Nothing hampers data backup operations like a slow internet connection. If the bandwidth of your clients' networks is limited, or their connections are flaky or unreliable, you're likely to discover that directly backing up data over their network takes much longer than you (or they) would like.
Fortunately, there's a solution to this conundrum. When you choose data backup software – like MSP360 – that supports data "seeding," you can work around the limitations of a slow internet connection. Seeding is the process of copying data from a primary storage location to a secondary storage location where the data is typically copied over a network connection. Data seeding is often applied when initial backups need to be sent to a remote location, such as off-site backup storage. When data seeding is used for backups, the data is typically compressed and encrypted before being sent over the network.
In this article, we discuss the issues that led to our decision to use MSP360's data seeding feature, and how it benefited us.
About the author
Cody’s career path in IT and passion to help businesses make the best use of their technology led to the foundation of Sirius Office Solutions. The company provides computer IT support, information technology consulting, and cyber security to businesses in the Phoenix Metro area.
Data Seeding for Unreliable Connections
MSP360 data seeding allows you to upload data to your cloud repository even when your internet connection is maxed out at the primary location. You can use an external hard drive, a USB flash drive, or even a local area network (LAN) to transfer data to a temporary storage device to upload from a site with a faster connection.
Once the data is loaded to the cloud repository, you can restore your backup to the primary site, or any other location, with the flexible MSP360 backup software. MSP360 data seeding is a great solution for customers with slow internet connections or unreliable networks. It is also a good option for customers who want to improve their backup performance or reduce their backup window.
MSP360 Support to the Rescue!
To illustrate how powerful data seeding can be in situations where network performance is limited, consider the following scenario involving one of my business' customers.
The customer is a small business with limited IT resources. Its internet connection supports upload speeds of only 10Mbps on a good day, and the connection tends to be flaky, with frequent slowdowns and transmission errors. The customer had a local 6-terabyte database that supported a line-of-business application. If you do the math, you'll discover that it would take more than 60 hours to transfer that amount of data over a 10 Mbps connection – and that's assuming the connection delivers 10 Mgps continuously, which our client's network didn't.
At first, we tried the usual workarounds to figure out a faster way to move the data over the client's network. For example, we experimented with using file-based as compared to image-based backup, hoping that one method would prove faster than the other. But we didn't experience the improvements we hoped for. No matter what we tried, it took a long time to move the data over the customer's network.
So, we reached out to MSP360's support services in the hope that they would have a better idea. And they did! After we opened a ticket, they responded to us within hours to suggest that we use the data seeding backup method. We were able to get the data seeding process started and completed within a few days by following the instructions in this article.
We quickly realized that MSP360 data seeding was the best backup approach for this customer. This customer thankfully already had an external drive on hand, which we used to copy their full database. They then sent the hard drive back to us, and we uploaded the data from our office with a much faster internet connection using a trial of Cloudberry Explorer's full version.
We were able to upload the customer's backup data to our cloud repository with no issues, and we found the data seeding process is simple and easy to use. It turned a backup operation that would have taken days into an hours-long affair, once we had the data on hand at our office. We highly recommend MSP360 data seeding for customers with slow or unreliable internet connections.
Conclusion
If you find yourself in the same boat we did – needing to back up data over a client's network, but lacking a high-speed, high-availability connection to do so – check out MSP360 data seeding. It's simple and easy to use and it will save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
Simple. Reliable.
