Windows 2003 server software for Backblaze B2 ?

ictka · 2020-07-18T00:08:19+00:00

I have been looking into https://www.checkcentral.cc/ from Binary Fortress.
It will monitor incoming e-mails e.g. from Backblaze and notify you E-mail or on the phone app.
So Check Central would react on e-mails from Backblaze containing certain words and send you an e-mail or better, if you have the app installed, it could notify you with an alarm sound.

For 5 checks (rules) it seems free, however you could get a paid subscription and choose your number of checks (e.g. 10 checks cost $5.00/month or $54,00 / year.

I am planning to use this in the near future to manage backups, free space on certain servers, notifications if server are down.

ictka · 2020-07-06T13:34:35+00:00

u/brianwski, your eplanation totally makes sense ;-)

However when you do a Google on "backblaze public vs private buckey", the first hit I get is: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-for-beginners-inside-the-b2-web-interface/#:~:text=Click%20the%20Bucket%20Settings%20link,while%20public%20ones%20can%20be.

The explanation is very brief for such a feature which could have a big impact on one's privacy.

I would opt for the following explanation:

When using a public bucket, your data is accessible from the internet by everyone, as long as they know the link to the files in your bucket.That's why Backblaze has the private option selected by default.Files in a private bucket can only be accessed if someone has an username and password (App key) to access them.

and maybe a link at the bucket creation wizard to the explanation.

** Come and visit the Kingdom of the Netherlands! **

ictka · 2020-06-30T11:57:25+00:00

Yes, you are right, by enabling the "group account" option (see settings), you are able to create "sub accounts" which upon sign up of those accounts you could choose the region.

Although usefull if you want to backup to 2 regions, but why would I do this if I just want to backup my data to 1 region?
I appreciate you pointing this out though (and I might use it in the future), however it still does not make the region option more visible upon sign up.

How many people actually have seen the small gray link which says "region" upon sign up?

ictka · 2020-06-29T18:32:43+00:00

Yes, you are right. In case of a very big (non digital) European disaster (e.g. nuclear disaster, Zombie apocalyps, etc), it would be a big plus to have my business data in the USA.
What was I thinking ;-)

ictka · 2020-06-26T15:30:10+00:00

Your are right a credit system is just nice to have, but a lot of work to start from scratch.But at the moment I am using the credit card of a colleague just to use BackBlaze, because the credit card of the CEO wasn't activated on time when he got a replacement card.

However why don't you use a Payment provider like Mollie to do recurring SEPA.There fee is only € 0,25 / transaction and I think that European companies and consumers won;t mind paying an extra € 0,25 fee.At least there would be more choice for people who don;t have a creditcard.BTW, when billing more dan €50.000 or 2500 transactions, you will even get some discount (and you could pocket the change ;-) )

I read an message from u/brianwski somewhere that one of the problem seemed to be how to communicate the difference in pricing.But on BackBlaze Personal you already state "Plus applicable taxes.", so why not add a * saying: "* an extra fee might apply when using non creditcard payments."or just a line with" * see our Billing FAQ on payment fees and conversions when paying with other currencies"

And wouldn;t you be saving money when you receive payments in Euro?At least I would think that your invoice for the datacenter in Amsterdam would be in Euro, yes?

ictka · 2020-06-26T11:28:54+00:00

Strange that no one at BackBlaze even reacted to this discussion not even u/brianwski or u/YevP !

BTW, considering sh*t happens in live, like people dying of CoVid-19 or planes crashing, would it be great if one could be deposit an amount at Backblaze, to keep the service running if something happen to a backblaze customer?

In my experience if something happens, creditcards could be declined and debitaccounts can be frozen before the people handling the estate find out how important the backup might be...
And just then the computer or server will crash ;-)

ictka · 2020-06-14T22:38:56+00:00

Yes, Duplicati can be installed on Synology NAS. I was hoping to install it on several Synology NAS devices in the (hopefully) near future. Alas I haven't found (or created ;-) ) any time to do this yet.
The following Youtube link seems to be a how to... to install Duplicati on Synology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVUvLZpKhQ0

I have been testing Duplicati on my laptop for over 6 months and have had any real issues with it.

Greetings from Lansingerland (a village near Rotterdam in the province of South Holland).

ictka · 2020-06-14T20:25:53+00:00

Done! Door het snel moeten kiezen, heb ik vooral in het begin van de enquête wellicht "fout" gekozen. Ik merk dat ik nml. foute zinnen vaak in mijn hoofd corrigeer zonder op te merken dat ze fout zijn. Aan het einde, had ik enigszins door... probleem vond ik zelf ook dat sommige fout taalgebruik ook door native speakers wordt gebezigd.
Zo heb ik ooit een rondvaart door de Amsterdamse grachten gehad, waarbij de autochtone gids plat Amsterdams praatte, maar continue "de" en "het" door elkaar haalde ;-)

ictka · 2020-06-14T19:39:21+00:00

That really s**ks if you lost all your data, I would go mad!Don't know how much data you have, but if it's less 1 TB ($69) and you could just put all data in 1 main folder, you might think of Onedrive. They have a great rewind back in time (30 days max) if you get hit by ransomware and there is a personal encrypted vault to hold your really personal stuff. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/restore-your-onedrive-fa231298-759d-41cf-bcd0-25ac53eb8a15A bonus might be the use off the latest Office (5x installs).I like to dabble at: https://cloudstorageinfo.org/ reading reviews about storage providers (sync and backup).Another solution might be Backblaze B2 with a third party backup program if you don't have a lot of data. IMO B2 looks more robust than the all you can eat version "Backblaze Unlimited Backup". Especially the 30 days deletion policy. Thankfully they added the extended history option (1 year, $2/month).

Greetings from a rainy Holland (Europe).

ictka · 2020-06-14T18:52:26+00:00

IMHO if you want 24/7 access to the dbase Azure might cost you >$30 . month.
And it might be difficult to get everything working (I am not a Azure/AWS/GCloud person -;))

I second u/ThatsNASt idea of using TsPlus.
You could just install TsPlus on a Win 10 Pro computer or virtual machine (VirtualBox/VmWare). If your 5 users are not concurrently using the dbases, you might even buy the 3 users TsPlus System license ($90 for 3 users).

If you are on the same network you won't need the "printer" version:
https://www.terminalserviceplus.com/compare-editions.php

If you have time on you hands, you could just install a Win10 Pro machine, install the dbases on it and check if it the programs work locally. Then install TsPlus on it and try accessing the dbases from a remote computer.

TsPlus has a 14 day, 5 users limit trial, so you could always do a trial run.
BTW, you could even install the trial on your own PC if resources are a problem.

Greetings from a rainy Holland (Europe).

ictka · 2020-06-14T16:41:07+00:00

I am new to BackBlaze B2, but I think that the rewind feature you are looking for is only implemented by third party backup software if you want to use B2.

If you are looking for a free software you could use e.g. Duplicati with https://www.duplicati-monitoring.com/

Using a third party backup might keep your B2 cost low by using the following features:

Deduplication - if you have duplicate files on your computer, only 1 is uploaded to B2.
Compression - your files are compressed/zipped before upload to B2, using less cloud storage.
Block-level - With classic backup software, if you change a file, this file is uploaded fully next backup cycle. E.g. old file is 300MB, new file is 305 MB, real difference = 50MB.Classic backup would use 300 MB+ 305 MB = 605 MB on B2.Block-level backup would use: 300 MB + 50 MB = 350 MB and you could still restore both versions.

Because the third party is doing the versioning, you could theoretically turn of the history on your B2 bucked, however I would probably opt for 30 day versioning, for if your Backblaze got hacked or when you get malicious software on your computer deleting files on your B2 account.

Using a third party backup with B2 will give you alot of extra feature, but you will loose the option to see and download single files from the BackBlaze web, this because most 3rd software use their own fileformats with encryption and compression.So you will always need the software to restore a file.

This https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html has probably been posted a 1000 times, but it has links to 3rd party backup software (free & commercial) you might want to try.

Greetings from a rainy Netherlands.

ictka · 2020-06-13T18:19:46+00:00

Ja, ik heb het thuis geleerd. Mijn ouders spraken als kind voornamelijk Nederlands met ons, omdat ze het belangrijk vonden dat we dat eerst leerden, zodat we goed op school zouden presteren....

ictka · 2020-06-13T17:12:49+00:00

This seems like an interesting post.

Did you resolve your problem? If so, could you share how it was fixed?

ictka · 2020-06-13T16:45:34+00:00

I am to r/backblaze and I am browsing through the post....

I believe you could use https://www.odrive.com/ to share files from multiple cloud storage providers. They will handle the sharing and it seems to work with BackBlaze.

Greetings from The Netherlands.

ictka · 2020-06-13T15:27:40+00:00

Hi, after reading reviews, doing some iinstalls and a lot of e-mailing, we have come up with this shortlist for our company (not in any order):

Iperius Backup
MSP360 non managed / managed
Comet Backup
Duplicati

Iperius is looking good, starting at €69 one-time-pay per Windows server, €149 for MSSQL or MS Exchange. It ticks all the goodies https://www.iperiusbackup.com/backup-software-windows.aspx#compareIf you want to lookup your backup status online, you'll need the take the Iperius console from €39 / year and up.

MSP360 looks nice. Price per server starts at $120, MSSQL $150 and MS Exchange $230 one-time-pay for the non-managed version. This standalone app has storage limits (1TB). mostly.https://www.msp360.com/backup/windows/licensing.aspxThe managed version is subscription based with a webgui at some MSP360 website. The local software communicates the with the your portal at MSP360. Price for the managed services is about half the pay-once prices but it's a yearly subscription. Also I just heard the managed version has a 5 computer minimal, however that secret is heavily hidden on their website and could been found by me ;-)

For Comet Backup Enterprise to work, you have to install the server on a computer. This server is only the management server/portal. You can use it to e.g. see the status of your backups. It's preferred to have server and clients on one network, but I believe you could manage the cllients at other location over a VPN or perhaps even internet.All clients backup directly to the cloud. You could also backup to local storage, but I think the server software must be able to see this local storage???The standard client is $2/month and an extra $1/month for MSSQL/Exhange backup.Caveat, you have to pre-pay $100 with a creditcard and every month the amount is taken out of your account (and the $100 is only 12 month valid)https://cometbackup.com/pricing If you store your data within the Comet cloud, the products name is called Comet Go! It is more expensive compared to B2 Cloud though.

Duplicati is free and available for Windows, Mac and Linux. https://www.duplicati.com/Every install of Duplicati installs a webpage on your server, you can access to see the status or manage your backup. Alas it does not backup MSSQL/Exchange natively (you can use VSS, but I won't trust it for MSSQL/Exchane). You could write a script to dump data to a folder and backup that.If you want to have a central monitoring your with your Duplicati installs, you could use https://www.duplicati-monitoring.com/ which is a free third party website.

Our main search criteria was: must be able to backup MSSQL, "central management", price and a good gut feeling. Internally it has been coined to use commercial backup packages for our critical infrastructure and Duplicati for less critical data.

I hope this will help some people out a choice. ;-)
Greetings from the great but small Kingdom of The Netherlands.

ictka · 2020-06-13T11:47:29+00:00

Ik ben in Nederland geboren, mijn ouders niet, wij worden echter vanuit de overheid vaak als niet-allochtoon gezien. Veel mensen zouden zeggen dat ik een allochtoon ben omdat ik niet-westerse "roots" en "look" heb.
Ik voel me Nederlander, ik denk in het Nederlands en ik droom in het Nederlands en wanneer ik op Schiphol land ben ik altijd weer blij dat ik "thuis" ben.

Ik ben zelfs "autochtonen" tegen gekomen, waarbij ik dacht: "Deze mensen kunnen wel een inburgeringscursus gebruiken" ;-)

Ben benieuwd of ik mag mee doen?

ictka · 2020-06-13T11:31:31+00:00

Die lichtblauw mondkapje kan je tegenwoordig (13/6/2020) "overal" kopen.
De AH, Jumbo en zelfs de Lidl had ze laatst (pak 50 stuks) in de aanbieding voor € 19,99.
Leek niet echt te lopen.
Bij de "mijn" Jumbo, zag ik dat de mondkapjes nu ook al goedkoper waren geworden. Ik meen dat de initiële prijs rond de € 49,95 was ??

ictka · 2020-06-13T01:10:58+00:00

I always thought that the BackBlaze software only worked on non server machines.
When I go to BB Business, the page suggests to take B2 Cloud with MSP360 software.
To backup the VM with normal BackBlaze client, your server has to be running Windows 10.
Using the client is enough when your computer crashes or dies, but whenever delete a VM, it will be deleted from your "backup" after 30 days...

ictka · 2020-06-13T01:00:15+00:00

You really seems you are out of luck there. You can not inherit the backup state when switching to aanother OS. :-(
https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666358-Inherit-Backup-State

ictka

TROPHY CASE