Laptop Backup for Remote Workforce

The post is a snippet from a new whitepaper released on the website – “Druvaa inSync – Laptop Backup for Remote Workforce”, please download the original document from – http://www.druvaa.com/products/insync_docs.html

About 200 million employees work remotely, i.e. they are not at their desk while accessing emails, sending work updates or editing financial sheets and about 70% of this working force never plans a backup before starting or during the travel.

With over 600,000 notebooks lost on US airports, this post discusses the key concerns in remote-backup, shortcomings in existing solutions and how inSync addresses them.

Remote Backup Requirements

Some of the key requirements for remote or on-the-move laptop backup are –

1. Availability of sufficient bandwidth -  Statistics show that on an average a business PC has about 8GB of important corporate data. Almost 80% of this data is usually in form of archived emails. The rate of addition/change of data is about 1% but the actual differential change almost doubles to about 2% (because of the email archival formats and post processing used by most of the email clients like Microsoft Outlook). Transferring this differential data (160 MB) over a WAN connection can be a problem especially when the user wants to spend that limited time accessing and answering the new emails.
2. Network access to backup server -While traveling, the users often cannot access enterprise LAN or VPN, which restricts their access to organization’s secure resources. While working over the WAN the user’s PC does not even have a static (publically visible) IP address. This makes it impossible for the backup server to contact the user’s PC and fire a backup.
3. Security -Working on the WAN, un-encrypted data backup/restore can expose the corporate information making it vulnerable to eavesdropping or stealing.

Limitations of Existing Solutions

There are two major design limitations in most of the existing solutions inherited from the tape-backup legacy -

1. Server triggered backup – Earlier when mobility was not an option, network backups used to be driven by a central backup server. The legacy still continues and even today most network based PC backup systems are still server triggered. The architecture imposes following limitations-
   1. When the user is traveling, the server initiates and sends network requests out-side the corporate network. Unlike the web or email server, this is a special case and needs more attention.
   2. The PC must be also visible to the server on a published IP address.
   3. The majority work is performed by the server and as the enterprise size grows the server scalability becomes a bottleneck.
2. Dependence of low latency, high bandwidth network -Thanks to the tape-backup legacy, most network backup systems today use same old R-Sync style checksum algorithms for incremental backups. And because of large no. of network interactions required in these algorithms, the backup systems works better on low-latency networks for less network turn-around time and faster execution.

Druvaa inSync – Client Triggered Backup Architecture

Druvaa inSync is an automated enterprise laptop backup solution which protects corporate data while in office or on-the-move. It features simple backup, point-in-time restore, and patent-pending de-duplication technology to make backups much faster.

Druvaa inSync client is a host based soft driver which gets installed on the user PCs. It is equipped with sufficient backup intelligence to initiate and accomplish backup. Configuring a client is a simple 5 step effort and can be completed within minutes of installation. The client triggered backup architecture enables the client to contact server and initiate backup over LAN/WAN and ensures high levels of scalability and security.

Druvaa inSync Enterprise Server is a software service which runs on a dedicated sever and can scale to serve terabytes of enterprise data. The server accepts backup and restore requests on published IP addresses using a 256-byte SSL encrypted channel and stores it locally on a 256-bit AES encrypted storage.

Data-deduplication – 10X Faster Backups

Druvaa inSync uses patent pending data de-duplication technology called SendUnqiue to remove duplicate data at the source (user’s PC) before the actual data backup is initiated.

The data updates for a user are checked for duplicate content against existing data (from all the users) backed up at the server. The server then requests backup for only newly created unique content and maintains a reference for common content.

2 comments November 12th, 2008

New Features in inSync v2.2

This weekend I downloaded and tried the new Druvaa inSync PC backup release v2.2  (news, download, release notes) . In this post, I have reviewed some of the new features as an end user -

1. Admin configured backup folders
The new “admin configurable backup folders” features is targeted specifically at enterprise setups where admin wants better control over what gets backed up on user’s PCs. Now, for each profile the administrator can choose “must have” backup folders, and conditionally allow users to add one or more folders. This helps the admin implement standardized backup policies.

As the screenshot shows, admin can either choose standard folders like “Dekstop”, “My Documents” etc or browse locally to choose standard backup folders e.g. “D:\” or “C:\Important Data”

2. Browser Restore
When not on one’s own PC, accessing the data can be really difficult . With the new browser restore feature, the browser comes very handy to access the backed up files.

To provision the feature, the admin has to first choose published IP address/port for web-restore in server configuration and then enable “web restore” in the profile. The user’s of the profile can then set the password for web-restore in the client configuration (as shown below).

Once password is set, the user can access the backup data over HTTPS using the published web-restore URL. The screenshot below shows web-restore in action -

3. New Server Status and Advanced Reporting
I have always liked products with good reporting capabilities. The ability to show current status/health and good reports/statistics without making the admin go through the logs is very important.

The new release comes with pretty good reporting capabilities. The new server status (shown below) tells the admin that everything is working fine.

And whenever the server faults or encounters a not-so-good situation (like “disk full” or “db not reachable“), alert email notification is sent immediately (see below) -

The new reporting engine is what i liked the most, it now offers six different reports. As shown below, each of these reports can be scheduled independently. The admin can also use the “Report Now” feature for generating on-demand reports.

The screenshot below shows a snippet of “Complete Report” -

4. Remote Restore
At Druvaa, we are paid to restore your data. To make the restore even simpler for some non-tech users, we have empowered the admin to schedule data restore for the user. The admin can now remotely browse user’s data backup hierarchy (but can not view data) and remotely schedule restore for any file/folder . The chosen file/folder is automatically restored to user’s desktop.

The screenshot below shows, how admin can now browse and restore user’s data

5. Configuration API
With this release, Druvaa has also opened up the configuration API (as XML-RPC calls). This is mainly intended for third party vendor’s for better integration with their applications.

The Road Ahead
I must say, I am quite impressed with the new features. But, I guess there is always scope for improvement . Based on my evaluation, I have put the following feature request, and hopefully you would these in the next major version -

1. Server Status – include “uptime” and “reason for last downtime”.
2. Cool new reports – Backup data composition (file-types) for every storage, configuration changes
3. Search files in Restore – a search box for search on file name would be nice

Add comment November 3rd, 2008