This is a question I get asked a lot by people who are interested in using our LiveVault offsite backup service. Although I could simply answer how long is a piece of string? This type of a response isn’t really helpful, is it?
So let’s take a closer look at how long it would take for a LiveVault offsite backup to complete. For the purpose of this post I’ll talk about small business servers that are located within an office environment, in most cases these are connected to the internet using a standard broadband package.
One problem a small office faces is not only the speed of their broadband connection but also its reliability. It’s likely the an office network is already busy transferring data even before installing an offsite backup service.
The recommended upload speeds when using LiveVault, based on a daily 5% change rate of data, are as follows:
| Total Backed Up Data Per Site | Bandwidth (upstream) |
|---|---|
| 6 GB | 128 Kbps |
| 20 GB | 384 Kbps |
| 60 GB | 1.0 Mbps |
| 80 GB | 1.5 Mbps |
A good rule of thumb based upon a typical 5% daily change rate, is that LiveVault offsite backup uses about 20 kilobits per second of your bandwidth for every gigabyte being backed up.
We don’t expect every customer to know what their upstream bandwidth is at the office or to be able to work how long it would take to upload 20GB.
Most customers are in no rush to have 20 or 30GB backed up onto our storage vaults so usually it’s just a matter of setting up the backup policies and starting the upload. The initial backup can take less than a day or it can take more, the upload speed from the server and how much data is being changed on the server will determine how fast it can complete.
There are, however, some customers who want a high amount data backed up as soon as possible, say 50GB and upwards. If a customer has an upload speed of 128 Kbps and needs to backup 1TB of data there isn’t much we can do to improve the speed of their internet connection but there is a solution we can provide.
Using our custom onsite backup device
We can provide customers with a customised backup device that can help speed up the first initial backup process. This device is brought on-site to a customer’s office, connects to their internal network and starts backing up the data from their server. The device acts like a backup vault, similar to what we have sitting in our data centre; it uses encryption and is very secure. Also, because it’s performing a backup on the internal network it’s a lot faster than performing a backup over the internet.
The onsite backup device can take anywhere from 30 – 60 minutes to backup 1TB of data taking a few factors into consideration of course. Another neat feature of this device is that we can actually throttle its bandwidth usage so there is no interference on the internal network.
As soon as the backup completes we then transport the device back to the data centre and migrate the backups onto our backup vaults. We can then remove the onsite backup device from the loop and the backups will start to automatically seed with the server back at the customer’s server.
The onsite device is only needed for the one time; once it’s complete it’s decommissioned from the customer’s backup account.
Last week we were called into a customer’s office to perform a backup of 100GB. They wanted the data stored offsite as soon as possible so we deployed our onsite backup device. It took approximately an hour to perform the onsite backup. After transporting the device to our data centre it took another hour to transfer all the data onto our backup servers. Now the customer’s server is seeding with our backup servers uploading any changes to their data.
Notice how I haven’t posted any precise times on how long it would take to complete an offsite backup? That’s because the true answer comes down to how long is a piece of string?
Here are some of the things we can do to help speed up the first initial upload of backups
- Split the backups into different policies
- Schedule the uploads to take place at specific times
- Throttle or un-trottle bandwith to match customers network speed
- Provide an onsite backup device to transport large chunks of data to our data centre
Our IT Engineers will work very closely with each customer ensuring their data gets backed up without causing delays or disruptions on their network.
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