Why Online Backup Will Not Protect Your Server
There is a growing trend of IT consultants selling online backup solutions. While there is no doubt that online remote backup can work if done correctly and with sufficient investment, it is often done in a way that doesn’t adequately protect servers, or is prohibitively expensive. I think this trend has more to do with the kickbacks that resellers are getting from the commercial backup providers than protecting customers’ servers.
I always advise my customers against online backup solutions. The commercial offerings today are priced per Gigabyte. which creates tension between comprehensive protection and controlling costs. This generally results in customers (often on the advice of their technology specialist) performing only partial backups to keep the costs within acceptable limits. The falsehood is that the operating system and programs don’t need to be backed up, because they can just be reinstalled from the original installation media. Well, let me tell you, if you are only backing up your users’ documents, you are not protecting your server. You can never successfully re-create your Windows Domain from the installation media. For a server, backup needs to be full-volume backup to protect the operating system, the server’s system state and configuration files, Active Directory, databases, mailboxes, log files, user accounts and settings, security settings and file permissions, web sites, and so on. Furthermore, many of these items need highly specialised backup technology to ensure a complete and accurate copy is made. I am not convinced that online backup clients adequately protect all of this data. The only technology I trust to perform this complex operation successfully, is the utility put in place by Microsoft specifically for the 
purpose. Based on Volume Shadow Copy, Small Business Server’s disk-based image backup technology produces a full-system image that not only works, but is in Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) format which can, in an emergency, be mounted and run in a virtual server.
The other question you should be asking yourself is “how long am I prepared to be offline?”. What is the potential restore time of your online backup? A nuts-and-bolts installation of Windows Small Business Server takes me at least a whole day to do before I am happy to take it live and if there is a lot of reconfiguration to do and Line-Of-Business applications to install, could take much longer. Then there is the image download time. Assuming that we’re taking full system backups and we’re prepared to accept the expense of that, then backing up will probably use some sort of differential technique so that only the changed files are transmitted each day. Restore, however, requires the entire image to be downloaded. On a typical 8Mbps DSL connection, that could take many hours, even days for a large server. A 200Gb image would take around 53 hours on an 8Mbps ADSL link, assuming absolutely ideal line conditions, but line conditions are seldom ideal and the transfer would also be vulnerable to networking outages. Maybe your backup provider will give you a copy of your backup on disk to restore from, but it will still take a day to courier that to you.
So if you’re considering online backup, think again. There are better, faster, cheaper strategies for servers. Disk-based image backups can be restored in minutes instead of hours or days and capture the entire server and all its configuration. In my view, this is a far superior solution. Online backup still has a place, but only as a second line of defence.