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Backup Strategies for Residential Clients
Contribution by Paul Apking
For many technicians, good backups have saved us time and time again. We realize the value of a good set of backups, something many clients fail to understand until it’s too late. In this article I’ll share with you my backup strategy for my residential clients.
The setup of automated backup for residential clients is fairly straightforward, can generate added business and gives a level of comfort knowing data is safe. This is also a great way for upselling regular service and for cross-selling of external drives.
I usually recommend to clients a local backup set and have a remote backup in case of disaster. Create a local snapshot using Clonezilla or a similar cloning software either onsite or in your shop.
If the client doesn’t have an external drive for the image, this will be a good cross-sell by adding the drive to your services. This will provide a base line image for the client in case of major virus or spyware issues. (you might want to try reselling MalwareBytes for clients with multiple incidents of spyware)
In addition to the snapshot would be a weekly or daily local backup program. A great tool to use is the Backup and Restore found in Windows 7 or above. Microsoft provides a decent tutorial on how to do this here.
Just remember to tick the box under Windows Task Scheduler called “Run task as soon as possible after a scheduled start is missed” in case the USB drive or computer is turned off when the back up is scheduled to run. Local backup is ideal for all type of files, particularly photos, and confidential documents which the client may not want to have stored in the cloud.
The secondary backup is remote which is a great opportunity for techs to generate more income by recommending reseller products, such as Mozy or Carbonite.
These tools give the client an additional backup (in case of fire, theft or dead local drive) and can co-brand their business with these solutions. These are straightforward to set up and can be done onsite or remotely using one of the recommended remote-support tools.
What backup strategies do you have for your residential clients? Please share you ideas in the comments.
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Another great backup program is Cobian backup. It’s definitely not for non-technical users, but it’s free and very flexible. I’ve set it up for clients with more unusual backup needs and it’s been a big win.
For remote backup I use CloudBerry Backup and back it up to DreamObjects. This costs me aroun $0.02/GB then I can easily charge the average person $5-$10/month and make a profit (dozens of clients = easy extra monthly income).
Phil, I never thought about doing this, do you get a good return with this? Also are your clients good about paying on time?
@Bob: Yes, I make a decent amount of money and it’s virtually no maintenance once you have it setup. I charge my clients mostly annually (some every 6 months) on an estimated basis. When it comes time to “renew” their service with me that’s when I do a “true up”. I’ve gotten pretty good about estimating the usage ahead of time though.
Hello Phil, what plan of theirs did you sign up for to receive the $.02 per GB?
@Chuck: I signed up when they were running a promo for $0.02/GB. Even at the standard pricing, you should be able to mark it up a bit and make some money.
Syncbackpro for local backups, gives you vastly greater control and tons of advantages over Windows Backup. Most important is you can set it up to email success/fail notifications, it has versioning (critical to any backup strategy), and you can simply drill down to the file you want restored and drag and drop.
Set it and forget it? Forget it. I’ve cleaned up after a previous tech who set that up too many times to trust that piece of “poo.” LOL Poor customer’s drive crashes, their tech said the backup is running, “Trust me,” the dang thing fails and no one ever knows. Customer is stuck with having to pay thousands of dollars for data recovery. Windows backup is a cop out for the lazy tech. (Sorry I call them as I see them).
Carbonite? Smart but slow. I’m still looking for a practical cloud backup service. But Carbonite ain’t it.
http://www.tpteq.com
Hi Tony, your name is certainly a blast from the past. I see you’re still in the Chicago area, we’re in northern Virginia and have been since 2000. We have spent time in Boston, Albuquerque and Greenville SC too. So you’re doing residential and small commercial IT. I used to do residential but now focus exclusively on small commercial. You can reach me by phone at 571-643-2853 or by email at alex@havetex.com and I would love to catch up. I’m about to take a trip to the UK, so you may want to hold off a week.
Hey Alex! Nice to hear from you.
We do both residential and commercial. Moving more into Security Camera work now. (http://www.apollosecuritysolutions.com) Can’t make enough with computer repair. As we grow I plan to keep that part of the business going however, so as to continue to provide quality services to the locals. Sometimes a simple computer repair can end up in a relationship where you end up getting some big jobs. It’s worked that way for us so far.
I find that the business skills I picked u at SDA have really helped me to do this right. Who would have thought, eh? LOL
I’ll keep your contact info and we should stay in touch. My contact info is all on the web site.
All the best.
T
Corrected link for tutorial…
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/backup-and-restore
I use my Synology NAS and the cloudstation app. I can charge as much or as little as I want and although the Synology doesn’t do Dedupe, my 4bay DS412+ in a RAID5 has 12TB of storage which is plenty for residential at this point. When I need more space and more clients I can bump up to the DS1813+ and have up to 35TB in RAID5. I’ve got gigabit internet so bandwidth isn’t an issue, all the storage is local (for those who do not like big companies owning their data), and it’s relatively cheap if you get enough customers…
Living life on the edge if your charging for Backups and storing them on a RAID5 system. I’d do at least RAID6 or RAID10 if you can afford the overhead.
I have a Synology NAS and planning to offer offsite backup for my clients, however, is there a way I can get a report daily or some kind of summary so I know the backup/sync is working properly?
Synology allows for many different alerts to be configured and in a handful of ways. below are 5 screenshots I took of the list of possible events you can configure (not going to take the time to write them out or search out exactly what you are looking for, but hopefully this will give you a good idea of whats possible)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/97urtzhkjpvqu0m/Screenshot%202014-06-01%2022.58.48.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ca84ifbcmo9ql17/Screenshot%202014-06-01%2022.58.59.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/61irsj7p4adbqvc/Screenshot%202014-06-01%2022.59.06.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d2qif3898y7x3kx/Screenshot%202014-06-01%2022.59.15.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/w4rzn0qevie6ooo/Screenshot%202014-06-01%2022.59.23.png
Crashplan- has many strategies including backup to a friends pc. They have an affiliate program, Also I setup the nonpaid plans to a email account on my site. I get a email that backup occurred or did not. An opportunity for a visit and tuneup.
One thing that needs to be considered is security of off-site backup. Crashplan encrypts before the data leaves the machine. I have been running crashplan for years on residential client machines and am quite pleased. (I am not an affiliate or paid by Crashplan)
Agreed. Crashplan is wonderful and my backup of choice.
Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to look into it
I use Crashplan for residential and Crashplan Pro for business clients. Definitely recommend them, I use them myself for all of my servers and desktop clients.
Jeff Roe
http://www.aguru4u.com/
Where is their affiliate program through? All I can find is their Partner program.
Good software.
Just a comment about Mozy as a reseller – they are phasing out (or have completely already) the referral programs for home editions of Mozy. They are moving to more business type services and stopped paying commisions for residential referrals a few months ago.
After much research, we’ve switched to promoting BackBlaze. Affordable, easy to use and good commission structure for resellers.
Heads up, the Mozy and Carbonite links lead to a 404.
Thanks Chuck. I’ve updated the links.
I’m so bummed Mozy when out with the affiliate program, I started reselling SOS and backed up with GFI and sales are great! This also goes for Malwarebytes starting to really grind my last nerve when it came to resellers, so GFI was the best answer in regards to support, price and service.
Do you use both SOS and GFI for backups? If so why not just one product?
SOS for backup, GFI for monthly maintenance plans.
Thank you Paul and everyone for sharing backup strategies. This information will help me put together some kind of a backup strategy for my customers. Very rarely will I meet a customer who is doing backups on a regular basis. I see this as an opportunity to offer an additional service to my clients.
http://www.pcmechanicfl.com
For data only backup we use Anchor, it’s simple and effective. For local backup, you can’t beat an image copy, Acronis or Macrium Reflect. Of the two I prefer Reflect, it’s cheaper and easier to use, plus tech support is out of the UK rather than Russia. Anything to avoid helping Putin.
I would steer away form Mozy and Carbonite as the most more you want to upload all your important Files. They charge per GB. My recommendation would be “Crash Plan” its a fix price for unlimited amounts of data and the information is accessible form any computer and iPhone or Android.
Hi all,
I stumbled upon this discussion and wanted to introduce you to http://www.ubiqshare.com
We provide:
Unlimited storage and backup
Unmatched data security
Unbelievable customer support and services
UbiqShare is the only file sharing solution that provides the above and provides partners with opportunity for recurring revenue.
I encourage you to give us a try and see how your clients can enjoy the peace of mind of unlimited backup, complete ubiquitous (it’s everywhere) access to data wherever they are, and how you can generate recurring revenue.
Thanks!!
With pricing *starting* at $17.70USD, this is a terrible option for your average residential customer (which, let’s remember, is the point of this article).
I thought I would throw in my 2 cents.
For online backup I have used Livedrive http://www.livedrive.com for the last 2 years. It is $600/year for a reseller account which allows you to setup unlimited accounts, with unlimited storage. You can do a monthly plan I believe also. It is nice because you have complete control and don’t get cut out of the loop. It is not perfect, but works reasonably well. It is easy to administer.
For local backup I have used Rebit. http://www.rebit.com . This is Time Machine simplistic once it is installed. It does full backups that you can restore a complete system from. It is the only one that I could put on a clients computer, come back a year later and it has done all of its housekeeping and has a full year of recovery points. The installation and activation process has given me some fits, but I have found some workarounds with that. They have good US based support. They are based out of Colorado. So many programs will run for a month and then fail, or fill up a drive and quit working etc. Rebit has pretty amazing deduplication and compression. Making a few bucks is nice, but when it comes to backups, I really just want something that works and I can rely on working. I have gotten to trust both of these solutions, and they are affordable enough that you can sell them.
Looking for good low cost backup software. I can remember using Norton software to recover hard drive data Thats how long I have been in the IT business. I am disabled now from a Brain Tumor Surgery in 2003. But I have done some work here and there. I want to get back in my own repair bussiness
There are many strategies to rescue the data loss situations and back up is one of them. There are many reliable tools for data backup. One software, which I know is Stellar Drive Clone. Though it is not free but the free version can be used before you use this software.