LiveVault is a safe storage service

How much is your company spending on data protection? Perhaps only a few CTOs can answer that on the spot, because the constant increase in the amount of information companies manage forces them to frequently update their backup infrastructure, making cost a moving target. Often each upgrade is closely followed by the next, adding more frustration and cost.

As technology improves, this gloomy scenario should improve. For instance, the development of utility computing should facilitate granular updates of computing infrastructure, easing the burden on company budgets.

However, for small datacenters, online services offer more affordable data backup solutions that promise professionally managed data protection without costly investment.

Through the LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service, LiveVault has been offering online backups for Linux, Solaris, and Windows servers over the Internet for a long time. The latest enhancement to its service, which comes with Version 4 of the LiveVault software, builds on the easy activation and seamless, user-driven online restores of previous versions and adds goodies such as simplified backup settings for Microsoft Exchange servers and faster restores.

The Exchange data protection features offered by LiveVault didn’t excite me, because they lack granularity. You can restore an entire Exchange database, for example, but not a single mailbox or folder — chores that are frequently on an admin’s to-do list. Nevertheless, the service is reliable, astonishingly easy to use, and tailored to the needs of small companies and remote departments. It’s definitely worth a try.

Look Ma, No Tape

Being an online service, LiveVault differs from conventional backup solutions. For example, I was able to activate and manage data protection on a server that was several hundred miles away. Traditional backup solutions cannot easily address this scenario, a common one for companies with multiple locations.

To register my server and activate the service, I logged onto the LiveVault Web server. During that process, LiveVault automatically installed a local agent and started a full backup of my data.

It took the better part of a day to copy about 3GB of data from my server to a remote location; after that, the LiveVault agent began to intercept changes, automatically saving them to the same remote location. As often happens on the Internet, there were occasional interruptions, but the service restarted pending jobs correctly after the connection was restored.

My data was now protected and without local backup jobs or gears, because LiveVault was handling the grunt work (including backups to offline media). As a bonus, it sent a copy of my data to the secure outside vaults managed by Iron Mountain.

LiveVault will automatically protect files and directories on your server, but you need to specify additional settings for databases and e-mail servers. Those settings boil down to identifying which files LiveVault should backup together, because they are part of the same logical database. Typically, a user will choose those files manually for a SQL Server database, but the latest version automatically recognizes the critical files to backup for an Exchange server, which should help non-technical users.

The friendly wizards of LiveVault’s browser-based GUI immensely ease restore jobs. It was simple to navigate an accurate replica of my server’s directory tree to choose files to restore. After clicking Submit, the restore started instantly on my server. When it was done, I received a notification of the results in my e-mail inbox. Pretty slick and easy, even for non-technical folks.

Restoring a database and my Exchange mailboxes was more cumbersome. LiveVault doesn’t offer selective restores, so recovering a single mailbox or selected messages is impossible; it’s all or nothing. Moreover, LiveVault started restoring my Exchange files without warning me to close the application first — not exactly end-user friendly.

Nevertheless, the online restore is the best feature of LiveVault and should work for many recovery scenarios. For large restores LiveVault can pack your files on CDs or loan you a NAS appliance.

Is Online Backup for You?

Whether or not LiveVault is preferable to running your own data depends on factors such as data security and restore timeliness.

Can you trust typically unreliable Internet connections to transfer critical company data? Each company should assess that risk, but it helps to know that LiveVault encrypts and compresses data sent over the wire. This should reduce the possibility of disclosures or malicious changes.

How fast can you recover your data when needed? The connection bandwidth makes a big difference, of course. For instance, LiveVault estimates that a 1GB restore at T1 speed will take about 90 minutes. That is consistent with my test results, but on slower connections, the same recovery can take hours.

LiveVault doesn’t offer tools for “bare metal” restores, which means that if one of your server dies, before attempting the data restore you must reinstall the OS and LiveVault agent on your own.

In addition, the LiveVault service is strictly for backing up servers, not end-users’ desktops or laptops. For that, you should pursue other services, such as those offered by Connected PR.

With that in mind, LiveVault is well worth considering for data protection, particularly for smaller datacenters and companies with distributed computing facilities. It may not cover all your needs, and depending on your technical environment, it may require complementary tools or procedures. But if you can work around those limitations, its flexibility, streamlined installation, ease of use, and competitive cost are hard to achieve otherwise.