New Years Resolution – back up my own stuff better (part 1)

With twenty years of backup experience, you might presume that my own personal backups might be flawless and in triplicate.   And for my professional workstation, it actually is.  But admittedly, for the rest of my data, such as those invaluable family photos, personal data and other stuff – it admittedly isn’t as well or frequently protected as it should be.   This lines up with the old phrases:

The plumber’s house always leaks.

The cobbler’s kids have no shoes.

And here I am, preaching not just on data protection topics, but also the plight of the SMB (most recently blogged on SMB DR) … but my own non-recreate-able data isn’t protected as well as I know that it could and should be.

This isn’t that different from the reality that many IT professionals deal with every day.   Your data center may be well protected (or presumed so) … but your branch offices’ data, or maybe just your one-off workloads, are barely protected at all.

So, as part of 2012, I decided to ‘eat my own dogfood’ and sign up with a cloud-based backup service.   Since I recently contributed to some ESG Lab assessments of Asigra and was impressed by their 1) commitment to security, 2) their longevity as a BaaS platform and 3) their commitment to the channel – I decided to go with them, which then meant finding an MSP in my area.

To my happy surprise, I found The Harding-Group in Dallas.   The “happy” in that claim comes from a few points:

  • They were in the Dallas, so I might be able to ask for a site visit as my experiment moves forward.
  • Many years ago, I had previously worked with THG as a reseller of software that I to used offer – so I knew their reputation.
  • And this is the big one, THG wasn’t just a no-name telco but a technology consultant to many SMBs (among other companies).

I love that!

I have long believed that the best off-site data protection provider for any SMB is their friendly neighborhood IT consultant/integrator.  In fact, I lamented on it in my book and here is why …

Q > If you are an SMB and your stuff breaks badly, who are you going to call?!

A > The professionals who helped you put it in and maintain it!!!  So, who better to have your offsite backups than them?

Now, without looking behind the scenes as to the Harding Group’s business plans and choice to deliver the service (or choose which technology to offer it through, such as Asigra), I will likely never know the whole story.  But the fact that reputable integrators who are trusted by their SMB customers to recommend, deploy, and maintain solutions for SMBs are also able to offer backup-as-a-service to those clients is a wonderful boon that more SMBs should look into adopting.

Look for more blog posts on my personal experience with cloud-backup over the next several weeks as I fulfill some of my New Years Resolutions, one of which is to back up my own stuff better.

As always, thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading.

[originally posted on my ESG blog – Technical Optimist .com]

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