Home Forums Discussions Problems AC Backup Issue

Mel,

We often see the error message in practices where the upload speed is limited (or the backups large). It *may* mean that the backup itself is completing, but the upload fails or times out.

One sure-fire way is to take your backup to a test/home machine, install the same version of AC you are using, then use the restore utility. Works, or Doesn't.

You would have figured it out. Seeding is simply copying all of your data to a hard drive and sending the hard drive via FedEx or mail to the cloud company. They then copy that to you account, so that the entire backup process takes maybe two hours and not 60.

If someone had a server or computer with 500 GBs of data or even ImportedItems of 60GBs and you had a T1 or something similar at 1.54Mbps, it would take a LONG time to do that initial backup. And, unless the backup was being done by a system where if it timed out, you didn't have to start over, you may end up getting very frustrated.

But, the part where it is really important is when you need the data. You can't wait three days to download the data not to mention if you fixed the issue, you are now entering data that will be overwritten. So, you really want to know that AC (most companies that do cloud backups for a business will do seeding (or whatever you want to call it).

I still think doing your imported items makes the most sense. For instance,

I do a local backup of AC each night. After a while, I have 30 backups, of which I really need maybe the first two. The second one if for some reason the first one just happened to be corrupt. But, once you start getting down to the fifth or sixth, that's a lot of progress notes. But, I like the little encrypted file with all the data except II. Now, look at the online backup that includes II. Say,you upload 50GBs of total data. AC and II. Now, every day you are backing up incrementally. So, you have:

Initial backup
Inc
Inc
Inc
Inc
Inc
...

unless you want to do the initial again.

Now, I haven't seen the actual backup program. But, in order to continue the backup, you will have a ton of incrementals. So, let's say you have backed up 30 days. You now have one full backup and 30 incrementals. So, in order to restore, you have to depend on the latest incremental backup plus all the ones in between. Which is wny a lot of programs give you a differential option as well. Instead of the incremental which is smaller and quicker but only contains the newest data since the last incremental, you have a differential (a little slower and larger to back up), but it contains all of the newest data since the initial backup. So, less chance for corruption or issues.

On a local backup, when you use incrementals, you usually set a schedule maybe like Monday (full backup), Tuesday through Friday (incrementals). Then you have a full backup the following Monday.

Plus, locally, you can do trial restores to make sure everything is fine. I am not trying to rain on the new AC backup parade, but, for me, the benefit of being able to back up all my IIs (say 50 or so GBs) along with AC itself, is outweighed by the fact that the backup is more likely to have issues. Just me.

I guess if I had all of my AC data and lost my IIs, I could live with that. But, if I lost all of my AC data, it would be tough. I still think one can back up their IIs locally and take one home. With the IIs you can even copy and paste it to a flash drive.

If you back up to the cloud, you will want to make sure that whatever company you go with, they are compatible with SQL databases. We know that AC is.

Doctormel, my understanding is when you get the error messages that backup did not complete successfully and that there is another backup running means you are still uploading the initial backup file.

Bert I would definitely agree there's an "issue", the trouble is it looks like no one can identify it. I've contacted guardian Angel support via chat, e-mail and phone, and have talked/e-mailed Ryan Furtado several times. Despite this it's still uploading the initial backup. it's odd because as I said in an earlier post it took a couple weeks for my initial upload to complete when I first installed backup, but after I changed to 8.2.4 it still has not completed the upload.

I agree that the whole cloud backup concept may be flawed but I still like the idea of having an automatic remote backup. Maybe it's just not practical though. I do do local backups to an external drive, guess I'll just buy another one and start swapping them every day.

Hi Rando,

I agree it is a great idea to have a cloud backup. For me, that means backing up my data to some cloud backup company.

The issue for me is nothing beats the little 300MB or 10GB backup file that AC generated to your drive. The one without the II, could also be backed up to the cloud.

It is one thing to restore from a backup of the entire AC or the databases. But, it is awesome to restore from the Red Lifesaver Icon in the AC folder. One can do this from the new backup, but you would want to make sure you could choose from the small one. My guess is you can't.

PLEASE SEE NEXT POST!!!

Given I was emailed twice by Amy alefort@amazingcharts.comabout moving to the new backup system, I would think she is the one to email about any problems.

Also, the former backup was $250 annually and has not increased in 12 years. $300 annually (if it works) is a lot cheaper than the business cloud backups at iBackup, Jungle Disk, Carbonite, CrashPlan, etc., which run around $60 a month (if commercial).