We offer cloud backup services for our customers. Most of our business customers use cloud backups, and some of our residential customers also use them.

We use Backblaze as the backbone to our backup service, this is one of the major backup services. We don’t store your data at our location. Some of our customers use Backblaze directly, and some go through us. The breakeven point is around 400GB per computer, if you are backing up more data then the Backblaze unlimited 1 PC plan at $99/year is cheaper, if it is less data then our plan is cheaper. If your data changes a lot, then the many extra snapshots we take will use more space, since we make many more snapshots than the basic Backblaze plan does, for most users this is not the case.

Features:

What is a backup: Every backup is a snapshot of that folder as of that moment in time. It is best to have any programs with open files closed, but the backup will backup open files as well (as long as you are an Administrator on the computer).

What to backup: You can backup as few or as many folders as you want. Most people back up the C:\Users folder (and exclude the AppData folder), which has most important files for most users. We can include any other folders you want as well.

When to backup: We can schedule backups for any time. Most customers choose once per day, you can do it more or less frequently. It can be automatic or you can have an icon you double click to start the backup.

How to backup: We normally set it to run automatically, but you can also run it manually anytime you want. We can set certain triggers, such as a certain time of day or when you first start the computer.

How long do we keep the backups: Our default amount to keep is
– Hourly backups for the last day (if ran hourly).
– Daily backups for the last week.
– Weekly backups for the last 6 weeks.
– Monthly backups for the last year.
– Yearly backups for the last 2 years.
Our backup system is smart, if one file is backed up two years ago, it doesn’t backup that same file again unless it changes, yet that file will be in every backup since it existed since that time. This is called de-duplication and makes it so you can have lots of backups that don’t take a ton of space. You may have 100GB of files saved, with hundreds of snapshots which contains different variations of those files and it may only use 10% more space than your actual files.

What if it stops working: We get alerts if your computer skips a backup. If your computer misses a few backups then we can check with you to make sure everything is working. This typically happens if someone goes on vacation and has their computer off for days.

Privacy and Security: Our backup service is encrypted by a password which you can pick or we can help you generate. Without this password, your backups are useless, so we typically give you two printouts with it, and recommend you save it in your phone. It is up to you if you want us to keep a copy of this password for safekeeping, or if you don’t want us to keep a copy of it (in which case you MUST keep it safe, the only way to get your data is with this password!). If you keep it secret from us then you should print it out a few times and keep them in a very safe place. Without this password the data in your backup is just gibberish and is useless.

How to get my data back: You will have an icon that will walk you through the recovery process. It will list every Snapshot you have saved, you can pick one and then pick which files or folders you want to recover. All recovered files/folders will be saved in a new folder, they will not overwrite your current files. If you have any issues you can contact us for assistance.

Pricing:
– One Time Setup Charge of $40, where you tell us what folders you want to backup, how often, and we set it up for you. It will run automatically, typically once or twice per day, but we can change that. You can have a shortcut to run i manually, or we can set it up to just run every so often.
– Monthly fee is 2 cents per GB per month, which is $2 per 100GB per month. There is a minimum monthly fee of $2. Ongoing charges are calculated monthly based on usage at the end of the month. We typically bill once your charges get up to $40, for some customers this is less than once a year. If you only used 100GB per month, that is $2.00 per month or $24 per year in usage. If you used 300GB per month, that is about $72 per year.