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.

Secure Online Backup

I’m glad you asked! I can tell you one thing that makes backing up your data to an online server “secure” and that is that you would have an extra copy of your data stored online in case something bad happened. This would, in theory, protect your data from fire, flood, hardware failure, natural disasters, and other physical forms of data corruption. However, it wouldn’t protect your data from being hacked, downloaded, deleted, viewed, or corrupted. Actually, just storing data online may give you some peace of mind but your data is not necessarily “secure”.

In order for your backups to be secured on a remote server you need to take into account several factors. For example:

Server Security

Are the connections to the backup server secured with SSL or TLS?

Does the server have the latest patches installed to help prevent it from exploits?

Is the server adequately firewalled to prevent unauthorized access?

Does the server have a mechanism to deal with Denial of Service (DoS) or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks?

Is there a network Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) in place?

Is the data center that houses the server itself, secure?

These are some of the concerns regarding the backup server, but there are other aspects to securing your data such as the backup software and the service.

The Backup Software

Does the backup software use strong file encryption such as 256-bit AES?

Are the password keys generated using SHA-256, SHA-384, or SHA-512 as recommended by the National Security Agency?

The Online Backup Service

Does the service require you to enter your password in a web page form making it prone to server-side eavesdropping and discovery?

Does the service offer a password recovery option which also subjects your password to discovery?

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to address some of these questions and how they relate to the SecureBackup service.

For a MySQL installation on Windows Server 2008, 2003, or Windows Vista, backing up your databases can be performed in a couple of different ways.

The first method is more of a hack and involves backing up your entire MySQL “data” directory located somewhere in your “Programs Files” folder (ex:  C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\data). But in order for this to work, you need to stop the MySQL server first and then restart it once the backup is complete. This means that your MySQL server is offline while the backup is performed. In addition to that, backing up your database this way is not a documented method. You are not guaranteed that it will work in future versions of MySQL. There are a few other “gotchas” as well. For example, restoring your backup won’t work if you don’t restore every single database folder that was originally in the MySQL data directory in the first place. In this case, the MySQL Server won’t even start.

THE CORRECT WAY TO BACKUP YOUR MYSQL DATABASES

If you want to play it safe, you should backup your MySQL databases the documented way. The tool of choice for this is “mysqldump.exe” which is located in your MySQL “bin” folder. You can use mysqldump from the Windows Command prompt while running as Administrator.

For those of you with experience in the *nix environment, you probably know how to redirect output to a file. You can do this in Windows with the Command Prompt as well.

If you placed the MySQL path in your Windows environment when you installed MySQL, you should be able to use a command like this in the Command Prompt to backup all of your databases:

mysqldump -uroot –pYOUR_ROOT-PASSWORD --all-databases > “C:\all-databases-backup.sql"

To backup only one database, you could use:

mysqldump -uroot –pYOUR_ROOT-PASSWORD DATABASE-NAME > “C:\database-backup.sql"

Of course, for the above commands to work, you need to substitute the MySQL root password with your own password. The root password was created when you ran the MySQL Server Instance Configuration Wizard during the install process of your MySQL server.

One thing I’ve found is that you should not leave a space between the -u and -r parameters in your mysqldump command. Other than this, it’s rather straight forward to create a MySQL database backup.

If you want more information about mysqldump, click here.

SECURE, COMPRESSED, AUTOMATED ONLINE BACKUP

If you need an automated backup solution for your MySQL databases, you can use a Windows batch file to perform the above mysqldump commands and then set the batch file to run automatically in Windows Task Scheduler. If you also need an automatic online backup solution, you can use SecureBackup™. Simply tell SecureBackup™ where your database backup files are located in one of your backup jobs. I also want to mention that the *.SQL backup files created above are really just text files and can be quite large. SecureBackup™ will automatically compress these files during the backup process and significantly reduce not only their size, but the time it takes to backup these files over the Internet. They will also be encrypted with 256-bit AES encryption.

Today I wanted to talk about how to setup an automatic SQL Server backup solution and also how to back it up online with SecureBackup. I am using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express but you should be able to use these instructions for all versions of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

In my case, the database files are located in the following directory:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA

As you may already know, you cannot backup the *.MDF and *.LDF database files directly because they are attached to the SQL Server. You could detach them, back them up, and then re-attach them but then your database will be offline for a period of time.

To solve this problem, we first need to create a SQL file that can be used later to automate our database backup. Here’s how we can do that:

CREATE AN SQL FILE

1. Login to Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.
2. Right click on your database from the “Databases” node.
3. Select “Tasks” -> “Back up…”
4. You are now presented with the “Back up Database” window. In this window you can specify your backup settings. At a minimum, you need to create a destination for your backup. Click the “Add” button and specify a full path name for your database backup in the “File name” field. You will need to use this path name later, so let’s take note of it.
5. You can choose any other backup options that are important to you. Over on the left hand side is “Options”. I would click on that and decide whether you want to use “append to an existing backup set” or “overwrite all existing backup sets”.
6. Once you are finished with your settings, you need to create an SQL file which will be used later for the automated database backup. To create that SQL file, click on the arrow next to “Script” at the top of the window. There will be an option for “Script action to File”. Go ahead and select that option. You will then be able to save your SQL Server Script File. Take note of where you have saved this file as well.

CREATE A BATCH FILE

Now that we have created the SQL file, we need to create a batch file that can be automatically executed by the Task Scheduler. To create this file, do the following:

1. Open Notepad and enter the following:
   sqlcmd -S .\SQLEXPRESS -i "C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\Backup.sql"
   Of course, substitute the pathname with the pathname of where you saved your SQL file.
2. Save this file and take note of where you saved it.
3. Now, using Windows Explorer, go to the directory of where you created this file and rename it to have a .bat filename extension instead of .txt.

SET BATCH FILE TO RUN IN WINDOWS TASK SCHEDULER

We are now ready to add the batch file to the Task Scheduler. Rather than using the Task Scheduler GUI, I prefer to do it on the command line. You can open a command prompt as Administrator or if you are already running as Administrator, you can use Start -> Run. Either way, enter the following:

schtasks /create /sc Daily /st 03:30:00 /tn "MyTask" /tr "cmd /c C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\Backup.bat"

Again, substitute the pathname above with that of your batch file.

Also, set the time specified to something that is desirable for you. In the above example, we run this task at 3:30 AM.

SET SECUREBACKUP TO BACKUP YOUR DATABASE

The time specified in the Task Scheduler step above is important because you need have SecureBackup automatically backup the database file after the task is complete. Since the backup took place at 3:30, you can setup SecureBackup to run the backup at say, 4:00 AM. This way you will have the most recent backup.

From within the SecureBackup software, you need to create or edit an existing  Backup Job and include the location of the backup file that you chose in step 4 of “CREATE AN SQL FILE” above. If the file isn’t listed and you can’t select it from within SecureBackup, it’s because Windows Task Scheduler has not run your batch file yet. To run the batch file, simply double click on it from within Windows Explorer. It may take anywhere from 10 seconds to, possibly, a few hours depending on how large your database is. Once complete, you will have your database backup file and can select that file from within SecureBackup. You will also be able to schedule the Backup Job around how long it took for that batch file to complete.

You now have an automated backup solution for your Microsoft SQL database complete with a secure online storage solution. I hope this post was helpful to you.

Intuit’s QuickBooks Pro software offers an online backup service for your company files. As a long time QuickBooks Pro user, I can tell you that I have NEVER used this service simply because it’s not worth the price they are asking.

As a business owner and QuickBooks Pro user, I figured that if I’m going to actually pay for an online backup service for my accounting data, I should be able to backup my other important business documents as well.

With SecureBackup, you aren’t tied down to backing up only your company file. You can backup anything else you need such as your tax files, your legal documents, your email correspondence, your Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint documents, and anything else that is critical to your business.

With SecureBackup, your QuickBooks backup is automatically encrypted so you don’t have to password protect your company file within the QuickBooks software if you don’t want to. Of course, if you have more than one person in your office, it might be a good idea to do this anyway. But what I’m getting at is that if you are worried about your QuickBooks backup file falling into the wrong hands, you don’t have to worry about this with SecureBackup.

There’s one thing to keep in mind about backing up your QuickBooks company files with SecureBackup. If you want to ensure that you can easily restore a company file, make sure that you create a backup within the QuickBooks software first, and then use the SecureBackup software to backup that file. In other words, I wouldn’t recommend backing up the company file directly. You may be wondering why I’m saying this, but the reason is because QuickBooks appears to have a hard time using company files that are not restored from a backup made within the QuickBooks software. I have run into this problem on a few occasions. Now I’m not saying it can’t be done but it is better to stick with QuickBooks backup proceedures.

Probably the easiest way to do this is to have QuickBooks backup to a local folder on your hard drive. Then all you would need to do is have SecureBackup backup data from that folder. You should also include the “Company Letters” templates if you want to back up that data as well. As a matter of fact, I would recommend backing up your entire QuickBooks directory in addition to the local QuickBooks backup folder.

In summary, I don’t think there is any reason why you should have to pay Intuit so much money just to backup your QuickBooks company file. With SecureBackup, you can backup QuickBooks and anything else you desire.

SecureBackup has many online backup plans to choose from.

There’s no risk. Try SecureBackup right now for free!