There's a new alternative in town to tape backup. An affordable alternative. One that a small business can easily cost-justify. One where you can get reliable backups of your data without having to have deep pockets to buy a tape drive, software, and media. The answer is Firebak.

Firebak costs less than most tape backup solutions by the time you factor in the cost of the software. Its huge capacity (up to 240 GB) gives you plenty of room to grow, and to even put multiple backup sets on the same media, reducing the number of media needed. It's fast enough to back up 40 GB of data in an hour, as opposed to nearly 5 hours required even by pricey tape drives. The media is durable and factory sealed. You can remove them just like tape, rotate them off-site just like tape, store them just like tape. But they aren't tape. They're better.

Why is Backup Important?

If you have any data stored on your system that you would prefer not to lose, then you should have some sort of backup solution. All hard drives, being mechanical devices, eventually fail. Even a RAID array won't protect you from viruses, hackers, intentional or accidental deletion of files, database corruption, software errors that destroy data, or anything else. You need a backup solution, and preferably one that permits you to take the data offsite periodically in case of a disaster such as a fire or tornado.

For more information on the importance of backup, read an article by one of our engineers here.

FireBak is Faster

Speed is important for backups because you only have from the time the last person goes home to the time the first person comes in for your backup to complete. In some cases, this can be as little as six hours. If your backup job isn't done in that time, then it'll slow down the server and the network while it's running. Files may be open and therefore cannot be backed up. A lot of problems can occur. So a system that can back up 40 GB in an hour is a huge advantage.

Tape drives are also sequential devices. You have to start at the beginning and fast-forward through everything before what you want, just like you do with a videotape. FireBak is random-access, like a DVD. You can move forward, backward, skip to the backup job you want, without having to fast-forward or rewind.

FireBak is Less Expensive

A traditional 40/80 GB tape system costs around $1500 for the drive alone (that's street price, not retail). That includes one tape and a cleaning tape. You still need to buy tapes on top of that at about $62.00 apiece. Those tapes need to be replaced every year or two, while we offer a three-year warranty on the media. For FireBak, the same drive, the same number of media, twice the capacity, and over four times the speed, plus SMART monitoring (see below), cost the same as their drive alone.

FireBak is More Reliable

This is all just part of the technology. Tape really hasn't changed all that much since 50 years ago. It still works the same way, basically; it's just that they've made incremental improvements.

Tapes are more likely to develop bit errors -- that is, situations where the backup appears to work fine, but upon reading it on later it turns out to have gotten garbled and unreadable. Our technology is similar to that used in hard disk drives. The bit error rate is extremely low (usually as low as the drive you're storing the data on in the first place). So in general, if you back it up, it won't get garbled.

With tape, there is a decent chance, as media ages, that what gets written isn't what will get read back in. With FireBak, it's far more likely that the backup would fail entirely, than that a few errors might creep in. FireBak lists a maximum bit error rate of 1 in 10^13 (less for some of the larger capacity units). That means 1 bit out of place in every 1,250 gigabytes. One '1' changed to a '0'. That means, out of 40 GB backed up, only one in 31.25 backups will have any errors at all, even over time. The media is designed to withstand up to 300 G's of force when not operating, and still provide full recoverability of the data it contains.

Now, let's talk about media failure. Nobody likes to think about that, but any mechanical device, no matter how well made, can fail. If a tape drive fails, the error rate increases. It tends to be more likely to back up gibberish. If the restore process encounters gibberish, it tends to stop with an error, making it much more difficult to restore. This is hard to detect before the fact, because the backup appears to have worked fine. If problems develop with FireBak media, however, the general result is that the media is unusable. This will be obvious when the backup occurs, rather than only when you go to restore from it. The failure rate is extremely low -- roughly similar to that of the hard disk in the computer. It's why we always sell packages with more than one media -- the chance of all your media failing at once is almost zero -- roughly the same as having all the drives in a RAID array go bad at once. It's very, very unlikely. Buy a lottery ticket before you bet on that happening.

FireBak is Bigger

High-capacity hard drives are cheap! It's easy to get a lot of storage into your server. And with the demands of current software, and the increasing data storage requirements of even small businesses, it's a good thing that storage is this cheap.

The trouble is, backup technology hasn't kept up with hard drives. Hard drives have been growing in size and performance exponentially, while tape drives have lagged behind, trying to catch up. The end result is that if you want to back up to tape, you need a big tape drive. And a big tape drive costs lots of money. Backup software is ridiculously expensive, as well. It works out that a small company can easily spend more then $3,000 on a tape backup solution, by the time you include software, to back up their data. That's a lot of money for something you hope to never use.

FireBak uses similar technology to that of hard disk drives. So it will have no trouble keeping up with the future. The 'drive' is generic; if you need more capacity, then you can simply increase the size of your media. Right now, we offer two sizes: 80/160 GB, and 120/240 GB. A 180/360 GB version is planned for later this year.

FireBak Requires Less Maintenance

Unlike tape, our system requires no cleaning. Well, you might take a can of compressed air to the components every few months or so if you're in a dirty environment, and clean out the cooling fan on the unit. But other than that, all you have to do is monitor your backup jobs. And with FireBak, that's not as hard as it sounds.

The chance of something going wrong during the backup, and only affecting one or two files, is actually smaller than the chance of the whole media failing during the backup (and that chance is small). That sort of failure can be detected, though, and the media replaced (free if it's within 3 years of purchase). That means that in general, if you see an error message, it's probably a serious issue; you'll avoid a lot of 'nuisance errors' that don't really indicate something wrong with the backup.

FireBak Is Compatible

FireBak is based on industry-standard technology, and all the software you need to back up your file system, your system state, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft SQL server is built in to Windows 2000, Windows 2003, and Windows XP. FireBak, additionally, will work with any backup system that can read or write backup files to compressed NTFS partitions, which is most of them. In a pinch, you can forgo backup software entirely and simply copy the files over manually.

This also means that during a restore, you don't have to install special drivers. Just install Windows 2000, slide in your drive, and restore from it. It's fast; it's simple; and it's reliable.

Specifications

Pricing

Contact Information

Ready to buy? If so, then contact us at the number below. Due to our free installation offer, we don't currently sell online. Instead, we want to talk to you, to schedule a time when we can install your customized FireBak system, and to answer any questions you may have about this revolutionary new technology!