How To's
To connect a shared web drive to your Windows 7 computer…
Note: you can click on any of the images to get a larger version.
Go to Start, then Computer:
On the left, make sure you’re in Computer, and click on Map network drive in the menu bar:
This will bring up a dialog box where you choose the drive you want to use (it normally defaults to Z:), and you enter the internet path to your shared drive, e.g. to access just your shared folder:
https://myfiles.onthe.net.au/dav/YOURSHARE/shared/
or to access all your OnTheNet folders, including backups etc:
https://myfiles.onthe.net.au/dav/YOURSHARE/
Note: Replace YOURSHARE with your own shared drive name given to you by OnTheNet.
If you want this drive to be connected each time you start Windows, check the Reconnect at logon checkbox.
Click Finish, and you’ll get an Attempting to connect popup box:
After a short time (e.g. 5 seconds), there’s another popup box where you fill out the User name and Password given to you by OnTheNet.
If you want Windows to remember the username and password for you, check the Remember my credentials checkbox.
When you’re ready, click OK and you’ll get the Attempting to connect popup box again:
…then after another short wait (10 seconds?) your should have the shared folder mapped into Windows 7 as a normal drive, e.g.:
Et Voila!
Note: If it’s really slow opening up the shared drive, you may want to turn off this setting:
Start : Control Panel : Network and Internet : Internet Options : Connections : LAN Settings : Automatically detect settings
To set up Image Manager look at the following steps.
Once you have set it up, give us a call and we can do a few test runs.
To configure a replication job:
- In the ImageManager console, select the ImageManager agent and managed folder whose files you want to replicate.
- In the Replication Targets pane, click Add new replication target.
- In the Replication Target dialog box, select the General tab. Specify the appropriate settings in the General tab dialog:
- Name (Optional): Enter a descriptive name for the replication target.
- Type : intelligentFTP: The replication target is accessible via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
- Location : backup.onthe.net.au/home
If there is no existing entry for ‘backup.onthe.net.au/home’:
- Location:
- Type: intelligentFTP
- Name: OnTheNet
- Path: backup.onthe.net.au/home
- Security: SSL
- check: This location requires authentication
- Username: [your username provided by OnTheNet]
- Password: [your password provided by OnTheNet]
- Save
- Subdirectory : We need to know what you set this to, your data will be store in this directory on our server.
The Subdirectory defaults to the machine name, and often with a bracketed part repeating the machine name. You can remove bracketed part, taking care not to leave any trailing spaces. - Make sure the “Don’t replicate base image files” is ticked, if you have already seeded the base image and don’t need to upload it. (Leave this unticked if you want to upload new base images every Friday, i.e. you’re not using Continuous Incremental backups)
- Select the Replication Mode tab. Specify the appropriate settings for this replication in answer to the question: “Are you replicating to a folder being consolidated by a second ImageManager at the target?”.
As you normally want to upload an single daily backup at the end of the day, most of the time you would select: Yes–Replicate only consolidated daily image files - Click Save to close the Replication Target Settings dialog box.
Here are some basic instructions for creating offsite backups with VEEAM:
This is a summary of steps. More detailed instructions are below:
- Create the Linux repository (if you haven’t already)
- Create a USB HDD repository
- Create a copy job to the USB HDD repository
- Disable the copy job and send us the HDD
- Once we’ve copied the backup files, edit the copy job and change the repository to the Linux Server
1) Create Linux Server Repository (if you haven’t already)
- click on “Backup Infrastructure” (bottom left)
- select Backup Repositories (top left)
- right clock on right hand area select “add repositroy”
- type in name e.g “Backup Repository OnTheNet”, select next
- choose Linux Server, select next
- click “Add New”, DNS name is: backup.onthe.net.au, click next
- click “Add” (next to credentials), select “Linux Account”. Type in username and password as provided. Click “Ok”.
- select the credentials you just created, click next
- untick “Enable vPower NFS server”
- click finish
2) Create a USB HDD repository
- plug in USB HDD
- click on “Backup Infrastructure” (bottom left)
- select Backup Repositories (top left)
- right clock on right hand area select “add repositroy”
- type in name e.g “Backup Repository USB HDD”, select next
- choose Microsoft Windows Server, select next
- Choose “this server”, click populate, it will list all the local HDDs. Select the USB HDD. click next
- choose path where you want to place repository, click next
- click next
- click next
3) Create Copy Job
- click on “Backup & Replication” (bottom left)
- select Backup Copy (top left)
- right click on right hand area and select “Backup Copy”->VMware (or HyperV depending on Virtualisation Environment)
- type in name (e.g. Backup Copy Job to OnTheNet), click next
- click add, select “From Jobs”, select the Backup Job you want to Copy, click next
- select the USB HDD from the repositories, click next
- “Direct” is selected, click next
- select “Any Time”, click create
- click finish
Once the job has finished, right click on the Copy Job, select disable. And send the USB HDD to:
OnTheNet Pty Ltd
c/o Data Centre Team
Interactive (warehouse entrance)
437 Williamstown Road
Port Melbourne VIC 3207
Make sure you email us when you send it and include a self addressed Express Post bag (500g for a 2.5″ and 3kg for a 3.5″)
Once we have finished copying the backup to our servers.
5) Change Copy Job Repository from USB HDD to OnTheNet
- click on “Backup & Replication” (bottom left)
- select Backup Copy (top left)
- right click on the Backup Job you created, select “edit”
- click next
- click next
- select the Linux Server repository
- select map backup and choose the correct backup, click OK
- select finish
You can use several different products, depending on your requirements.
Our own free backup agent is called CirroStore, which is a wrapper around rsync.
Given the limitations of rsync within the Windows environment, this is best suited to data-only backups (as opposed to system backups enabling full machine restores).
You can download this at:
http://cirrostore.onthe.net.au/downloads.html
For full system backups we find the commercial StorageCraft product, ShadowProtect, works well. This produces local image backups which can then be copied to OnTheNet. Working alongside ShadowProtect you can use ImageManager to manage your local images (consolidations, retention etc.). For Shadow Protect we also run Image Manager on our side to match your consolidation and retention policy without needing to re-transfer the consolidated files. We also confirm the integrity of the received backups by mounting and running checkdisk on the images. We’re also support HeadStart Restore, which allows us to spin up a virtual machine based on your images, for disaster recovery purposes. Please let us know if you’re interested in this side of things as we can offer discounts on the StorageCraft licences. We also support Asigra, AppAssure, Backup Assist, Vembu and Ahsay backups. Overall we’re agnostic as to how the data is produced and gets to us, so if you’re specifically interested in some other solution, talk to us!
It’s worthwhile going through these “Best Practice” guides from StorageCraft prior to installing and configuring ShadowProtect and ImageManager:
General Questions
We’re based in Australia and our data centres and support staff are in Australia. We’ve been in business for over 15 years. If you need your data quickly it can be shipped to you within hours, if you have a problem, you can speak to us or even come and visit us in the Docklands.Our technology was developed by us, therefore we understand it. If there are problems you can call us and we can fix them. You won’t be waiting for responses to arrive from the USA or India, across different time zones to have your problems sorted out.Finally, we pride ourselves on our personal service. If you call us, you’ll be speaking to a person and not a machine.
Very.
Your data is stored in a professionally run data centre, with redundant power supplies, specialised fire suppression equipment, 24 hour guards and access with security cards by authorised personnel only. The data centre is so secure it is used by the major banks for disaster recovery.
All of our servers are duplicated, so that even if one falls down, we can seamlessly switchover servers and keep running without you even noticing. Giving you peace of mind. You can further request for your data to be encrypted and keep a private key. That means nobody but yourself can look at it. But be careful. If you lose your key, nobody, not even us, can decrypt your data for you. All your data is encrypted before it is uploaded, so nobody can snoop on it. The servers with your data are firewalled off and highly secure. Nobody but you can access your data.
If you already have a reliable backup system on site, congratulations! You’re already ahead of the pack. But you should aslo store your most critical data offsite to insure against the worst case scenario.
You can do this by taking home portable hard drives or tape. However this involves a manual process which is easy to stop doing and forget as well as being expensive. A much more reliable and cost effective method is to use online backup to archive your onsite backups. It happens regularly and automatically and in the background so that you don’t need to do anything. If it doesn’t complete properly, we will be alerted and we can react accordingly.
Backups should be automatic, regular and cost effective. OnTheNet monitored offsite backups makes them so.
Your data is stored in Australia (and it does not leave Australia). The data center is a purpose built data centre and provides redundant air conditioning units, redundant UPS backup and generators. The computer rooms are also protected by VESDA and FM200 fire suppression systems. It is also used by major corporations and financial institutions.
In most cases, you can simply recover your files by downloading them over the internet. If you need to recover large amounts of data very quickly, we can ship you a portable hard disk or thumb drive with your data on it. As we are based in Australia, you should receive it in a few hours If you use an interim onsite backup box running something like Backup Assist or Shadowprotect, you can perform a complete bare metal system restore after downloading your backups.
It depends less on how much data you have and more on how much your files change.
For most customers, despite having several 100GBs of data, only a few hundred megabytes need to be uploaded each night. On ADSL2, it would usually mean less than half an hour overnight.
If your first upload can last 8-12 hours overnight you can usually seed the following amounts depending on your link:
| Speed | MB/ Hour | Total after 8-12 hours |
| 256kbps/64kbps | 23 MB/hour | 230 MB |
| 1.5Mbps/256Mbps | 92 MB/hour | 920 MB |
| ADSL upload speed 384kbps | 141 MB/hour | 1.41 GB |
| ADSL2 upload speed 1Mbps | 368 MB/hour | 3.68 GB |
| 10/10 Mbps | 3.68GB/ Hour | 36.8 GB |
If you have any questions about your data backups, give us a call.
We regularly backup your data over the internet. For most businesses this will be overnight, but it can be as often as you like down to every few minutes.
We only upload the changes in any data. Before uploading, the data is encrypted, ensuring the integrity and security of your data. As we have the previous backup once we have the changes we can reconstruct any file. We further check that the file we have reconstructed is exactly the same as the file being backed up. As we only upload changes, it reduces the time and bandwidth required to perform backups.
You can easily view your files using a viewing tool or web browser. Each backup will have a time and date stamp. Therefore you can recover a file from any time point in the past where a backup has been created. For most businesses this means that you can revisit files for each business day.
As the very first backup maybe large, we can seed our data centre by backing up to a portable hard disk on your premises and taking that to our data centre to create the first backup.
If you need to restore your files you can download them from your backup account. If you urgently need all your data again, we can ship you a portable hard disk with all your data.
Using Backup Assist, Shadowprotect or similar onsite backup systems as an interim step will allow you to do bare metal system rebuilds.