Ever wondered how backup over a slow internet connection works ? Watch our short video guide below to find some easy solutions to this issue:
Having the ability to backup your data over the internet offers convenience, utility and accessibility. Whether this is performing backups or restoring from them. However, a common concern we hear a lot is whether someone can perform online backup with a slow internet connection.
If this sounds similar to you then fear not, there are a variety of solutions to help you work around this issue. Make sure you can still be confident that your data is safely backed up! It’s important to note that on the very slowest connection it might not be possible to backup over the internet. However, this usually not the case for most connections.
Compression:
Before sending your data across it can be compressed which reduces the size of it. The more effective the level of compression, the smaller the file size is which mean it takes much less time to transfer data.
Out of Hours:
This is as simple as it sounds. Having the option to set what times of the day that backups take place. This means that backups can be set to be performed out of office hours. This means that you won’t be struggling for bandwidth with your backup. Meaning that you can use it as you want and have the backup have a dedicated time slot to avoid usage clashes. An example would be having it set so the backup only run at 8pm – 6am.
Bandwidth Throttling:
Bandwidth throttling works by restricting the amount of bandwidth that backup can use at a given time. Resulting so that it can coincide with regular use of your internet without drastically slowing down the connection. This is useful if you need to run backups in the day but have slow internet or lots of traffic.
Local Speed Vault:
Having a local speed vault is a method of speeding up how long it takes to restore data from a backup. This works by keeping an additional copy of the backup locally, which can be used for restoring much quicker than over the internet. The caveat of this is that additional external hardware (such as an external disk or drive) is needed. Of course is an additional upfront cost you have to consider. Think about if the investment would save money (in the form of time taken) in the long run. This external hardware can be encrypted so that your data can still be kept secure.
Dedicated Internet Connection:
Like the name suggests, this means having a separate line in place that is dedicated specifically for backups. This means that traffic from your regular internet use will not impact the time it takes to backup your data. The same applies for vice versa. Another benefit of this is that the backups can send data whenever they have to. They aren’t restricted to just out of hours, for example. The obvious downside of this is the installation and rental costs. It’s worth considering if this will save you money/time in the long run compared to not having it.
Seed Backup:
Sometimes the initial full backup is too much for the internet to handle. An easy way to see this would be if the backup was predicted to take an abnormal amount of time or slowed down internet speeds drastically to unusable standards. A way of getting around this is by performing a seed backup.
A seed backup consists of transferring the data to a physical disk, which can then be transferred physically to a data centre like ours and imported in to the backup system. After this all changes made will then be added to the backup incrementally via the internet. An example would be to have 1TB on a disk, physically given to us and then from that point only the changes are sent over (incremental backup) on the internet which normally are much smaller and manageable.
If you have a question or need some help with backup you can always get in contact with us and we’ll do our absolute best to help you in any way we can.
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