How to back up an end users data in more than one location

Sometimes an end user wants his data backed up to two locations, one on the RBS Server, and another to a geographically distant location. This article discusses two ways to do this on a customer-by-customer basis.

1  Use the RBackup Endpoint's built-in Local Mirror feature.

This solution has the advantage of making the restore from the alternate location completely automatic, while using the end user's bandwidth rather than the Servers bandwidth to support the second backup site.

The RBackup Endpoint has a built in feature that can automatically maintain a mirror of everything it stores on the RBS Server. Typically this mirror is written to a hard drive in the local network environment, either a shared network drive or a USB drive, or a NAS device.

This feature is useful for backup redundancy and also to dramatically speed up restores. During a restore the RBackup software will check the local mirror location first to see if the files to be restored are there. If they are, RBackup gets them from the local mirror at full local network speed.

Solution number one is to move the mirror location out of the local network into a remote location and map it as a drive letter through a VPN. The RBackup software will see the mapped drive letter as a local drive, and when it writes the mirror backup, it actually goes through the VPN to the remote location.

2  Use a folder sync utility to synchronize the end users folder on the RBS Server with a remote location.

This method has the advantage of being able to mirror more than one (or all) users' data without requiring a VPN.

Every user on an RBS Server has his own folder under which all his data are stored. You can mirror any single user's folder (or all users' folders) to another data center, providing a geographically distant backup site for your own RBackup server.

This is a typical folder structure for an RBS Server. It starts with a drive letter (in this case C:,) and then a folder name (in this case \RBS) and then below \RBS there are a number of system folders (.sync, Reg$In, Reg$Out) and some log files.

The other folders are for user data, and are named the same as the usernames. In the example below, DEMO is a user account, so is Rob.

Mirroring user data to a remote location is simple. Just install a computer at another location, or bring up an instance on a cloud service like Amazons EC2 service. Then install your favorite folder synchronization software and set it up to synchronize one or more users folders.

Use one of the search engines to find synchronization software by entering a query like: download folder sync software