C Infinity is happy to announce support for our Connected secure online backup service on Windows 7.
Windows 7 has been a massive success as a desktop operating system at home, in the small business and in the enterprise. Early adoption rates have been high and more widespread than expected. It features solutions that make it a great desktop and branch office platform. And it’s those very scenarios that our Connected backup service targets.
Roaming laptops rarely have access to an infrastructure that allows them to back up the valuable business data that is stored on them. Very often they are in remote locations, used by sales representatives or customer service agents who rarely get back to the office. The data on the machines cannot be lost but how can that data be backed up?
Windows 7 features technology that allows companies to remove servers from the branch office. That reduces costs but also means that there can very well be data stored on those desktop or laptop computers in that office. It won’t necessarily get backed up by internal systems.
With C Infinity’s Connected backup service you can securely back up those machines over the Internet. Connected identifies the blocks within files that have been changed and targets them to be backed up. Before that happens, duplicate blocks are tracked and wasted effort is eliminated. That duplication isn’t sent over the wire. Some files, Outlook PST files for example, are further optimised. The remaining data is compressed and then encrypted using AES. At this point the data is uploaded to the redundant data stores in C Infinity. Your data stays encrypted until you recover it. That means only you can access your data. It never leaves the jurisdiction of Ireland and our data protection laws because we are an Irish company, using a physically secure Irish data centre located in Dublin.
How well does it all perform? I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now. When we completed the upgrade of our service I installed the agent from the web site. It is a simple next-next-next installation. The agent scans the file system. Policies can be set up to target particular files and folders from the administrators online web console. Users can target files. My PC is backing up My Documents, my Internet favourites, my Outlook data and a few other bits and pieces. It ran away and backed up everything. I was curious to see what would happen on subsequent backups.
As I expected, my machine automatically runs backup jobs in a pre-defined time window every day. I powered up my machine this morning and was greeted by a status update not long afterwards.
487.4MB of files had changes. However, once the optimisations were done there were only 3.5MB of changed file system blocks that were not duplicated. These were compressed down to 1.2MB. This was encrypted using AES and then sent up to our redundant and replicating stores in the data centre.
Now I can recover any file I want within my retention window. Sure, I might have Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) running locally or even use Windows Backup and Restore to back up the laptop to a USB disk. USB disks aren’t necessarily the most reliable solution and that requires manual work for me to (a) to remember to do it and (b) do it. VSS is great to recover a file that might have changed on the laptop recently. But Connected gives me a secure central store. If I lose my laptop or it breaks then I can restore my data onto another machine without any delay.
Check out our secure Connected online backup service for desktops and laptop as well as our Livevault service for servers and contact us if you have any questions.
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