Zmanda Cloud Backup FAQ

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1. What is Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB)?
2. Why cloud backup?
3. Why have you partnered with Amazon S3?
4. I am a reseller and wish to offer ZCB to my customers. Do you have a resellers program?

5. Can I view my backup data stored on Amazon S3 directly?
6. Won't uploading/downloading data to cloud be slow?

7. Which versions of Windows can you backup?
8. Can ZCB backup other operating systems such as Linux?
9. Can I restore deleted files? Do you support versioning so that I can restore files from an earlier backup run?
10. What options I have to store my backup data?
11. What about data retention?
12. What data format do you use for backup images?
13. For us the best time to backup MS Exchange/MS SQL Server/Windows machine is different from the best time to upload backup data to Amazon S3. What do you recommend for our situation?
14. Do you support backup of sparse files and hard links?
15. Does the timestamp of files change after ZCB backs them up?
16. Can ZCB backup open/locked files?
17. Can I do a bare metal disaster recovery with ZCB?
18. How do you provide hot backup of MS Exchange and MS SQL Server?
19. Can you provide hot backup of Oracle?
20. Can I run ZCB on a virtual machine?

21. How secure is my data with ZCB and Amazon S3?
22. Can I turn off secure transfer to improve performance?

23. I have multiple Windows systems to protect. How does ZCB pricing work in my environment?
24. I want to backup applications such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Windows System State, MySQL and Oracle. Do I have to buy special licenses/agents for these?
25. Amazon S3 pricing is complex. Can you simplify it?
26. How's the billing done?
27. I want to change the credit card that I use to pay for the ZCB. How do I do that?
28. I would like to get the invoice in a different format. Is this possible?
29. I host my Windows Server on Amazon EC2 cloud. What are my costs for backup?
30. How do I cancel my ZCB subscription?
31. Is there a free trial for ZCB?

31. How does ZCB compare with Mozy Professional (MozyPro)?
32. How ZCB is different from other online/cloud backup products?

1. What is Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB)?

   Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) is a comprehensive backup solution for small and medium businesses that need disaster recovery for their Windows Servers, Desktops and Laptops and applications such as Microsoft Exchange and MS SQL Server.

   ZCB has an open architecture which puts you in control of your backup data, storage location and backup policies. It uses the highly robust Amazon S3 cloud storage and ensures your data is backed up safe and secure at all times.

2. Why cloud backup?

   There are several reasons. First and perhaps the most important is data safety. The popular backup media such as magnetic tapes, hard disks, DVDs are error prone and have higher failure rates. And of course, keeping your backup data at your office location doesn't protect you from unfortunate disasters such as cyclones, floods, etc.

   Second important reason is automation and reliability of backups. With cloud backup, backups happen automatically in background and require no manual intervention at all.

   Cost effectiveness, round-the-clock availability and easy access from anywhere are some other important reasons.

3. Why have you partnered with Amazon S3?

   Amazon S3 is the most popular cloud services provider, trusted by companies such as Netflix, Yelp and Amazon.com itself. The reasons include:

   Robustness: Amazon S3 is backed with 99.99% availability and offers storage with up to 99.99% and 99.999999999% durability, making it 400 to 4 billion times more robust than a typical hard disk. Details about Amazon S3 Service Level Agreements are available at http://aws.amazon.com/s3-sla/

   Cost advantage: Being the largest cloud infrastructure provider, Amazon is constantly able to reduce its costs further. Hence you can safely assume that your costs to backup to Amazon S3 will only decrease with time.

   Security: Amazon datacenters are professionally managed to provide great security for your data. Amazon meets SAS70 guidelines and has a detailed security policy in place.

4. I am a reseller and wish to offer ZCB to my customers. Do you have a program for resellers?

   Yes, we do have an reseller program which offers attractive benefits such as cobranding support, cashbacks, prioritized support, and co-marketing opportunities. Please visit our partners page for more details.

5. Can I view my backup data stored on Amazon S3 directly?

   Yes. But one important thing to understand is that ZCB stores your data in Amazon S3 storage areas which is especially tagged by Amazon to be used with ZCB. This enables Amazon to calculate your bills accurately, as per your actual usage with ZCB, and also to keep your backup data separate from rest of your data.

   This means that you can't view your backup data directly using regular Amazon S3 clients such as Amazon web console or S3Fox. However, we have made available a modified version of jets3t, a popular open source tool for this purpose. You can use this client to view/manage your backup data on Amazon S3 storage directly should you need to do so.

6. Won't uploading/downloading data to cloud be slow?

   With ZCB, you can choose the Amazon data center which is the closest/fastest for your environment. ZCB is network resilient and intelligently attempts to get over the temporary degradation in quality of your internet connection.

   In addition, ZCB can adapt to best suit your internet connection. ZCB supports multithreaded upload/downloads, which means it opens multiple parallel connections to Amazon S3 servers. Depending on your CPU, memory and bandwidth resources, you can configure ZCB to use specific number of threads.

   Also, you can change the block size of the transfers to and from cloud, based on the quality of your Internet bandwidth.

7. Which versions of Windows can you backup?

   ZCB supports Windows 7, XP, Vista, 2003 Server and 2008 Server.

8. Can ZCB backup other operating systems such as Linux?

   No. But there is a workaround. ZCB supports backing up of network mapped drives. So if you wish to backup data on your Linux servers, you can map them on ZCB machines using sharing protocols such as Samba.

   However, if you need a native cloud backup support for heterogeneous systems such as Linux, Windows, Mac, Solaris, etc. we suggest you consider Amanda Enterprise our open source network backup product which provides an option to backup to Amazon S3 cloud.

9. Can I restore deleted files? Do you support versioning so that I can restore files from an earlier backup run?

   With ZCB, each backup has a unique timestamp and can be used to restore all the data which existed at the time of running a backup. The future actions such as modification or deletion of files don't touch the earlier backups at all. So as long as the backup run data hasn't expired (as per your configured retention policy), you would be able to retrieve older versions of your files.

   This means that unlike many other backup products which enforce a time period or number of versions to preserve file history, ZCB offers you a complete control on this feature. You can increase/decrease the backup frequency to control versioning and you can configure the data retention policy to control the number of days your deleted/modified data will be available for restore.

10. What options I have to store my backup data?

    ZCB offers you the complete flexibility about storage media. You can choose to keep your data only on cloud storage (out of the 5 Amazon S3 regions available globally), only on local disk storage (local disk, external hard disk or network mapped drive) or both for high redundancy and faster local restores.

11. What about data retention?

    ZCB supports retention periods from 0 days to forever. This retention policy can be specified separately for local storage and cloud storage, which supports specific use cases such as keeping last 10 days of backups locally and last 60 days of backups on the cloud.

12. What data format do you use for backup images?

    ZCB keeps the backup archives in well-defined and widely used ZIP64 format.

13. For us the best time to backup MS Exchange/MS SQL Server/Windows machine is different from the best time to upload backup data to Amazon S3. What do you recommend for our situation?

    ZCB allows different schedules for backup and for upload. For example, you can perform backups of MS Exchange/MS SQL/File server to a local disk during weekdays and schedule the uploading part to occur over the weekend. The local backup data can be either retained or deleted as per your data retention policy.

14. Do you support backup of sparse files and hard links?

    Yes, we detect sparse files and hard links and backup only the minimal data to reduce the size of backups. At the time of restore of such files, we also restore these attributes.

15. Does the timestamp of files change after ZCB backs them up?

    No.

16. Can ZCB backup open/locked files?

    Yes, ZCB can backup open files using Microsoft VSS snapshot technology. For example, you can continue sending and receiving e-mail using Outlook while backups are running.

17. Can I do a bare metal disaster recovery with ZCB?

    ZCB can be used for Bare Metal DR by backing up entire content of C:\ drive (as well as other volumes if they present) and backing up Windows System State which contains important system files, such as Windows registry and other operating system components (see this Microsoft article for more details). This means once you have installed the operating system (and any Windows service packs) on the hardware compatible to your original Windows machine, you can use ZCB to complete the bare metal disaster recovery of your system. Please see this Microsoft article for more details on the Windows System State restores.

18. How do you provide hot backup of MS Exchange and MS SQL Server?

    ZCB takes advantage of VSS-awareness of MS Exchange and MS SQL Server. When a backup starts, ZCB coordinates communication between ZCB Requestor, the Exchange and SQL Writers, and Windows Providers that create the snapshots (shadow copies) of Exchange or SQL.

19. Can you provide hot backup of Oracle?

    Yes we support hot backup of Oracle via VSS snapshots similarly to backup of MS Exchange and MS SQL Server. (Please note that for Oracle backup, you would need to use our earlier ZCB 3.0.2 version)

20. Can I run ZCB on a virtual machine?

    ZCB is fully supported in a VM environment. In fact, we utilize virtualization extensively in the development, test, and QA of our software.

21. How secure is my data with ZCB and Amazon S3?

    There are several levels of security provided by ZCB and Amazon S3 that ensure privacy and security of your data:
    
    
    
    • ZCB provides an option to encrypt your backup data using PKCS #12 Digital certificates that can be self-generated for free or purchased from third party Certificate Authorities. Moreover, encryption certificate is owned and known to you alone, making it impossible for anyone else to decrypt your encrypted data.
    • In addition to encrypting the backup data, ZCB provides an option to transfer your data from your computer to Amazon S3 via secure 128-bit SSL.
    • Amazon S3 provides access controls that only permit authenticated access by ZCB with your own unique security certificate.

22. Can I turn off secure transfer to improve performance?

    Secure transfer to cloud can be turned off to increase upload or download performance. This is recommended only when data is encrypted or data being backed up is public data.

23. I have multiple Windows systems to protect. How does ZCB pricing work in my environment?

    There are two options to buy ZCB licenses for protecting multiple systems:
    
    
    
    • Option 1: Buy only one ZCB license and use it across all systems under your control. In this case you pay $4.95 per month (independent of the number of systems being protected), plus cloud storage costs as per actual usage.

      This is an ideal option for system administrators who are putting together a backup solution for multiple Windows servers - all under their administrative umbrella, with data on all systems having identical privacy requirements (i.e. who has access to that data or not).

    • Option 2: Buy an individual certificate tied with a unique email address to protect each system. e.g. if you have three systems to protect you will buy three ZCB licenses, each associated with an independent email address - in this case you will pay $14.85 ($4.95 x 3) per month plus cloud storage costs as per actual usage. You will need to create an independent account on Zmanda Network and Amazon.com for each of these email addresses.

      With Option 2, the Amazon account for each of the email addresses associated with ZCB license will provide storage and bandwidth usage by the corresponding server. In this model there is complete privacy across systems.

24. I want to backup applications such as SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Windows System State, MySQL and Oracle. Do I have to buy special licenses/agents for these?

    No. There is no separate license fee for backup of these applications. There is only one ZCB version and it supports backup of all these applications along with file system data.

25. Amazon S3 pricing is complex. Can you simplify it?

    We understand. But here is the best part - you don't need to worry about it! You only pay as per our pricing which is simple to understand. Any other charges from Amazon are absorbed by us entirely.

26. How's the billing done?

    At the end of each month, you will be billed on the basis of your actual usage by Amazon; using its widely familiar and trusted billing system. The charges by Amazon are inclusive of all the charges and you don't need to pay Zmanda any other amount separately.

    The charge by Amazon will appear in your financial statements (credit card statements) under heading "AMZN PMTS(Services and Merchandise)". The bill will have specific entries for Zmanda Cloud Backup in addition to entries for other Amazon Web Services if you are using them.

    You can also view your current and previous ZCB bills at any time by visiting the AWS Application Billing page.

27. I want to change the credit card that I use to pay for the ZCB. How do I do that?

    As explained above, ZCB billing is handled by Amazon. To make this change, please go to the Amazon Payment Method page (requires login to your Amazon account) and edit your credit card details.

28. I would like to get the invoice in a different format. Is this possible?

    The billing and invoice generation is handled by Amazon Web Services. So, if you wish to make changes, please request them at devpay@amazon.com and keep zcb@zmanda.com in the CC list.

    If you just want to add some small bit of information on the invoice, such as your company name after your full name (e.g. John Doe, XYZ Systems), you can edit your Amazon account details to achieve this. To do so, please go to your personal information page and click on the "Change" button against the Full Name field.

29. I host my Windows Server on Amazon EC2 cloud. What are my costs for backup?

    There is no charge for transferring data between EC2 and S3 (within the same region). You will pay for monthly license charge and storage cost on S3.

30. How do I cancel my ZCB subscription?

    There is no long term contract for ZCB. Any monthly fee paid for unused days in the month will be refunded to you on a pro-rata basis. To cancel, please go to the Cancel ZCB page (requires login to your http://network.zmanda.com account)

31. Is there a free trial for ZCB?

    No. To keep things simple for ourselves and our users, we don't offer a free trial. This means that you can evaluate a complete product, with no limitations, completely at your own pace.

    Please note that our low, usage based pricing allows one to evaluate the software at a very affordable cost. You are charged a prorated amount for the monthly subscription fee for the first month. Also, you can cancel anytime and your prorated monthly subscription fee for rest of the month will be refunded. You will be billed for the one-time setup fees ($4.95) and for storage and bandwidth usage incurred during your trial period - at a rate that is one of the lowest in the industry.

    To buy ZCB, please click here.

31. How does ZCB compare with Mozy Professional (MozyPro)?

    Some of the key differences are:
    
    
    
    • Data retention: Mozy provides inflexible data retention period of 30 days only. Using Mozy you will not be able to recover your Exchange, SQL or a file going back in time for more than 30 days. With Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) you control for how long you want to retain your data — from 0 days to forever.
    • Live application backups: In comparison to MozyPro, ZCB supports live backup of many more applications. E.g. Mozy does not support live backup of MySQL, Oracle or SharePoint, whereas ZCB has built-in functionality for all of these applications.
    • Control and own your data: With ZCB, you own and control your data completely. The ZCB data archives stored on Amazon S3 are in a well-known open format (ZIP64) and can be accessed by users directly. As opposed to this, Mozy stores data in proprietary format, and only way to get to your own data is through Mozy's interface.

      Also, ZCB offers geography control. Once you choose a cloud location (say Europe or Singapore), the data always stays within that geography. This may be required for regulatory compliance or for other policy reasons. You have no such control with Mozy.

    • Durable storage with well-known SLAs: Amazon is the leader in cloud services and offers SLAs which are well advertised and understood. So your data is stored on a highly available cloud storage that is securely accessible with standard APIs and tools.
    • Affordable: Not only Mozy charges more than double of what ZCB charges for actual cloud usage, it also doesn't allow you to share your licenses among multiple machines. This makes ZCB far more affordable than Mozy Pro.

32. How ZCB is different from other online/cloud backup products?

    Some key differentiators for ZCB are:
    
    
    
    • Comprehensive backup: ZCB can backup not only file systems (with unlimited file size, open file support, network drive support and external disk support) but also live applications such as Windows System State, MS SQL Server, MS Exchange and MS SharePoint.
    • Unparalleled flexibility: ZCB offers an unparalleled array of options so that users can use it in just the way they want:
      • Options to backup to local disk, cloud or both
      • Configurable number of threads for upload/download
      • Customized pre/post backup actions
      • Intelligent, time specific bandwidth throttling options
    • Reliable storage: ZCB leverages the highly reliable Amazon S3 storage which offers storage with 99.99% durability (400 times that of a typical hard disk). Also, Amazon S3 is available in 5 convenient regions across the globe and offers location control which is important for compliance and performance).
    • Peace of mind: Coming from Zmanda, an open source company with 1,000,000+ deployments worldwide, ZCB uses open standards while storing your backup data. This enables the use of this data even outside of ZCB, providing a great flexibility and peace of mind.

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