More and more small businesses are considering offsite backups – with good reason! Our data backup best practices indicate that you should have both an onsite and offsite data backup. Mozy Pro is an offsite only solution. Several small business customers have asked me about the popular Mozy Pro service from EMC. So here’s my take on it in terms of suitability.
I think Mozy has a good offering, but due to the fact that there is no onsite backup, I can’t recommend it. Trying to download large amounts of data over the Internet in the midst of a disaster just isn’t my cup of tea. Further, I think it’s too complex for most small businesses.
You see, many small businesses underestimate the complexity of data backup. The majority of non-technical business owners feel that backing up is as simple as copying data from one place to another. Most marketing campaigns are geared toward convincing small business owners that “anyone can do it”.
Backing up servers a very different from backing up some documents stored on a PC. Backing up servers involves the precise and specialized backup of files that need to be in use 24-hours a day. Server backup also entails backing up your user database (Windows Active Directory) and several other live databases such as SQL and Microsoft Exchange Server (e-mail). Does Mozy Pro support Active Directory, SQL and Microsoft Exchange backups? Yes, they do. Is a small business owner or his/her delegate best suited to implement, monitor, maintain and restore these backups? Probably not.
But don’t take my word for it. Picture yourself in the midst of a data loss crisis, and click on the following links below to see some of the documentation from the Mozy Pro. If any of it makes you uncomfortable or appears complicated, you should probably trust your backups to a local, trusted IT advisor.
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Today I got to see our PREVENT Small Business Backup Service in action. I was quite impressed! A service ticket was opened by one of our clients looking for assistance with accessing a database from a certain point in time. The client was concerned that one of their production SQL databases was not accurate so they wanted to be able to bring up the database from January 2nd and run it parallel to the production database for comparison. In the ‘old’ days this request may have made me a bit squeamish.
In the old days, I would initially need to hunt down the tape from January 2nd, then I would need to import the tape into the drive on the backup server, and finally sit back and hope that the backup server would be able to find the data I was looking for. If I had made it that far I would then need to figure how to turn that backed up data into a database that would not interfere with the production version running on the same server.
Not only did PREVENT make this whole process a lot easier, but it also significantly reduced the amount of time needed for the restore. I started the restore by connecting to the client’s PREVENT box and launching the Backup Management Console. From there I was able to ‘Explore the backup’ by browsing to the location of the PREVENT backup files, sorting by date and choosing the incremental image of the server’s drive where the database was stored. I finished the explore backup wizard and two minutes later PREVENT presented me with an exact duplicate of the disk drive on the server as of January 2nd.
I quickly browsed into the SQL database folder and sure enough, there were the .mdf and .ldf SQL files that made up the database. I copied both files to the client’s server and used SQL Enterprise Manager to attach the database as a different name. The client was then able to go into the database and find the data they were looking for. The entire process took me about twenty minutes to complete.
With PREVENT, I was able to do the entire restore remotely, quickly, and most importantly, of all the data was reliable. What more could I ask for in a small business backup product?
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