The only confusion on the whole page for me was enabling the protection on the shares. KeepVault’s “Always/Real Time” schedule by default and the single “Job” configuration removes any daunting thoughts you might have. With the previous solution I reviewed I could create multiple backup jobs and multiple schedules, which was nice, because parts of my collection barely every change, I just wanted them backed up. I like how KeepVault really focused on the simplicity of the solution. For what it’s worth, I went with “Let KeepVault choose one for me”. Although my suspicion here is that you are still safe because our data is stored in blobs and because KeepVault has more than one customer, it’ll be hard for the lay-man IT person at KeepVault to match this up to your backup. To me that means that someone at KeepVault *could* decrypt your backup. The interesting thing here is that they generate the key based on your ID and subscription numbers (as its computer agnostic). If you don’t want this cumbersome task, you can let KeepVault choose one for you. If you’re like me, you’ve installed WHS 2011 on new hardware and it’s probably a while before that fails, so you might forget it. If you generate one yourself, you have a risk that you forget your key and now your cloud backup is useless. Typing that in, with my email ID and I’m good to go.Ĭhoosing an encryption key I can type one in myself, or KeepVault will randomly generate one for me. I’m all for yearly payments too, so I got to save my 10%!! Within 5 minutes I was emailed my subscription ID. I thought it was pretty slick you could pay via PayPal or with a standard credit card.
Simply click on the Order a KeepVault Backup for Windows Home Server Subscription Now button and sign up. The initial page doesn’t look intimidating at all. You’ll have to re-start the Dashboard to have it appear in the global tabs.
Just double click on it on the server, or on any server-joined client, read and accept the EULA, and then Install it. Installing the add-in is just as painless as installing any add-in. You don’t need the AWIECO add-in, but it made it a “glance” to compute. That came out to about 117GB, so I signed up for the 130GB plan from Proxure.
Using the AWIECO Drive Info add-in, I determined I wanted to back up my Pictures and Documents, the things that I really care about.
Plus when you hit the top mark, you click a link and you can bump up your storage. Once you get over 15GB, Proxure seems to win hands down on cost. So if you’re only backing up a very small amount of data, you could end up over paying, but if you compare to Amazon’s 15cents/GB (up to the first TB), you really see a cross over at about 15GB.
KeepVault Pro can also be used on Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard (codename “SBS7”), although that UI is not shown in this blog post.īack to the review: The first thing I notice was KeepVault doesn’t bill you for what you use, they bill you for storage space in chunks (40Gb, 80GB, 130GB, 200GB … 3.5TB!). The steps and UI, aside from the color of the dashboard, is identical. However, for these business products, you need to get KeepVault Pro. While this blog covers KeepVault on Windows Home Server 2011 (codename “Vail), the same add-in offers cloud storage to both the Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (codename “Aurora”) and the Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials.
I thought it was pretty cool that they offer versions for Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Standard Server (03 & 08 via their Professional version), and most importantly for me: Windows Home Server. I watched a demo of their solution run and it seemed reasonable, at least to check out. While at SMB Nation 2010 in Las Vegas, I had ran into a company called Proxure who build a solution called KeepVault. Like the cost of Amazon S3 is about as expensive as it gets, and signing up for Amazon S3 was probably one of the more confusing processes I have ever done. While I still think it’s a good solution, it has some draw-backs depending on the Amazon S3 back-end. When using Windows Home Server v1, I had found an Online Backup solution that I previously reviewed on this blog. As I’ve mentioned before, being a photographer, my photos are my most critical piece of data that lives on my Home Server.