backup
You’ve decided to start backing up to the cloud, good for you! However your company has been around for a while and you have a lot of data to backup. How do you get 500Gb or more up to the cloud backup server using your current Internet bandwidth restrictions?

Calculate Your First Backup

Your first backup to the cloud is going to be a full backup, you need to get a full copy of the data there to start with. After that all your backups are incremental, that is they only backup changes since the last full backup. Incremental backups are quick and efficient, and unlike traditional backup systems are very easy to restore from.

So the question is, if you have 500Gb of data, how long will that take to do that first full backup?

Here’s a handy calculator to help you, but first do a bandwidth speed test and look for your upload speed. If your Internet upload speed is 5Mbps (megabits per second) or less and you need to backup 500Gb then that first backup could take over 250 hours (that’s over 10 days)!

That’s way too long, you need a way to shorten that first backup time. The answer is a seed load.

Run A Seed Load

seed load usb driveA seed load is running your first full backup to an external hard disk, then shipping that disk to your backup provider. They load it up to the backup server directly so that the first backup you actually do over the Internet is an incremental backup, much smaller and faster!

Performing a seed load is a special process and will be different than how your backup normally works. Read the documentation and if you have any questions then ask before you start. You don’t want to do this more than once.

External hard disks can hold up to 2Tb and more these days, they’re small and easy to ship. Using a USB3 connection to your server, the copy to an external disk is minutes, rather than hours. Make sure your cloud backup provide has this option if you know you have a lot of data to backup. Here at CloudPockets we include this service at no cost.

Ask for a seed load, you’ll be glad you did!

Share