Backup your USB Flash Drive Online

We love customer feedback! As our service continues to grow, we get more and more feature requests. We always have a list of these feature requests on hand so that we know what to work on next. A while back, the most requested feature was for file archiving support. We know that many of you wanted to be able to have multiple, older copies of your files on hand in case you needed to revert back to them later. Shortly after we added that feature, we found that it actually came in handy for us as well! We were modifying a source code file to add a certain functionality to our software but after a couple of days we began to realize that there was a better way to approach this. What we needed to do was revert back to an older copy of that file so that we could implement the newer method. Fortunately, we had an older archive of our source code file on hand and were able to revert back to it. What a great feature request that was.

Until today, our number one feature request has been to add backup support for external drives. Well, we’ve heard you loud and clear!

Our latest release of SecureBackup adds backup support for all drive types, including USB flash drives, external hard drives, floppy drives, RAM disks, CD/DVD/Optical discs, and even unknown drive types. As long as the Windows operating system can see your drive, then you will be able to back it up with SecureBackup.

As I always say, we look forward to providing our customers with the best possible service. The ability to backup your USB drive or other device is the next logical step towards achieving that goal.

Raid Redundant Online Backup Servers

I’m happy to announce, today, that we brought our new RAID redundant backup servers online. It’s been a long time in the making and I’ll be honest, it’s taken much longer than we had originally anticipated. However, we wanted to make sure that everything was not only working correctly, but working well. One of the things that we wanted to be sure about was making sure that we could monitor all aspects of the server from the fan speeds and internal temperatures to the hard drives and making sure that we could be alerted of any problems as early as possible. Most of the time, a potentially failing hard drive can be detected before it actually fails giving us time to replace it. But of course with a RAID redundant server, even a completely failed drive is not an issue and no data would be lost.

I also wanted to mention that all existing SecureBackup customers will be upgraded to the new servers and all of their existing data will be switched over to the new servers as well. This is going to be performed over the next couple of weeks.

We want to provide the best service possible and we know how important it is to provide a safe and secure backup environment for your precious data. We will be releasing a press release shortly regarding our new RAID backup servers.

We hope that with our continued efforts to improve our services that everyone will be happy to recommend SecureBackup.com to their friends, family, and business acquaintances.

With all of the advantages that online backup provides, there are some things to keep in mind when choosing an online backup service:

• Data Security
• Reliability
• Ease-of-Use
• Acquiring a Free Trial

Data Security
Data security is the most important thing to look for in an online backup service. If your data is not secure, then there is really no point in having a backup in the first place. There are two main aspects of security that are important in the world of online backup.

The first is backup server security. Imagine the chaos and worry if a hacker broke into your backup server and deleted your backups. In order to prevent something awful like this from happening, look for an online backup service that provides secure TLS/SSL server connections. This keeps your password secure and also prevents a “man-in-the-middle” attack which allows a hacker to corrupt your data.

The second security issue to be aware of is backup file encryption. Some businesses have highly sensitive data which must be protected. For example, doctor’s offices are required to maintain patient privacy; their main concerns are with HIPAA compliancy. Other businesses, such as software developers, want to protect their trade secrets; they don’t want their source code falling into the wrong hands. AES file encryption provides protection against these risks, so be sure the online backup service offers this important feature. AES encryption is superior to other forms of encryption; it is the new standard adopted and deployed by the U.S. Government to protect classified information. It keeps confidential information, confidential.

Reliability
There are a number of things that can go wrong with backing up your data, especially when it takes place over an Internet connection. For example, an Internet connection could fail in the middle of a backup resulting in a faulty copy of the data stored on the backup server. To avoid this scenario, a good backup service will ensure that the data is verified not only before it is transmitted over the Internet but afterwards as well.

If data is not verified after it has been uploaded to the backup server, you may not know about a problem until you try to restore it. This would defeat the whole point of having a backup in the first place. Ensuring that the backup service provides full file verification will save you time, aggravation, and money in the long term.

In addition to full file verification methods, you want to ensure that your online backup service provides RAID redundancy. A RAID redundant backup server prevents data loss when a hard drive on a particular server fails. Look for a service that provides RAID-1, RAID-5, or RAID-6 redundant servers to help prevent this from happening and to protect your backups.

Ease-of-Use
Ease-of-use is a given when choosing an online backup service. After all, the backup software is your interface to protecting your valuable data and you need to be comfortable using it. If the service offers backup software with a “set-it-and-forget-it” interface, you will be able to run your backups automatically and never have to worry about them again. Typically, you want to be able to schedule your backups to run at night when nobody is in the office.

You don’t want software that automatically chooses the files for your backup set. You also don’t want software that places restrictions on the types of files that you are allowed to backup. Being able to select specific files and folders to backup is important for your business. Selecting these files and folders should not require anything more than clicking on a few checkboxes within the software.

Another important aspect concerning what makes an online backup service easy-to-use has to do with restoring your data in the event of data-loss. Connecting to your backup server and restoring your data should be fast and simple. The last thing anyone wants to deal with is spending time restoring data with a slow and unresponsive server.

Acquiring a Free Trial
No matter which online backup service you choose, you want to take it for a test drive before committing. Often, there is little in common between online backup services; you want to be confident in subscribing to the best online backup service for your particular business needs. When you find a service that meets your requirements, take full advantage of a free trial offer if there is one offered. Keep in mind it is all about ease-of-use and quality of service. An online backup service that provides a free trial indicates that they are confident in their services and that they are willing to prove it to you for free.

Be responsible. Provide your business with a true sense of security. Answer the question “Got protection?” with a confident, resounding “Yes!” When it comes to protecting your business from a data-loss disaster, you need to consider the advantages that a secure online backup service provides.

Backing up your data online is the easiest way to protect your company’s irreplaceable assets. Unfortunately, some businesses don’t realize the importance of backing up their data until it’s too late. The statistics are quite alarming. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and the National Archives in Washington, 60% of companies that lose their data close down within 6 months and 93% close their doors within 5 years.

Fortunately, backing up your data doesn’t have to be as complex as it once was. When you back up your data online, all you need is an Internet connection and backup software. Keeping track of full, differential, or incremental backups is no longer necessary. And, manually storing your backup media offsite to protect against fire, theft, and natural disasters, is no longer a concern.

According to recent surveys, more and more businesses are choosing an online backup solution for their data protection needs for a multitude of reasons! There are several advantages, including:

• Critical business data is automatically stored offsite.
• No need for additional hardware and storage media.
• There are no backup device or media failures to worry about.
• You don’t need to maintain or rotate backups.
• All you need is an Internet connection and backup software.

With an online backup solution, you will be relieved from worrying about purchasing, installing, and maintaining any additional hardware. You won’t need to worry about the shelf-life of your backup media. You may not even need someone from the IT department to help you get started. All you need to do is ensure that your computer or office network has an Internet connection. Then it’s simply a matter of installing the online backup software. After this, you can start backing up your data immediately and confidently.

The inherent beauty of an online backup solution is that your data will be automatically protected from fire, theft, vandalism, flood, and other types of natural disasters. This is due to the fact that your data is already stored on a remote backup server. In the past, businesses hoping to protect their data from physical disasters may have used tape backup devices. They would store their tapes in safe-deposit boxes which are located offsite, typically, at a bank. This does keep data stored offsite but requires the inconvenience of transporting the tapes to that offsite location. In addition, these types of backups must be rotated to replace older backups with new ones. With an online backup service, however, your business will have the convenience of readily available backup data that is already safely stored offsite.

New RAID-5 Backup Servers

We have almost completed development of our new RAID-5 backup servers and plan on deploying them soon. I wanted to touch on a few key points about our new servers and also explain a little bit about how they work and why they are better than most other RAID solutions.

We were originally planning on using RAID-1 for our servers because we liked the idea of having two drives mirroring each other in case one of them failed. However, after further investigation, we found that in order to have a lot of backup space available on each server, it was quite complex to set it up this way. In other words, we found that we needed to have multiple RAID configurations in each server.

The solution we came up with was to use RAID-5 instead but with a hot spare. The hot spare is just an additional drive that remains on standby in case one of the working drives fail.

To help explain the added redundancy, I will first explain what RAID-5 is. A RAID-5 server has an array of hard drives which looks like one giant hard drive. If one of the hard drives fails, no data is lost and the other drives compensate until you replace the drive. But with our hot spare drive, the new drive automatically, and immediately, come online and take over for the failing drive.

The beauty of this solution is that even if the backup server has a drive failure, a new one automatically comes online and takes it place. If then a second hard drive fails before we replace the old one, the backup server still continues to function without data-loss.

We know that we have taken the extra step in protecting your data with our new servers and are confident that it will be as reliable as it gets and probably even more so than our competition.

We are looking forward to deploying our new servers soon!

Windows Mail is included with all versions of Windows Vista and is the successor to Outlook Express which was included with Windows XP. If you are using Windows Mail and want to backup your email autmatically, SecureBackup makes it easy.

The default location of where Vista stores your Windows Mail files is as follows:

C:\Users\{USERNAME}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail

In this case, the {USERNAME} text above would be replaced with your actual Windows username.

If you were to open Windows Explorer and browse to your C:\Users\{USERNAME} folder, you would typically not see the “AppData” folder listed. This is because it is a hidden folder. SecureBackup, however, shows all hidden folders and allows you to browse them with ease.

Backup Windows Mail

As shown in the screenshoot above, you can easily browse to your Windows Mail folder. Simply check the box next to “Windows Mail” to backup all of your important email documents as well as other related information. For example, not only will your email and email folders be backed up, but your email account login information will be backed up as well. Your account login information is what you enter into the “Tools” -> “Accounts…” screen within Windows Mail when you setup your email account.

As you can see, automatically backing up your email with SecureBackup is both fast and painless.

SecureBackup 3.1 - File Archiving Support

We are happy to announce the release of SecureBackup 3.1 which adds a new file archiving capability to our online file storage service. This new feature allows you to set a desired level of retention for your backup files and works on a per-backup-job basis. In other words, for each backup job you create, you can now tell SecureBackup to automatically retain anywhere from zero to nine older copies of your backup files. When SecureBackup detects a change in your file, it will automatically create an archive of the older copy and begin to backup the newer file immediately.

Each archive file is marked with a “{archive-TIMESTAMP}” extension and is also highlighted with an orange background within the “Restore Files” window of the SecureBackup software. This way you can easily see that they are archives of the original. The TIMESTAMP takes the form of the year as 4 digits, followed by 2 digits each for the month, day, hour, and minute of the original backup date. The filename of the archive will have the date and time appended right onto the filename so that you can easily distinguish when that file was originally backed up.

A file storage solution that allows for multiple levels of archives comes in handy. For example, when you accidentally delete data within a document you are working on, it would be nice to be able to restore an older file version that you have archived of which contains the data you accidentally deleted. I’m sure many of us have accidently destroyed something we were working on and wished we had an older copy lying around!

Storing older versions of files is now a completely automated and painless process with the SecureBackup software but it does require that you are using SecureBackup PRO. The SecureBackup HOME edition does not provide this feature. The more archives that you retain, the more backup space you will need. Using archive levels was therefore considered as a feature for customers who are paying for a dedicated amount of space such as those who are using SecureBackup PRO.

With SecureBackup PRO, you can now retain multiple copies of your backup files with ease. The new file archiving feature allows you to backup up to nine older copies of your files. And as always, the SecureBackup software is free and there is no additional charge to existing customers to upgrade to SecureBackup 3.1.

SecureBackup Website

We started our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign in early March 2009 and are pleased to see that we are currently ranking in the top 3 for online backup, secure online backup, online data backup, secure online data backup, secure online file storage, and online data storage. There are probably some other terms that we rank well for but I haven’t looked.

Marketing an online backup business in this day and age is not always cheap or easy to do but we are pleased with the results so far. Nothing is guaranteed in the world of SEO, page rank, position, or Alexa Pagerank. And our rankings will fluctuate with time so this is, of course, an ongoing effort. Just got a little excited to see how well we are ranking these days and wanted to share it.

New Online Backup Servers

There is a new and exciting thing happening here at SecureBackup LLC and I wanted to share it with everyone.

We are planning on providing all customers with RAID redundant online backup servers. We are going to accomplish this by building, maintaining, and co-locating our own backup servers at a data center in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Currently we are leasing dedicated servers from a data center in Houston, TX. While this has been a great solution so far, it has somewhat limited us in terms of our online backup service offerings. We know we can offer a better service by building and maintaining our own servers.

We have been very pleased with the initial test results of our new online backup servers. Because of the fact that we can now choose our own server parts, we will soon be able to better monitor the health of our servers, anticipate and prevent problems, as well as provide RAID redundancy.

Monitoring servers is an important task in the world of online backup server administration. By monitoring things such as fan speeds, CPU temperatures, and hard drive errors, you can anticipate potential problems down the road and take corrective action to prevent it. Our new server grade motherboards provide built-in support for monitoring certain aspects of system health.

We will be able to determine if a hard drive is failing and can replace it before it happens. And because we will be building RAID redundant backup servers, if one drive actually fails, the data will still be secured on a secondary drive.

One of the methods that we will be using for monitoring hard drives is called S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. With S.M.A.R.T. monitoring we will be able to better predict potential drive failure and can take corrective action immediately. S.M.A.R.T. monitoring isn’t a bullet proof solution and a hard drive can fail without warning but it is a good first line of defense.

In addition to S.M.A.R.T. monitoring, we will also be able to monitor the health of our drives with our new RAID configurations. We are planning on using RAID-1 mirroring for our new servers. This will not only alert us of a failing drive, but will provide redundancy if that drive actually fails.

RAID-1 is our method of choice. While RAID-5 is great for storing multi-terabytes of data, the best choice for online backup with multiple GB of data is still RAID-1.

We look forward to deploying our new online backup servers and offering RAID redundancy to all SecureBackup customers. We will issue an official press release when we roll out the new servers.

We have recently distributed the SecureBackup™ online backup software to several websites for review purposes and have been very pleased with the results. The SecureBackup™ software consistently received the highest rating of 5 out of 5 stars.

SecureBackup™ Wins Multiple 5-Star Awards!

As you can see, we have numerous awards that we could place on our website to proudly display our winning status but it would take up quite a bit of space. Therefore, we have decided to place our entire collection of award winning images on this page.

The most notable award that we received came from Tucows. Tucows is one of the largest software download sites on the web and is recognized as an authority on software reviews. They did a very thorough review of our backup software and awarded SecureBackup™ with their highest rating!

We are pleased to have received such great ratings. SecureBackup™ was designed to not only be easy to use, but also to be the most secure online backup solution available on the market today.

View a demo of SecureBackup™ or sign-up right now and start backing up your files today!