Backup Software

One of the major things that we are overhauling for version 4 is the mechanism used for storing backup job information. This includes the backup job name, schedule, and backup file set. Rather than scatter this information across various files, we are streamlining this to allow all backup jobs, and their corresponding information, to be located in one central location. One XML file will contain all of the data needed for backing up your files. The advantages of this approach are quite numerous.

For starters, this will allow an easy way for the new SecureBackup Windows service to detect changes easily. As a matter of fact, as soon as you create or modify a backup job and save it, the XML file is updated. The SecureBackup service “listens” for changes to this file in the background and can then take the appropriate action. The SecureBackup Windows service is responsible for actually running the backup jobs at the scheduled times and backing up the data to the remote server.

Another advantage of this approach is that the service won’t have to stop a backup job that is in progress when a change is made. It also allows changes to be made to a backup job even if it is running.

Converting your existing backup jobs to the new XML format in version 4 will not require any effort on your part. The SecureBackup software is smart enough to determine if updating to the new format is required and will do so automatically.

Backup Software

We have begun working on version 4 of our backup software and this is the first post of a new series I am going to be writing in regards to that. It’s called, “SecureBackup 4.0 - Backup Software Development”. I will not only discuss our goals in terms of the software and how that will benefit you, but also about the technical aspects of the software underneath the hood.

The SecureBackup software currently requires the Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework to be installed on the target system. We are planning on continuing to use this platform for version 4.0. On the surface, the new version will be quite similar to what you are used to. This means that much of the user interface will be the same both in form and function. You also won’t have to worry about transforming your current backup jobs to a new format as this will be taken care of automatically. Underneath the hood, however, several things will change. I will cover a lot of these changes in the coming months but for now, I just wanted to outline some of the major goals we have for version 4.0. These include:

• To allow SecureBackup to run as a service.
• To provide additional options such as bandwidth throttling, backup server access options, and more.
• To allow backing up open files.
• To simplify some of the underlying code and other mechanisms to allow us to maintain the software more easily.
• Possibly a .NET to MONO port so that we can also support MAC OS X.

Probably the biggest change will be the first one mentioned. Allowing SecureBackup to run as a service is important for certain IT departments. Currently, a work-around is to simply log in, start the SecureBackup software, and then lock your computer - this still allows you to leave your workstation on for backup purposes but no-one can access your system without your password.

Bandwidth throttling will allow you to limit your upload connection speed. This means that your computer/network Internet access speed will not be bogged down while SecureBackup backs up your files. Currently, you need to use a third party tool such as NetLimiter to do this.

We get many requests for people who want to back up open files. SecureBackup does not currently support this. As a matter of fact, most backup solutions don’t. However, the new version of SecureBackup will backup open files as long as they are not locked, or in-use by the operating system. These files simply can not be backed up.

Some of the underlying code and backup mechanisms will be completely reconstructed from scratch. This will not only make our life easier in terms of maintaining the code, but you will get less false error messages. For example, the newer version of SecureBackup will simply reconnect to the backup server in the event that it was unreachable for a period of time and automatically resume backing up your files. Right now, it displays an error and your backup needs to be manually restarted unless you wait until the next scheduled backup. With the new version of the backup software, this will no longer be an issue. Most of the current “backup server is offline” error messages in the SecureBackup software are not due to our servers being down but are due a networking error somewhere between the client computer and our data center. Our servers are online virtually 100% of the time.

Lastly, we may port the software over to use C# and MONO to target the MAC OS X operating system exclusively but this is still in discussion. Either way, the latest Windows operating systems will always be supported. For now, the only solution for backing up a MAC OS X computer with SecureBackup is to use mapped network connection for your MAC while still running SecureBackup on Windows.

SecureBackup Backup Software

Installing the SecureBackup online backup software just got a whole lot easier. We have been searching for the best way to install the dependencies that are required by the backup client software for all of the different operating systems we support. The operating systems supported by SecureBackup are Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. Although Windows XP is quite old, it is still widely in use today and a lot of our customers are still using it. Since SecureBackup is built upon the .NET 2.0 framework, we needed to ensure that the framework would not only be installed if needed, but that it would be installed correctly. The problem with this is that framework may be not installed by default or it may not be fully patched with the latest service pack from Microsoft. We also wanted to ensure that Service Pack 2 SP2 of the .NET 2.0 Framework was installed.

We have been using Inno Setup with some success but decided to switch to InstallAware which  made our lives a lot easier. We know that this is a robust and mature solution for installing our backup software and are confident that there will be no more sporadic failed installs on some of the older PC’s out there. It’s never been easier to get started with backing up your data online than right now with SecureBackup.

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.

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!

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.

SecureBackup Client

SecureBackup, a premier online backup firm, recently unveiled its new website where computer users can select from a variety of secure online storage options based on their individual storage needs.

CANASTOTA, NY – Premier online backup firm, SecureBackup LLC, recently announced that it launched a new website to better serve its customers. The website features a variety of secure online storage options, including SecureBackup HOME for personal use as well as SecureBackup PRO for business applications.

With more than eight years of production web server experience, the professionals at SecureBackup understand the importance of providing safe and secure online backup services. With a commitment to offering outstanding backup services, combined with exceptional customer support, SecureBackup has been engineered from the ground up with security in mind. A highly secure data backup solution, SecureBackup does not suffer from server-side eavesdropping attacks. Additionally, all files with SecureBackup are protected using United States government strength AES file encryption techniques.

“We are thrilled with the launch of our new website. Now an even greater number of customers can benefit from the superior online backup services SecureBackup provides. Whether it’s a fire, flood, a computer crash, or other disaster, our customers have peace of mind knowing their data is securely stored and can be easily retrieved when needed,” says Steve Eschweiler of SecureBackup (http://www.securebackup.com).

SecureBackup has many proprietary technologies and measures in place to maintain customer security. At SecureBackup, passwords are never entered online, decrypted online, or stored online. Because the entire encryption and decryption process occurs on its clients’ computers and not on SecureBackup servers, the firm ensures that all measures have been taken to fully protect the information being stored. Additionally, since the process is automated, SecureBackup customers can rest assured that their valuable information is being stored and backed up frequently and securely.

SecureBackup offers a variety of secure online storage options to meet every customer’s specific backup needs. The firm’s SecureBackup HOME package is appropriate for personal use and offers unlimited online backup. With the HOME package, files are backed up directly from the customer’s hard drive, allowing for easy storage of family photos, videos, and other personal files.

For business professionals, SecureBackup PRO is also available, offering 50 GB to 6 TB of safe and secure online storage. Ideal for small business or home office backup, the PRO package also offers customers professionally managed, dedicated backup servers for storing the most sensitive business information.

“People fail to make regular backups simply because it often requires a considerable amount of time and effort. At SecureBackup, we offer automatic online backup with a user-friendly ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ interface to help make this process as painless as possible,” concludes Eschweiler.

About SecureBackup LLC: Secure online storage firm, SecureBackup LLC, (http://www.securebackup.com) provides superior backup storage services to a variety of clients throughout the country. Engineered with security in mind, SecureBackup has many proprietary technologies and measures in place to ensure the safety and security of all files. For personal use, the firm offers SecureBackup HOME, giving customers unlimited storage space for storing family photos, videos and other files. Perfect for the home office or small business, the firm also provides SecureBackup PRO, offering 50 GB to 6 TB of secure online storage.

Media Contact:
Steve Eschweiler
SecureBackup LLC
9 Grago Blvd
Canastota, NY 13032-1005
1-800-351-8816
http://www.securebackup.com

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.

SecureBackup™ offers Secure Online Backup

SecureBackup™ PRO was designed with the business owner in mind. Since we are business owners ourselves, we know how important your data is and how data-loss can affect your bottom line. We also know how important it is that your data is not only stored in a safe and secure offsite location, but that you will be able to restore your data quickly and easily in the event of data-loss.

The SecureBackup™ software and service was built from the ground up to be both reliable and secure. We have taken every measure to ensure the highest degree of protection for your data. In addition to that, we have found that our service exceeds the quality of our competitors in many ways:

• We don’t fool you into thinking that your data needs to be encrypted twice in order to be more secure. That’s an actual claim by one of our largest competitors.
• We use 256-bit AES file encryption. If that’s good enough for the U.S. Government to protect classified information, we’re pretty sure it’s good enough for your sensitive business data.
• We offer undiscoverable password protection along with SHA-256, SHA-384, & SHA-512 password encryption which is recommended by the National Security Agency.
• We don’t offer a password recovery option because that can compromise the security of your backups in more then just one way.
• We provide free technical support to all of our clients. We also provide 24/7 emergency phone support to our dedicated backup server clients.
• We do not throttle the bandwidth to our servers in any way. In plain English, this means you get the maximum amount of speed possible for transferring your backups to and from our servers. We provide burstable speeds up to a full 100 MBPS. As a matter of fact, we performed a full backup of 2,598 MB (2.5 GB) of data consisting of 43,289 files in just under 4 hours on one of our production servers with SecureBackup™ PRO.
• We do not limit the types of files that you are allowed to backup. Some online services do this to prevent you from backing up files in order to save money and reduce their bandwidth costs. We don’t restrict you from backing up anything. If you want to back up an .EXE file in your Programs directory, you can certainly do so.
• Some online backup services prolong the backup process and even state that it may take weeks to perform your backups. SecureBackup™ can backup your data immediately and does not prolong the backup process. If you need to, you can pause SecureBackup™ and pick up where you left off by simply clicking a button.
• SecureBackup™ allows you to backup data not only from your hard drives but also from any computer on your network.
• Unlike some of our competitors, we offer fully compressed backup space. When you backup your files with SecureBackup™, you might be able to store up to 1.5 times more data than what your plan allows due to our compression algorithm.

For more information about pricing, please see our Plans & Pricing page. Or click here to view a demo of SecureBackup™ PRO.

If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to serving you!

Click here to learn more about SecureBackup™ PRO!

In this, my second post, I wanted to share with you some of my goals for this blog. There are many topics that I would like to discuss here regarding online backup and why your backup files need to be secure, why your password needs to be secure, and why backing up online has many advantages over other types of backup solutions. I would also like to discuss data-loss and why it’s just as important, if not more important, than business insurance.

Aside from these general topics, I am also going to be covering the SecureBackup service in detail, what you can expect in terms of data security from our service, and what sets us apart from the rest of the crowd.

In addition to covering the service side of things, I would also like to talk about the SecureBackup software and how to make the most of your backups with SecureBackup and Windows. For example, backing up MySQL and MS SQL databases requires some extra steps due to the fact that Windows restricts file access to databases while they are running.

There’s probably a lot more that I haven’t thought of to write about but I’m looking forward to helping in any way I can.