Blog

CDP Arrives!

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) has arrived!

You can now protect all of your Computer data as it changes, rather than waiting for a scheduled backup.

New Software Arrives!

Carl, GBData
15 Oct 2008

Our Latest software now increases the encryption level from 128-Bit to 256-Bit.  This is in excess of what banks are currently using, and provides further protection for your data.

Each individual file is separately encrypted before being sent by a secure link (Which in itself provides protection) to our servers.  This means that not only can GBData staff not read your data, but should anyone be able to intercept it, nor can they!

Do please remember your encryption key, the software when first installed defaults to use your login password set up for the software.  If you loose it there really is not way of getting your data back, unlike some other companies that can do this, but it can also be called "Breakable Encryption"!

Carl, GBData
19 Jan 2008
Welcome to the new year!

An option available with our software when protecting Microsoft Exchange, is to enable protection down to individual email level. This means that emails, diary appointments, contacts etc. can be individually restored, which can save a lot of time especially with users that have large outlook file (.pst files) sizes.
This option costs 50p per month per user, but is well worth considering. Deleted an important email that arrived yesterday? Performing a complete restore would mean loosing all of the emails that have arrived today. With the individual email versions of the software, no problem. Simply go into the software, find the email, and restore it, quick and easy!
For users that rely on their email as a vital business tool, this add-on provides indispensable protection.

Carl, GBData
15 Sep 2007
A new report published today says the traditional methods of tape backup and restore for corporate disaster recovery (DR) are obsolete and inadequate.
In the report, entitled "Survival of the Fittest: Disaster Recovery Design for the Data Centre," analyst firm Burton Group said advances in business continuity technologies, heavier reliance on IT systems to meet competitive and e-commerce needs and regulatory legislation are forcing enterprises to reformulate their DR solutions.
Richard Jones, report author, vice president and director of the Burton Group data centre strategies service said natural and manmade disasters have been key in demonstrating the affect of inadequate data centre DR policy.
"A number of events, including [hurricane] Katrina, indicate how costly a disruption to business continuity can be for an organisation," he said.
The report said, given the increasing globalisation of business markets, reliance on real-time processes, shrinking IT budgets, explosive data growth and new regulatory requirements, DR plans should be higher than ever on the data centre management agenda. But it points out that, on average, over one third of corporations have not tested their DR plans this year.
One challenge is the fact that, while tape capacities have been doubling every two years, hard disk drive (HDD) technology capacities have been increasing tenfold every five years.
"Growth of HDD storage coupled with the corresponding consumption of that added storage by expanding digital content has created the backup administrators worst nightmare: backups that do not complete in time," writes Jones.
He said disk-to-disk backup and restore solutions, including virtual tape libraries, have grown in popularity within the past few years as a method of solving the tape problem.
The report also points out that DR requirements are starting to feature more and more in compliance regulations. It says corporate DR plans are best served by following the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 17799 standard for information security published almost two years ago, while seeking ISO 27001 certification of that standard for e-commerce and business-to-business (B2B) systems should be a prerequisite for establishing adequate DR business requirements.
Internet technology advances, coupled with the explosion of co-location and hosting centres, also offer additional advantages to businesses seeking to improve DR and business continuity. "But co-location of business services is not for every company, nor for every system within the data centre," added Jones.

Carl, GBData
15 Sep 2007
W. FOWLES & Co. an accounting firm based in Broadstairs, Kent produces an information newsletter each month to its clients.
In a recent issue they reviewed GBData and our service, concluding that it is a worthwhile service, that its' clients should seriously investigate.
This newsletter can be found here
Having looked at their web site I have found it to be useful and informative, and well worth investigating.

Carl, GBData
03 Sep 2007
GBData has for some time been committed to supporting the environment. The service that we offer is substantially more "green" than more traditional methods of backup that utilise replaceable media. Whether those be CD/DVD's, or even tapes, which have a life of little over a year, on-line backups represent a more environmentally acceptable method of backing up.
To further support our environmental policy, which can be found here, GBData also minimises its paper use, not printing emails unless necessary, and issuing invoices by email as standard unless requested otherwise.

Carl, GBData
13 Aug 2007
A lot of companies that backup on-line are potentially missing out on the benefits of using the GBData service.
These clients are only backing up one computer, because more than one with their existing provider would cost more.
With GBData the software can be configured to back up many different computers, in many different locations. This is not about mapping drives and backing those up, which our software can also do. This is about installing the software on many different PC's often at remote locations, such as on those salesmen's laptops; after all they are often treated with less care than they deserve, bouncing around in the boot of the car.
Using GBData software to back these computers up, not only costs nothing more, but often does not even consume company internet bandwidth because they are working from home.
GBData only charges for the data stored, not how many computers you are choosing to protect. Just think, the loss of a salesmen's email, that was his biggest order in the offering, if only his computer had been backed up on a regular basis.

Carl, GBData
07 Aug 2007
Hi
A lot of people are breaking the Data Protection Act with their backups (see here ).
The act requires that information on individuals be kept kept secure, yet few people performing backups encrypt them, or even bother to remove them each morning to a safe, but just leaving them in the computer drive for anyone to access.
With our backup software, the backups are encrypted before the data leaves their computer, thus ensuring that even if anyone could gain access to the backup, they cold not read it, due to the military strength encryption that we use.

External Hard Drives
Carl, GBData
05 Aug 2007
Hi All
Did you know that you can also save a local copy of each of your backups to a local drive such as an external hard drive. This means that when you come to restore, you do not need the internet, which increases the flexibility of the backup system.
This local backup can be encrypted to maintain the provisions of the data protection act, and your own security regime.
This drive can be located anywhere on the network, so another PC's hard drive could also be used.
This external hard drive can be purchased from us as part of the backup scheme, (see our pricing page here for further details) or you can purchase your own, there is not any particular criteria, other than the size required.

Carl, GBData
01 Aug 2007
The Economic Times had an interesting article recently, that discussed online backups; you can find it here: The Economic Times
It describes the recent changes that the on-line backup community has been going through.
While the products that they describe are American based it is still interesting to read how much more accepted online backups are now becoming.

Carl, GBData
24 Jul 2007
Hi all.
Today we reduced the price of our 20Gig scheme to just £20 per month plus VAT. We firmly believe that this is excellent value for money, for a service that is focussed at the UK business community.
The quality of our service has always been one of our major strong points, being a UK company, with UK staff, and UK data centres allows us to provide that personal touch. Now that we have lowered our pricing we have increased the availability of our service to the smaller companies, for whom the loss of data would be catastrophic.

Carl, GBData
22 Jul 2007
Hi all.
A lot of our customers are not aware of our web based service, so I thought I would give you some brief details.
You can gain access to your data via the internet, anywhere in the World.
Log on to our data portal: www.portal.gbdata.co.uk from here first make sure you click on the User login, just to the right of the Administrator login link, and then enter your user name and password that you set-up in your backup software.
Once logged in you will have complete access to not only all of the data backed up, via all of the different PC's on your scheme, but the ability to modify the schemes, which will be uploaded to the appropriate PC when next they run their backup.

Carl, GBData
15 Jul 2007
Hi all.
If you want greater protection you can run a backup more than once a day.
However you don't need to add a new backup set. The easiest way to run the same backup again is to open up the backup software, click on the Backup Schedule, and then click on "Add". This will allow you to add a second schedule, for the same backup.
So, for instance you could run a backup at lunch time as well as in the evening, further minimising the amount of data you could loose.

Carl, GBData
07 Jul 2007
Just a quick note to everyone, if you a planning on upgrading any computers to Vista, or purchase a new computer with Vista, to re-download the backup software. This is because we have upgraded the client software to run in this new operating environment. If you are not running Vista, it is not necessary to perform the upgrade.
To upgrade go to here: Download portal and download the correct version.

Carl, GBData
01 Jul 2007
Myth One
Online backup is too expensive. Initially it may appear that way. Compare a tape scenario for instance.
Hardware, software licenses, tapes, personnel--and let us not forget basic human error--add to the cost of traditional tape backup. Additional costs accrue with off-site courier services and tape solutions have large upfront and sometimes unexpected costs, while online backup costs are declining. A small 10-gigabyte user with daily backup would pay approximately $460 per month for traditional, albeit partial, service; while the same user would pay approximately $294 per month for complete, automated online backup service. Online backup eliminates all these traditional cost factors because with it, total automation, local backup and off-site protection occur simultaneously.
Myth Two
Data is not secure on the Internet. Online backup utilizes the same technology the U. S. Government uses for its security, encrypted, fragmented data or pieces of a puzzle in gibberish language. Online backup vendors can also offer clients a highly secure VPN (Virtual Private Network) connection if they so desire. This higher level of security ensures that all communication between the client and the vault is encrypted. Online backup is actually more secure than storing unencrypted data tapes in a remote vault.
Myth Three
Online Backup can't handle a Fortune 500 company's data. Handling large amounts of data over relatively, small bandwidth is a popular feature of online backup. An initial backup or "seed" of the server's data is extracted. The Delta Processing technology then seeks out updated portions of changed files and only the fragmented change of data is sent to the vault. Additionally, large-volume and highly redundant disk storage systems store the data online. To further data integrity, reliability and recovery, the massive amounts of data online are backed up to tape on a daily basis and shipped to an underground vault for safekeeping. Online backup providers service businesses with a responsibility to ensure that storage space is always available, no matter what the size.
Lawyer's Weekly, the nation's top source of legal information for practicing attorneys, has used online backup for years. "My feeling is that you're only as good as your last backup. Our company has many remote locations without systems administrators. As a result, we really have come to depend on online backup as a means of assuring that our backups are done on a daily basis at these sites," said Tom Bannister, systems manager, Lawyer's Weekly.

Carl, GBData
22 Jun 2007
Did you know that we get more requests to protect Laptops, than any other computer.
Many firms protect their servers, however badly, however most do nothing with their laptops.
In a group of companies surveyed recently, the survey found 57% of companies ask laptop users to manually upload their data onto company servers; with only 29% of companies using software to automatically backup laptop-based files to the corporate network.
Not a Problem. Or is it?
Despite the growing number of laptop users and the high-rates of theft and failure associated with laptop use, laptop backup does not yet appear to have risen to the top ranks of IT managers' concerns, according to the survey. No IT department will miss its processing window, for example, due to a stolen notebook. Also, most IT managers are less likely than other employees within an organization to use and rely on a laptop for their day to day work, which may make them less personally aware of the potential for data loss. None of this takes into account, of course, the toll laptop data loss can take on the business function--the wasted time and resources in restoring or recreating lost data. When a user has a hardware problem, it's usually reported to the IT department. The negative impacts of the problem are far less likely to be captured by most organizations. While lost laptop data may not be "mission-critical" to the IT operation in the classic sense, it may be of huge interest to the CEO, the VP of sales, or other executives. Are the files on lost laptops critical to the user, a corporate goal, or a key sale? Much laptop-based data is critical by these measures, but the accounting of such can be rare.
All of this can be avoided by simply rolling out GBData backup software in an organisation. Wether it is one laptop or 100, all can safely be backed up with no effort due to our automated software.