example) create a backup task that runs every Friday and also on the first of the month.

You can also choose whether you want to store your backup in Ashampoo’s proprietary database format or as a clone of the file structure. The former is more space-efficient, but the latter means you can browse your backed-up files in Windows. If you combine this setting with compression, each file is stored as a standalone ZIP archive.

Another very welcome feature is version management: Ashampoo lets you choose whether to replace old versions of files immediately or store them for up to 3,650 days. Historical versions can be viewed and restored via a date and time selector in the Restore window – a convenience that few backup systems can match.

For disk backup jobs, you can additionally define a cycle of full and incremental backups, and specify how long the backup chain can get before the oldest data is wiped. There’s no option to create differential backups, however, nor to consolidate incremental archives.

In all, Ashampoo Backup Pro 14 doesn’t really fall down in any area – except speed. No matter what settings we applied, it was decidedly sluggish, taking a slovenly 163 seconds to copy our 2GB test folder to an external hard drive, and nearly six minutes to send it to our NAS appliance. Still, given that most backups run in the background, those slow results shouldn’t ruin what is a very competent package at a great price.

Veeam has announced the expansion of its public cloud support with the launch of the new Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Veeam’s new cloud solution leverages Google-native backup technologies to help organizations quickly and reliably overcome any cloud data loss, in addition to lowering storage acquisition costs.

Furthermore, the service offers a centralized platform to protect, secure, and manage data and applications on cloud, virtual, and physical environments, enabling organizations to accelerate their hybrid cloud adoption strategies.

“As customers migrate their most business-critical workloads to the cloud, data protection and management are top of mind. With the expanded availability of Veeam’s data backup solutions on Google Cloud, customers can quickly deploy and manage these applications at global scale, while benefiting from Veeam’s capabilities in data protection,” said Manvinder Singh, director of partnerships at Google Cloud.

Key capabilities of Veeam Backup for GCP include Google-native backup and recovery powered by policy-based automation for rapid recovery; cost calculation and management tools to monitor costs and avoid cloud overspend; multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a defense against brute force cyber attacks; and integration with “Veeam Backup & Replication” repository for easy recovery outside of Google Cloud.

"Organisations leveraging hybrid cloud infrastructure can increase both the value and performance of their workloads by taking advantage of data movement across on-premises and cloud environments,” said Andrew Smith, research manager, cloud infrastructure services at IDC.

Smith continued: “However, this environment requires complex data protection solutions to meet customer demands for data recovery and resilience. While solving this problem has historically been the responsibility of the enterprise, providers like Veeam can help by adding granular levels of automation and data protection which allow organisations to ensure they are prepared in the event of data loss or downtime.”

Newmar Power, a player in the power electronics solutions for telecom and public safety, announced a new line of products aimed at more extreme uses.

The new line of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) is called the Rugged AC UPS Series and will prevent system interruptions due to power failures for telecom, public safety and intelligent transportation systems. For the transportation industry, this system is specifically designed to power-critical hardware that sometimes endure unpredictable climate extremes, including traffic lights, e-tolling systems and digital signage.

The new design provides battery-backup for power grids working in extreme environments and can handle temperatures ranging from -40 to 176 degrees Fahrenheit. Because temperature extremes can impact battery life, the Rugged AC UPS features a built-in temperature-compensated battery charger to help extend battery life.

The Rugged AC UPS also features a wide AC input voltage range of 88 to 152 volts AC and a wide range automatic voltage regulation (AVR), which allows the UPS to operate normally without transferring to backup mode during temporary voltage irregularities.

"Newmar Power is already a trusted name in the telecom and public safety space, so we are very excited to enter new segments of the transportation sector including ITS/traffic," says Richard Gaudet, president of network and industrial power business at Mission Critical Electronics, the parent company of Newmar Power.

Data loss is a real danger, no matter what storage device you use. Important files – such as your business files or critical work documents – need a strong backup strategy to avoid unexpected hardware failure, natural disasters, or simple accidental deletion. Otherwise, business continuity and regulation compliance are at risk.

This whitepaper explores how integrating Synology’s Btrfs file system and snapshot technology for shared folders on Synology NAS lets IT administrators protect their data, forming a resolute data protection strategy.

Download it now to learn how Synology helps ensure maximum data availability.

Backup specialist Retrospect is one of the industry’s old hands, now in its 31st year. Don’t think its software is old-fashioned, though: Backup 17 introduces a range of brand-new features, mostly aimed at simplifying deployment.

One notable addition is automatic onboarding, which can dramatically speed up installation. It works by providing a custom client that users can download and install themselves; this then immediately starts backing up files according to your policy, with zero user configuration required.

Elsewhere, the ProactiveAI feature helps keep your protection up to date by dynamically adjusting backup windows, and it can now process more hosts for faster responses. Other improvements include reduced restore times for larger sites and an option to export preflight summaries of all backup information.

All of this comes under a range of licensing plans. The Single Server 5 package covers one Windows server and five desktops for £445, while the Multi-Server version we tested costs £2,015 for unlimited Windows, Mac and Linux clients. Optional add-ons are available for Exchange, SQL Server and IMAP email; for agentless backup of VMware and Hyper-V hosts, you’ll need the separate Retrospect Virtual solution, although it’s rumoured that this could be incorporated into the main Backup product in the future.

Once you’re set up, it’s time to sign up with the Retrospect web console, which provides real-time monitoring and management of your backup environment. You can even manage multiple organisations from here, although this requires an add-on, which adds £404 to the cost of the Multi-Server licence.

The web console is also where you set up automatic onboarding. If you want your desktops to start backing up as soon as the software is installed, this is easy to configure: create a backup task with the entire set of clients as the source, then generate a web link to send to your users. Using this, they can download and activate the backup client.

In practice, we found this worked perfectly. Once the software was installed on our Windows 10 desktops, they immediately appeared in the host’s client container, and backup jobs started whirring away without users having to lift a finger.

We were also pleased to see that the onboarding feature works in exactly the same way with remote clients. You just need to provide the external IP address or DNS name of your backup server in the web console while configuring the client package. On installation, the client will then quietly make the connection and start backing up.

Creating new backup jobs is a simple step-by-step process, and you can define multiple backup sets for different media, with destination options including local, removable and networked disks, as well as optical media, tape and cloud storage using any account compatible with Amazon S3, Backblaze B2 or Dropbox.

If you’ve created a ProactiveAI task, this will default to always active, which means it will run whenever it can for the best possible protection. If you prefer, you can specify a minimum time between backups, and ticking the “Allow early backup” box permits users to trigger additional backups whenever appropriate.

As for what’s backed up, Retrospect’s progressive backups start with a full backup of everything that’s supposed to be protected, then subsequently secures all new and changed files, with user-configurable grooming policies to determine how many old versions to keep.

Should the day come when you need to restore your data, a wizard guides you through this too. You’re prompted to choose a backup set and snapshot version, select the drives, folders or files to be recovered and decide where to put them. Single files can also be restored directly from the web console and you can permit users to browse their own backups and restore items on demand.

Retrospect Backup has lasted the course for good reason: it offers a wealth of data-protection features at a price that SMBs will find pleasing. Platform support is as good as you could ask for, and the new automatic onboarding feature means you can roll out an entire backup strategy with minimal effort.

There’s no shortage of online backup solutions for SMBs to choose from, but BackupVault stands out thanks to its simple pricing scheme. The price is based solely on how much data you want backed up to the cloud, so you pay a predictable monthly fee with no nasty surprises.

Don’t confuse this with competing services that charge according to how much storage your data takes up once compressed. That can be good value, but compression ratios are dependent on the type of data you’re working with, and the provider is under no obligation to use the most efficient algorithms – so your outgoings could fluctuate significantly from month to month as your backup needs evolve.

Prices for BackupVault start at £24 per month for 50GB, and you can add capacity at any time in increments of 100GB, which get cheaper as you move up the scale. The standard service includes round-the-clock UK telephone support and a rolling 30 to 60-day retention period for all file versions, with backups older than 31 days automatically deleted on the first day of the following month. If you need more than this, you can pay a 10% supplement to upgrade to a 12-month retention period.

For small offices with one server and a few PCs, the BackupVault client can be installed on each system and configured locally. For larger deployments, BackupVault also offers a free central management console app that provides remote client access, system recovery and bare-metal restore services. To get set up you just need to enter your host name, account password and encryption key. It’s imperative that you keep a record of this key, as it’s needed to restore your data and BackupVault has no access to it.

The client interface is easy to use, showing you both local and network storage and allowing you to choose what you want to protect. You can back up individual files and folders, entire drives or complete systems, and extra options become available if certain apps or services are installed. On our Hyper-V host, an additional tab appeared for VM backups, while our Exchange and SQL Server hosts had tabs for the relevant apps. The software let us click to select individual SQL databases for backup, although when it came to Exchange we were only able to select entire data stores because BackupVault doesn’t support message-level backups.

Backups can be run on demand or scheduled at regular intervals, and for hybrid strategies you can copy data to a secondary location – such as a local NAS appliance – as well as your cloud storage. If you have a large amount of data to protect, you can hit the ground running with a free vault-seeding service, which lets you send in your first set of backups on encrypted USB media, rather than waiting for it all to upload over the internet.

BackupVault passed our restore tests with flying colours. The recovery procedures are easy to use and we’re big fans of the InstantData feature, which uses a combination of sparse files and a proprietary kernel driver to greatly reduce the wait time to access files stored in the cloud: we found that this allowed us to start working on recovered files just a few seconds after the restore process had started. We also tried restoring a 2.4GB MP4 video file from the cloud using InstantData and, while playback was quite jerky, we were able to skip to any part of the video and view it within 20 seconds of starting the restore. With conventional restore methods over our fibre broadband connection, we’d have been looking at a wait of around 90 minutes before being able to open the file.

Lastly, there’s a handy option to restore your files to a local virtual drive, meaning you can check back on older versions without replacing current ones or creating potentially confusing duplicates.

BackupVault Cloud Backup is a fine choice for SMBs, providing easily managed data protection services and almost instant access to your backed-up data – and its simple pricing structure keeps storage costs under control as well.

Businesses struggling to fit ever-increasing backup and disaster recovery requirements into dwindling windows of opportunity will find ExaGrid’s EX series of backup appliances stand out for a number of sound reasons. They deliver a tiered storage solution that can easily scale out to keep in step with demand and team this up with impressive data reduction rates, plus low acquisition and ongoing costs.

ExaGrid’s scale-out technology differs dramatically from the mainstream as it doesn’t employ dumb expansion shelves. Instead, each appliance is a complete system with its own CPU, memory, storage and network ports so as you increase capacity, you also scale compute power and network bandwidth.

Traditional data deduplication techniques are notorious for impacting on backup and restore performance but ExaGrid neatly side-steps this with its patented landing zone feature. Data received from the backup application is written directly to an on-appliance disk cache in undeduplicated form.

When the backup is complete, ExaGrid’s adaptive deduplication writes the data to a long-term retention space on the appliance where it is compressed and deduplicated. This doesn’t interfere with backup performance and because the landing zone always stores a copy of the most recent backups, the majority of restore operations are much faster as data doesn’t have to be rehydrated and decompressed.

ExaGrid EX21000E review: Hardware and deployment

On review is the ExaGrid EX21000E model which represents the middle ground in a family of nine appliances. This 2U all-Supermicro rack server comes supplied with ten 6TB SAS3 hard disks preconfigured in a RAID6 array with one set aside as a hot spare, giving you a usable raw capacity of 42TB.

Appliances are grouped together in sites and another key feature is you can mix and match any of the nine EX models together in a single scale-out system comprising up to 32 appliances. ExaGrid uses a hub and spoke architecture, where the hub is the central site and the spoke sites provide off-site replication for essential disaster recovery.

We found the EX21000E easy to deploy; we just followed its browser console’s quick start wizard to configure the network ports that would be handling backup traffic and created a new scale-out site. Selected ports are also configured for inter-site traffic to allow replication and load balancing between them.

Adding a second EX21000E appliance to increase capacity was equally painless. Using its wizard, we assigned the system to our existing site, configured its network ports and provided it with the site’s IP address and administration key.

ExaGrid EX21000E review: Storage provisioning

Configuration takes an hour to complete and we could then view the main web console, which listed our site and member servers along with status views of the landing zone and retention space utilization. Storage is presented as CIFS or NFS shares and creation is swift. You select the host appliance, choose a backup application from the drop-down list, pick a protocol and apply access security policies.

Network access policies contain the IP addresses of the backup application servers that are allowed to access the share. User access policies define which backup application groups and users are allowed to access specific shares, and these can integrate with Active Directory too.

ExaGrid currently supports 25 backup applications, including Veritas NetBackup and Backup Exec, Commvault, Veeam Backup and Replication, Arcserve Backup and UDP and IBM Spectrum Protect. ExaGrid also supports higher-level functions of some apps such as Veritas OST, Oracle RMAN channels and Veeam Data Mover.

Disaster recovery features are extensive: ExaGrid can replicate data to remote ExaGrid sites and public clouds such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Enhanced ransomware protection is due out later this year, where you will be able to apply WORM-like policies to data moved from the landing zone to the retention tier so it can’t be tampered with.

ExaGrid EX21000E review: Deduplication testing

To test data reduction rates, we used the Binary Testing deduplication test suite. This allows us to introduce controlled and measurable rates of change to specific data sets so we can directly compare results across any storage solution it has been applied to.

We loaded Arcserve Backup v18 on a Windows Server 2019 host and created a disk-based storage device using a CIFS share on our ExaGrid site. Using our standard 4GB data set consisting of 1,000 files, we introduced controlled changes within a percentage of the files during a simulated strategy of daily incrementals and weekly full backups.

After the first full backup was completed, we modified 2% of data in 40% of the files prior to each subsequent backup. After a one month simulation, we could see ExaGrid’s statistics page showing a data reduction ratio of 9.3:1.

ExaGrid’s dedupe algorithms are very efficient, and this is the highest ratio we’ve yet recorded for this test. Naturally, the ratio will improve even more over time so the ExaGrid solution is clearly capable of making big storage savings.

With another server running Veritas Backup Exec 20.6 to secure 29 Hyper-V VMs to an ExaGrid site share, we also tested recovery speeds. Using Backup Exec’s Instant VM Recovery, we restored a Windows Server 2019 VM from the latest backup in the ExaGrid landing zone and had the new VM up and running in only 37 seconds.

ExaGrid EX21000E review: Verdict

ExaGrid’s EX scale-out storage solution is a great choice for enterprises faced with ever-shrinking backup windows and rapidly increasing capacity demands. It’s simple to deploy, hugely scalable and our tests show it offers a high deduplication efficiency while ExaGrid’s landing zone delivers fast restores from the latest backups.

The EX21000E is good value as it presents a high capacity for the price and value gets a boost since ExaGrid’s price protection guarantees ongoing maintenance costs won’t be more than 3% per year and the price you pay for your first appliance will be the same for additional units over the following five years. Support is also a cut above the rest - ExaGrid’s maintenance contract includes a dedicated Level 2 senior technician.

ExaGrid EX21000E specifications

Cyclonis Limited, a creator of cloud-enabled software and data-storage protection, has recently released its newest storage-related product, Cyclonis Backup.

Cyclonis Backup leverages the Cloud and strong encryption to help users protect themselves against ransomware while also allowing them to back up their data securely. Cyclonis has long committed to providing its customers a simpler, more secure way of organizing and protecting their digital information.

With an interface designed for ease of use among novices and experts alike, Cyclonis Backup allows users to effortlessly back up their files and data to the Cloud. It also protects the data throughout the process using encryption algorithms such as HTTPS and AES-256. For the convenience of its users, files may be stored across multiple devices and browsers, and users can restore them on an as-needed basis.

This system also includes the Cyclonis Backup Wizard, which assists users in locating and selecting the most important data to them and backing it up to the Cloud as effortlessly as possible. Backup Wizard scans your device to locate photos, videos, documents and other commonly backed-up personal data.

To help users ensure their most personal data remains protected and secured, Cyclonis Backup leverages a myriad of powerful encryption technologies, including AES-256 and HTTPS. AES-256, an encryption standard established by the US National Institutes of Standards and Technology, is used by large-scale organizations across the globe. Meanwhile, HTTPS has come to be the most well-known encryption techniques and is recognized for its reliability and security.

Users must have a Cyclonis account to use Cyclonis Backup. It is worth noting, though, Cyclonis Backup permits users to back up and restore their data across multiple devices via a single account. Cyclonis Backup users can also use the Cyclonis website to access and download their files, giving them the utmost in flexibility.

There’s a free version of Cyclonis Backup with 2GB of cloud storage and limited access to Cyclonis’ support team. For those in need of additional storage space, there’s a variety of paid subscription plans you can tailor to your needs.

Entry-level plans for Cyclonis Backup begin at $7 per month, while the most expensive plan comes in at $28 per month. For those who require additional storage space, Cyclonis Backup allows its users to upgrade their plans at any time.

Cobian Backup is a freeware utility unusually aimed at both home and business users. It’s still at version 11 but is kept up to date for modern versions of Windows and actively supported, despite the fact that the rights to create new versions based on the source code were sold in 2014 to someone who promptly abandoned them.

Once you get past this mildly confusing situation, Cobian Backup 11 is a solid and capable free backup tool for Windows desktop systems. It’s a file-level backup tool, so if you require system imaging, you should look elsewhere.

It can run as an application or a service, using a System or regular account, all of which you’re prompted to select at install time; the default settings will be fine for almost everyone, but you’ll have to enter your Windows username and password to have it use your account.

Note that if you want to use Windows 10’s integrated Volume Shadow Copy feature, which allows it to back up system or software locked files, you’ll have to enable .NET 3.5 via the operating system’s "Turn Windows features on or off” settings, ideally before you install the software.

The interface feels a little outdated and some functions could be more clearly named, but it has very useful tooltips and it’s hard to miss the blue plus sign in the ribbon interface, used to create backup jobs. You’ll be prompted to name and configure a few behaviours for the backup, including selecting whether you want a full, differential or incremental backup.

Your backup source can be any combination of individual files, directories, FTP locations or a manually defined path. Similarly, your destination can be a directory, drive, FTP location or path of your choosing. Unlike many rival backup tools, Cobian Backup can browse shares on your network, making it easy to back up data to a NAS or SMB share.

Optionally, you can set a schedule, choose zip or 7zip compression, and enable encryption up to AES-265. You can even execute files and stop services before a backup begins, which can be used to run scripts or ensure the backup utility has access to all the files in its source path. The settings on existing backup jobs can be modified at any time. Detailed logs are kept, and if you point it at an SMTP server, Cobian can email you about backup events and their status.

In the target directory, backup folders are labelled by job name and date, making it easy to browse and find the version of a file that you’re looking for. Unlike most backup tools, however, there’s no dedicated restore function.

This can be annoying if you’re working with differential or incremental backups, as you’ll have a single full back up, and further backups merely copy the directory structure and any files that have been changed since either the full backup or the last backup.

The easiest way to deal with this is to first copy the full backup to wherever you need it, and then the later backups which include any updated files. For this reason, we recommend using differential rather than incremental backups if you have the space for it, as you’ll only need to carry out two directory copies to restore a set of fully up-to-date files.

Overall, Cobian Backup works well and has plenty of features, but its restoration options leave a lot to be desired compared to tools such as EaseUS ToDo and Duplicati.

Areca backup is a Java-based open source file-level backup tool for Windows and Linux that, and it’s although not particularly regularly updated – there’s not much to change when it comes to backup utilities – it is actively supported and includes some unusual features, notably delta backup, which stores only modified parts of your files.

It’s not as initially approachable as most similar backup tools we’ve reviewed. Before you can create a backup, you have to create a group – available in the toolbar or as a right-click option in the top right pane of the utility.

You’ll also have to create a backup target. This is actually where you set up almost every aspect of your backups, including the source directories you’ll be copying, although the naming doesn’t make that very clear.

The first stage is selecting the target location for your backups. This can be an FTP or SFTP repository, or a local repository, including connected USB drives and available network storage drives. We were pleased to find that we could easily browse to and select our NAS, and create a new folder for our backups to live in.

You can set the naming and date schema for this target’s archives here, as well as their storage mode. The available options are Standard, in which a new archive is created for every backup after the first; space-efficient Delta, which – after the first - archives only the parts of files that have been changed, and Image, which creates an archive at your first full backup and updates it every time.

They’re not to be confused with the backup type, which you’ll set up when you run the backup later; this purely defines how data will be stored on the target.

You’ll have to work down a series of panes in the Target interface to select your backup sources – we appreciated being able to drag folders in from the file manager here, choose what level of compression you want – Zip 64 is default and you can add .zip extensions to make the files more accessible – and whether you want each file archived individually or not.

You can also apply a range of optional features including encryption, filters to exclude files by extension, name or size, and any scripts you’d like to run before or after your backup job. A plugin, priced at €4 per machine, is available to enable Volume Shadow Copy Services support, allowing files that are currently in use by another application to be backed up, and there’s an API to create your own plugins if you need any more features.

With that done, you can run your backup, at which point you can select whether you want this to be an incremental, full or differential backup. If you want to schedule your backups, you’ll have to use your operating system’s scheduling tools, Areca’s command line interface and a bit of scripting to roll your own automation.

Areca doesn’t have an integrated browser to allow you to search through your backed up files and folders, although you can browse through the files stored on your backup target with varying degrees of ease depending on your folder structure, compression and encryption settings.

It’s easy to find the dated backup you want to recover in Areca’s neatly presented list, and the recovery tool can restore your entire backup to either a new directory or its original directory, with options to restore only newer or deleted files.

Areca Backup is extremely capable, but although there’s plenty of online documentation, its interface isn’t particularly intuitive by current standards and the naming of some features leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to clarity.

It’s a powerful tool, but its unusual choices of terminology, lack of integrated scheduling and paid-for VSC support make Duplicati a better choice, as it’s similarly scriptable and has multiplatform support.

One of the most broadly cross-platform file-level backup solutions around, the Duplicati backup utility runs in your web browser via its own local web server on Windows, macOS and Linux. It’s nonetheless easy to install and use on any PC, with notification area shortcuts that make it easy to access its browser-based interface.

When you first install and configure Duplicati you’ll be asked whether your PC has multiple users and prompted to set a password to prevent others from accessing your backup data if that’s the case.

Duplicati is more overtly security-focused than many other backup tools. As well as prompting you to restrict access to them, AES-265 encryption is enabled by default for all the backups it creates, and you’re prompted to set a passphrase for each backup. It’ll also nag you if your passphrase is too weak or if you attempt to store data on a remote location without password protection.

It supports a massive variety of backup destinations, including cloud-based options such as Amazon S3 buckets and Dropbox accounts, a variety of network locations and protocols, and local drives. That last category is surprisingly broad, as it not only includes connected USB devices but also, rather counter-intuitively, SMB/CIFS shares on your local network, as used by many NAS devices and file servers.

To use an SMB target, you have to enter the full folder path, including IP address and your username and password on the target device. Regardless of where your backup target is, you should give each backup job its own directory to avoid conflicts under Duplicati’s default settings.

Duplicati can back up any file or folder on your hard disk or other connected media. You can use filters to exclude specific content, as well as optionally excluding hidden, system and temporary files, or those over a specified size. Should you need to be able to back up open files using Volume Shadow Copy Services, you’ll have to enable the –snapshot-policy advanced option in your backup job and ensure that the Duplicati service or software has administrator privileges.

You’ll be prompted to set a backup schedule and can configure it to use a range of space-saving backup retention options. By default, everything is kept, but selected older backups can be automatically deleted as they age out of a specified time frame.

Duplicati is powerful and flexible, with advanced features including command line utilities and the ability to run pre- and post-backup scripts, but it’s also a little more sensitive than some of its rivals. With default settings in place, any error will halt the entire backup, which means that, if you’ve not got everything perfectly configured or if something significant changes in the file or folder structure that you’re backing up from or to, your backup routine will be interrupted.

It gives you plenty of warnings to tell you what’s happening, though, and you can override this by enabling the –allow-missing-source advanced option, which you’ll want to do for any backup job that includes removable media.

All restoration options are contained within the Duplicati web interface. You can browse and search through backups by date to find and restore specific files and folders to the location of your choice, or you can carry out a full-backup restoration, either to the original location or elsewhere.

Duplicati is our new favourite free backup tool. It’s under more active development than many of its rivals, but our tests found that, for a typical workstation, the current Duplicati 2.0 beta is a stable and refreshingly well-designed file-level backup and restoration tool with a wealth of very modern quality-of-life features.

Duplicati system requirements

There are plenty of free backup utilities aimed at consumers that may be fit for purpose for business workstations, particularly if you’re backing up a home PC or personal laptop that’s used for work. EaseUS ToDo Backup Free is among the best-known and most widely used of these.

It feels very much like shareware, with prompts to upgrade to the subscription-based Home or Workstation versions and reminders that some features aren’t available, such as – most relevant to us in this instance – guarantees for business users, as well as command line tools, full system cloning to a new disk, support for Outlook files, an event-based backup schedule and a promise of faster backup and restore speeds. CD and DVD backups are also only available to paying users, on the off-chance that you need them.

Free users nonetheless get a useful set of core features: single-disk system, disk and file-level backup and recovery, full, incremental and differential scheduled backups, cloud backups and disk cloning.

If you’re dealing with confidential data, it’s best to opt out of the Customer Experience Improvement Program at install time, as this phones home with limited – but not fully specified – data about your backup software’s activities and performance.

You’ll also want to change the default Personal Data Location, where your backups will be stored. ToDo Backup suggests creating a My Backups directory on your local hard disk. While this will guard against accidental deletion of the source file, it’s of no use whatsoever if your hard disk fails or your computer is stolen.

However, you can select any local storage device – a USB drive is best for this, or you can manually enter the path to a network share. The software will automatically create a dedicated directory for your backups.

Once installed, ToDo gives you a tidy-looking and easy to use client with an excellent range of backup options, although some of these are locked and prompt you to upgrade if you want to use them, such as higher compression levels, file exclusion and support for offsite copies.

Unlike some rivals, such as Duplicati, you have to manually enable encryption. Image Reserve Strategy options allow you to configure how many days’ images will be kept and allow you to merge changes into an existing image. Scheduled backups are disabled by default, but can be set to daily, weekly or monthly routines. The standard option for them is incremental but full and differential backups are also available. You can also add schedules to existing one-time backups.

ToDo Backup’s recovery tools allow you to carry out a full restore to the data’s original location or browse the folder structure of your backups and select the backup date you’d like to view and recover.

Easus ToDo Backup Free has an excellent range of tools – we particularly like having the ability to take system and full disk backups as well as its main file-level backup. However, it goes out of its way to brand itself as unsuitable for enterprise environments and prompt you to use the Workstation edition instead.

That won’t be too off-putting for home and micro office environments, but for bigger enterprising seeking a free backup solution we recommend using an actively-maintained open source solution such as Duplicati as an alternative.

When disaster strikes, whether large or small, your job is to keep things up and running. For that you need a plan of action. So, where do you start? You may need a backup solution, you may need a disaster recovery solution, or you may need a bit of both.

Developing your company’s business continuity plan begins with understanding the technologies available and matching them to use cases you have. After selecting a vendor, you can implement the solution, document your emergency plan, and test the entire thing.

This whitepaper explores how disaster recovery solutions aid companies by supporting business continuity, and in an approachable, action-orientated way goes through the steps leading to a holistic plan of action.

Businesses are increasingly dependent on the reliability of the servers within their IT infrastructure. Unfortunately, these components fail at random and in unpredictable ways, which in turn drives the need for server redundancy.

Server redundancy means having more than one server with the same structure and data available when needed. The redundant server has the same configurations, storage, applications, and compute capacity as the production server. 

This fail-safe option forms a layer of protection that mitigates disruptions like hardware failure or natural disasters such as fire and flood, as well as associated issues like power outages. Server redundancy can also form part of an organization's cyber resiliency strategy: If the primary server falls victim to a ransomware attack, the business can restore its data from the backup server and continue operating smoothly. 

Redundant servers also form a key part of backup, maintenance, and load-balancing strategies. These increase a business's ability to have control when IT infrastructure problems occur. 

Designing a system that works when components fail can be an expensive exercise, running a redundant and production server is still an expense that requires extra space within a data center. This has to be counterbalanced with the fact that the costs associated with a drop in reputation and a breakdown in trust can be catastrophic for an enterprise.  

Why is server redundancy important?

If an organisation hopes to survive and thrive, it needs to be prepared for the unexpected. A thorough disaster recovery strategy needs to be put in place with the capability to implement it. This could be the difference between your company coming through intact and being successful, compared to one that fails and is unsuccessful; that's how important this strategy is.

In a world where most organisations are built around digital infrastructure, redundant servers must form an essential element of a successful disaster recovery plan. Not only is it critical for your organisation to be able to access data in the aftermath of a disaster, but its loss could mean severe, potentially long-lasting disruption.

Hardware failure, application faults, network problems and other such issues can prevent the proper functioning of primary servers, leaving users unable to access services and vital data. At best, this will pose a problem for productivity.

Your business can avoid these contingencies by employing server redundancy. By having critical data duplicated at a second location, it can quickly and easily be retrieved in the event of a fault with a live server. If data integrity and access are vital for applications and the functioning of your organisation – as they are for many – redundant servers are essential.

What are the business benefits of server redundancy?

Server redundancy offers assurance to businesses as they have a cost-effective backup for accessing critical data if disaster strikes and a live server goes offline. If a server goes down, a backup server can take up the slack enabling maximum uptime until the failed server is fixed.

They also feature real-time system monitoring which scans for possible failure, which means businesses always know about the health of their servers.

However, the benefits need to be balanced with the level of risk and the substantial costs associated with it.

Types of redundant server

Redundant servers can take many forms.

Redundant domain, front end, and validation servers

These types of server redundancy are used for load-balancing to ensure users can always access a service. For example, a secondary Windows Active Directory server validates user access to the domain if the primary AD server goes down or is busy.

Replicated servers

A replicated backup server can be paired with a production server. Any change to the production server is replicated to a backup server using software-based or hardware-based tools. In the event of a server failure, the replicated server can be brought into service.

Disaster recovery servers

These are semi-hot spares that can have backup files quickly restored and restart processing, should disaster strike.

How to create server redundancy

To create server redundancy in your infrastructure, you need two servers housing identical data - a primary server and a secondary server.

A failover monitoring server checks the primary servers for any problems. Should a problem be detected, it will automatically update DNS records so that network traffic is diverted to a secondary server.

Once the primary server is working properly again, traffic will be rerouted back to the primary server. If the handover and hand back are successful, users should not notice any difference to the service.

What is IP failover?

IP failover is a popular technique for server redundancy. Servers run a so-called heartbeat process and in the event of one server failing to see the heartbeat of the other server, it takes over the IP address of the failing server.

IP takeover is implemented when two servers are connected on the same switch and are running on the same subnet.

What else should be redundant?

In addition to a redundant server, your infrastructure should make sure it has other parts that can be duplicated in case of emergencies and to ensure maximum uptime.

Backups

Backups can be deployed to ensure data held locally is also stored elsewhere (on the cloud, or another data centre in a distant location). This allows you to quickly restore data in the event of a disaster.

Disk drives

Hot spares should be available so that if a disk drive in a primary server fails, another drive can immediately replace it. Using a RAID array should ensure that a server can keep running when there is a single disk failure.

Power supplies

Redundant power supplies should be deployed on critical servers so that if the main power supply fails, it can continue to run.

Internet connectivity

If your server needs to have a connection to the internet at all times, having a line from a different telecoms company is important. If one line fails (e.g. if a workman severs a cable), traffic can shift onto an undamaged line.

Data backup may be one of the most boring parts of network management but it's one that needs proper attention. A data disaster could seriously disrupt your operations; even an accidentally deleted report or project can cost heavily in terms of lost productivity.

Unfortunately, many businesses are at risk. A report last year by IT services provider Beaming found that only 35% of UK companies stored their backup data outside of the office. More worrying, 17% of respondents said they didn't back up their data at all.

This cavalier attitude can't be down to lack of choice there are plenty of backup products on the market to suit businesses of all sizes. In this month's Business Focus, we test four products, from Arcserve, Iperius, Retrospect and Veritas. Each offers a wide range of features, with support for both local and cloud backups. We put each one through its paces in the lab to help you protect your business.

Easy as 3-2-1

A sound backup strategy is a simple one. The easier your protection regime is to understand and administer, the more likely it is to succeed. One popular approach is a "3-2-1" strategy, which means retaining three current copies of your data, backed up to two different types of storage media, with one copy stored off-site.

Whatever system you choose for backups, it's important to make sure it can be fully automated: a strategy that relies on users taking the time to manually perform backup jobs is one that's guaranteed to fail. All decent business backup packages include comprehensive scheduling features, so make sure you use them.

As well as full automation, the four products on review this month also support both full and partial (or incremental) backups. Full backups are exactly what they sound like, while incremental backups store only data that has changed since the last full backup was run. By not storing duplicate copies of files, this allows you to make huge savings on backup storage space.

What's more, if incremental backups are run frequently, they can complete very quickly (as not much data will have changed). This makes them ideal if you want more protection than a daily backup: they could be scheduled to run once an hour, or even more often to deliver close to real-time protection.

Hybrid theory

Just as important as your backup strategy is choosing the right locations for your backed-up data. Under our "3-2-1" strategy, the first copy will be your live data; this can then be backed up to on-premises storage, giving you the second copy.

Naturally, though, you don't want this second copy to reside on the same system as the live data so you need to find a different home for it. A tidy solution is to equip a server with enough internal storage for it to host the backup software and simultaneously function as a backup vault. For larger amounts of data, NAS appliances are a practical choice for backup storage.

What about the third copy of your data, which should be kept off-site? There are specialist storage services that will house physical data archives for you, but cloud storage is a simpler and more cost-effective solution for most SMBs. Combining local and cloud backup is called a "hybrid" backup strategy, and it's an excellent way to protect your business against most disasters.

Check that your chosen backup software supports cloud storage and which providers are on its guest list. If it ticks all your boxes, you will be able to use the software to manage and automate your entire hybrid strategy.

Ransom notes

Data backup isn't just useful for recovering from hardware failures and human error. Ransomware attacks have sharply increased in recent years, and businesses that think they're too small to be of interest are sadly misguided. Backup software won't prevent such attacks, but if you do suffer a ransomware incident, a good set of backups could get you back up and running right away, without having to pay the ransom to decrypt your files.

The secret here is file versioning, which lets you step back through the changes made to individual files over the course of days, weeks and months. If an important file is encrypted, you can easily roll it back to the state it was in before the ransomware struck.Not that encryption is always a dirty word when it comes to backups. Businesses that process personally identifiable information need to ensure it can't accidentally fall into the hands of third parties, and most backup products let you encrypt your archives to provide peace of mind on that score.

The road to recovery

In working out your backup needs, there are two metrics to keep in view: your recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).

RTOs reflect how long a business is willing to go without access to its systems, applications and data. If your company lives or dies by its data, you'll need an RTO that's measured in hours, and that means investing in a backup strategy that guarantees fast restore services. It often makes sense to define multiple RTOs an email server may need to be restored more urgently than a database.The recovery point objective (RPO), meanwhile, defines the amount of data loss your business is willing to tolerate. If you can't afford to lose a working day's worth of data then you will need to run more than one backup per day.

Once your data protection solution is up and running, it will doubtless be a big relief but don't relax yet. Any backup system must be regularly tested to ensure that files, applications and systems can be restored as needed, and that your RTOs and RPOs are achievable.

Retrospect Backup has always had a laser-sharp focus on protecting SMBs and its flexible licensing scheme allows them to tailor the product precisely to their environment. You can start with the base Single Server package which costs 599 and backs up one Windows server plus five desktops and scale right up to the Multi-Server version on review which supports all the Windows, Mac and Linux servers and desktops you can eat.

Application support requires optional add-ons with Retrospect offering ones for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and IMAP email accounts. You can also add features included in the Multi-Server Premium version such as open file backup and Windows bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware.

Installation on a Windows Server 2019 host was a swift affair but clients have to be manually installed on each system you want to protect. Even so, it doesn't take long and the host software provides a client discovery service.

The main console hasn't seen any design changes for over a decade but we found it still works well enough. Your first task is to create backup sets which define destinations and can be anything from a tape or DVD to a local disk vault, removable drive, NAS share or cloud storage with Retrospect's support including Dropbox, Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage.

For backup job creation, you select sources such as local disks and remote systems running the Restrospect client utility, pick volumes or files, choose a backup set and apply a schedule. No need to worry about choosing backup types as all jobs start with a full one followed by progressive backups that only copy new and changed files.

The new storage groups feature overcomes a disk backup set limitation where only one write operation is permitted. Storage groups function as containers where you add multiple disk vaults as folders and point your backups at the group allowing jobs to run in parallel.

Agent-less backup for VMware and Hyper-V hosts is not supported so you'll have to load the client inside each VM and treat them as physical systems. An alternative is to use the Retrospect Virtual solution but this is a completely separate product that has no integration with the Backup software.

You'll also need it if you want GRT (granular recovery technology) restores for Exchange 2016 and 2019 hosts as Retrospect Backup only supports this for mail servers up to Exchange 2013. For the latter, we had no problems securing our mail host over the network as Retrospect discovered its client and allowed us to back up the system, database and mailboxes.

Recovery operations are wizard-driven where you choose a backup source, select volumes, folders, files, databases or mailboxes and decide where to restore them to. For disaster recovery, the console guides you through creating a bootable flash drive or ISO and associating it with a backup set after which it can be used to restore a sick system.

Management facilities see big improvements as along with the backup host's dashboard utility, Retrospect has an iOS app for monitoring selected backup servers plus a cloud portal service for keeping an eye on multiple, distributed hosts. Real-time host monitoring is free while support for multiple organisations and facilities to remotely deploy backup job scripts requires an add-on which costs from 119 for one host.

Limited support for virtualized environments takes the shine off Retrospect Backup as using the separate Virtual solution will simply add to the support burden and cost. That said, SMBs that want an easily managed backup solution for protecting physical servers and desktops at a great price will find Retrospect worthy of consideration.

Verdict

Retrospect Backup’s limited support for virtualised environments is a disappointment, but if you want an easily managed backup solution for protecting physical servers and desktops, it’s a worthy contender at a good price.