JBCL Hawk Offsite Backup

The idea of this program was from the Christchurch Earthquakes in 2011.   I dealt with many sites where the business operation was drastically affected because the office computers were inaccessible.

Example 1 - A site presumed they were well covered by backups:

• They had tape backups of the server
• Some of the tape backups were kept offsite
• They also had a disk image copied over the internet to their network provider each night.

In the earthquakes they found:

• The building was condemned and unable to be entered
• The CBD was closed by the army and police and no access was allowed.
• The tapes proved to be problematic as they were unable to get a compatible tape drive and software for restoring the backups
• The network suppliers offices were also inaccessible
• Eventually after 6 weeks they were able to get into the building for 10 minutes and remove just the server box only.

Example 2 - An office had the front wall of the building fall into the street.

• The business owner could not get into the office to rescue anything
• The police were directing everyone to leave town
• The server and Wifi were still running on a UPS, so he sat with a laptop in the street outside and copied essential files over the Wifi and then left

The need is for very easily accessible backups, so that in case of emergency:

• the essential files can be set up on any working computer.
• The best format for the backups is on a USB drive (pen drive or USB external Hard Disk) as these can be read by almost any computer.
• Ideally compressed

The JBCL Hawk Offsite Backup is for this.

• This backup can be tailored for any site - they can set up several different backups and choose themselves how quick or comprehensive each one is
• When first run, the program automatically sets up Full and Quick backups for JBCL and BCL files - these give excellent examples how to set these up
• The backups are manual - that is an operator can run this quickly when they know they have finished work for the day before leaving the office with the external drive.
• The backups are very quick to run and require just 2 or 3 clicks.
• An operator can run a comprehensive backup eg once a week or once a month, and a quick important data backup daily
• The backup is compressed  using the standard ZIP format, so that it can be opened and used on any computer running Windows 7, 8 or Windows 10
• Doing a backup will keep the previous backup, renamed with a -OLD filename so that even if the current backup fails the previous backup will be present.
• The program comes with easy options to do two kinds of backups - either a full backup of a folder, or just a quick backup of core data files and settings.
• The idea is that in case of fire or emergency, the USB drive can be grabbed while running from the office, and will contain a very recent backup.

Setting up a backup:

Running a Quick Backup Option

Note the Disk button to the Left of the Close button allows you to browse the backup that has just been made to check the files are there.