With the death of Crashplan home, I’m using this as an opportunity to transition clients to more of a managed backup solution. I have some questions and I’m hoping you guys can pick apart my use cases for holes I’m missing. I’ve been using CB for server backups at 2 sites (1 with a single Hyper-V host and the other with 1 Hyper-V host, 1 bare metal and 2 sql) for about 2 years and am reasonably happy with it for those sites. However, I’m looking for a sanity check on things.

I’ve looked at Veeam and haven’t been able to get the MSP folks to call me back to get licensing going. I also think the Azure infrastructure costs would be more then CB, but I’m not 100% there as I haven’t actually got a whole Veeam repository setup before.

Questions:

SQL backups - should transaction logs be shrinking after backup automatically or just marking space as free within the transaction logs? Today I checked a server and had 12gb of transactions logs on a few hundred mb database. I had to manually backup and then shrink to get the space back. This was on SQL Express.

If I’m doing a hybrid backup and the local network target is missing, does the cloud backup proceed or also fail? (I’m pretty sure it’s fail)

On Desktops/laptops, If I’m doing a backup of either image or file/folder and the computer is shutdown/sleep/hibernate, what’s the impact on the backup and any files being backed up at that moment? Does it make a difference if this is real-time or scheduled?

Can I do a hybrid image plan scheduled in addition to a file/folder real time plan without them interfering?

Will a file/folder real time plan generate a failure anytime it runs a backup and fails due to no internet? If so, can that be limited for that plan? What happens if a client takes their laptop off-site, boots it up, then connects to a guest network 15-30min later? Do we get a bunch of queued failure emails in that 15-30min period when it finally can hit the internet?

What phone support options are there? I’ve only ever done email and for me to ramp this up, I really need phone support.

Should I be encrypting within CB on each backup?

Is encryption performance impacting during backup/restore operations or pretty minimal on overhead?

Do I need to do more than AES-128 or is that secure enough for non-compliance data?

How good is the granular restore from images of VM’s or bare metal?

Can I script the below (We have Continuum)? Install the client Create the backup plan of file/folder to cloud. Have the backup plan consist of C:\Users*

Can users get a read only view of their backup plans?

Use cases:

Cloud destinations will be to B2. Local destinations will be a USB 3.0 attached to the local server or a QNAP NAS on the network via shared folder.

Desktop/laptop – File/Folder Real Time to cloud of C:\Users (exclude hidden/system) and any data drives on the machine. Secondary plan would be a once a day bare metal backup Hybrid.

Servers (non-virtual) – this would be a Hybrid backup of bare metal as often as at least once a day and possibly more.

Servers (virtual) – Hybrid backup of Hyper-V VM’s and a bare metal of the host. Same schedule as above.

What issues can arise from the above cases that I need to check and solve ahead of time?