Offsite Storage Solutions

CascadePoint works with a variety of offsite storage products. We are currently suggesting three types of offsite storage solutions:

There are some limitations on each solution, so please note them. Generally, CascadePoint uploads to remote storage in the background, so you are not really aware its working, but if you have very large amounts of data (10+GB) you should understand that upload can take awhile. Be realistic in what you are storing.

Assuming your are backing up regular documents and not a 50GB music library, XDrive may be the right solution for you. XDrive creates an offsite storage location that looks like a disk drive on your computer (X:). You can get 5GB of storage for free or if you want more storage, they sell 50GB for $9.95 per month. Sorry, its a strange business model.

To set up AOL XDrive for use with CascadePoint, go to www.xdrive.com and follow the instructions after pressing the "Get 5GB Free" button.

After installing XDrive and rebooting your computer, you should see a new disk drive labeled X: in your My Computer window. In CascadePoint, type X:\Archive in the remote archive input block on the Archive Options page.

You are done. CascadePoint will create the archive directory for you and start putting archive files there.

This solution is cheap (free), easy and produces relatively fast output to the remote archive (based on your ISP upload speed). It is probably not a good solution for people wanting large amounts of storage.

Amazon S3 is a giant server farm owned by Amazon and available to anyone to store almost unlimited amounts of data. The cost is variable and complex; based on amount being stored, upload and download bandwidth and other factors. Its sort of hard to predict cost, but is generally lower than other solutions. You will need to create an account on Amazon S3. Start here -- Amazon S3 Signup. There is a storage cost calculator on this page that will give you an idea about pricing.

JungleDisk is a piece of middleware that does basicly what the AOL XDrive does. It makes Amazon S3 look like a local disk drive on your computer. It costs $20.00 for an unlimited copy lifetime license. You can get JungleDisk here. It has been very reliable and very fast.

After signing up for Amazon S3 and purchasing JungleDisk, you will need to configure JungleDisk for Amazon S3 and tell it what drive letter you want the JungleDisk to be (e.g., X: G: etc).

Setting up CascadePoint is the same as in AOL XDrive. Just set the remote archive on the Archive Options page to X:\Archive (or whatever drive letter you are using for JungleDisk).

This solution is fast, stable and provides unlimited storage volumes, but cost can go up pretty fast as you use storage. Check the storage cost calculator to estimate your costs.

There are a large number of low cost web hosting companies that offer large storage solutions at low cost. For example, Siteground offers 500GB of storage with 5000GB of bandwidth for $5.95 per month (2 year contract). This is the least expensive way of getting large storage volumes at low cost. however, FTP is slow. You are unlikely to get more than 3GB of upload per hour. So if you are saving that 50GB you are looking at 15+ hours for the initial upload. Later backups will be incremental and thus a tiny fraction of the time needed for the inital upload.

If you are not acquainted with FTP, we recommend you use one of the other offsite solutions.

The generic process is to select a web hosting provider and establish a web domain of your own (e.g., www.mydomain.com etc). Once you have set this established, you can set up one or more FTP accounts. If you are going to be backing up several computers, set up an FTP account for each computer. At Siteground, you get there by going to your "cpanel". there will be an icon to allow administration of ftp accounts. Each account will have a user name (e.g., jamiescomputer) and password.

This solution is slow, but it is inexpensive for large storage needs. You need to be realistic about upload speed and storage needs. Archiving 1-20MB Word, Excel and Powerpoint files or lots of photos will work well. Uploading 10GB video files will not work well.