Backups and Imaging
Overview
If you live and work in the Central Florida area like we do, you have experienced your fair share of hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, fires, and lightning. In fact, Central Florida is the Lightning Capital of the United States and Second in the World only to Rwanda, Africa! While some Central Floridians actually brag about this fact, we are concerned about it.
Lightning Strikes = Dead Computers.
Even if you have an uninterruptible power supply, manufacturers do not guarantee that their products will protect your computer against a direct lightning strike. At best, they can pay you money if their product fails, but all of the money in the world may not bring back your important data if it is not backed up. That data may be in the form of pictures, financial data, e-mail, or any number of other data types. It doesn't really matter what, how, or why the data is gone; once it is gone, there is no getting it back!
You may be thinking "I copy my data to a CD/DVD as often as I can, so I should be covered." This will only give you a false sense of security. CDs and DVDs can be lost, damaged, or stolen and manual backups of any kind are often forgotten or skipped due to time constraints. We recommend, as a minimum, an automated backup of all of your important data to an off-site location each and every night using a reliable, secure, and network-based backup solution. This recommendation is based on far too many experiences with new clients that have lost important data due to lightning, power surges, power outages, viruses, standard hardware failures, or simply deleting the files themselves!
We Recommend
eFusion Systems offers solutions for disaster planning that range from automated backups that provide basic protection to combinations of local and offsite backups, computer imaging, and virtualization systems that provide advanced protection and optimal recovery. Whether you contact us or choose some other means, we urge you to choose a backup solution, implement it, and test it as soon as possible!
Pricing
We want you to be as informed as possible while making a decision about obtaining a product or service from us. That is why we have included the pricing information below. Prices listed here are typical and can vary based your unique situtation.
- Initial Consultation and Design: As with all of our products and services, the initial consultation is free! Additionally, if we need to customize the design to your specific needs, there is no additional charge!
- Product Costs: Offsite pricing is $10 per server and $8 per computer. Data storage is $0.50 per Gigabyte. All prices are monthly. Additional products such as imaging are uniquely quoted for each customer.
- Installation Services: Typically the installation services are charged at an hourly rate. Most installations take less than an hour.
- Training Services: We will provide a single on-site training session (up to 4 hours) with the person responsible for using and/or maintaining the system at no extra charge. Of course we will be happy to answer any basic questions that may come up after the training session via phone or e-mail for free as well!
- Support Services:
Warranty Support- Includes replacement of hardware through an RMA process with the manufacturer. Labor costs are not included in warranty support unless the product fails due to our mistake (which is very rare). Labor pricing is based on whether or not you choose one of our support plans.
Non-Warranty Support- If the product warranty has expired and the manufacturer will not provide an RMA, we will provide a quote for the total cost of replacing the product (including labor and materials). Once again, our labor pricing will depend on whether or not you choose one of our support plans.
Did you know???
Check out the following tidbits of information related to this technology or service! The more you know about something, the more likely you are to make good, informed decisions when it comes time to implement it!
- Hard drive manufacturers put a 3 or 5 year warranty on their drives for a reason! This usually means they do not expect the drives to last much longer than that!
- Hard drive redundancy such as RAID 1 or RAID 5 can protect you from a single hard drive failure, but they cannot protect you from viruses, corruption, or deleted files!
- There are many factors to consider beyond daily full backups when preparing for a disaster. Some include data archiving, bandwidth limitations, truncation of data logs, schemes such as Grandfather-Father-Son, and more!
- The security of your backup data is just as important as the security of your live data!
- Even if you have a good backup of all of your data, installation of the operating system and all of the applications, updates, and settings can take a full day or more to complete! Lost a CD or License Key for one of the applications? At best, you will have to spend the time getting new ones for free; most likely you will have to pay for the software again; at worst, the company that created that application no longer exists!
- Computer Imaging not only restores all of your data, it restores the operating system, all of your applications, and all of your settings as well! Best of all, restoring from an image is as fast as copying the image to a new hard drive!
- Recent advancements in computer imaging allow for you to restore to completely different hardware (including virtual machines!) or to easily upgrade to a faster, more powerful computer while keeping everything just as you had it on the older machine!
