A Business Case for Providing Bare Metal (Image) Backups?
I need a little help wrapping my head around something. Maybe you can help. You’ve been asking me for a Bare Metal Backup feature, and I am about to give it to you. My questions are all about how you’re going to use it, and how you’re going to charge for it, and truthfully, I want to know why you want an online BMR backup solution at all.
Bare Metal Backup (sometimes called Imaging, sometimes called P2V) is a feature that backs up an entire hard drive – programs, data and all, and then can restore it to a different drive (or a virtual machine) complete, ready to run, bootable, an exact copy of the original drive. There’s no file selection because it backs up everything.
BMR is good for quick disaster recovery. It’s easy and fast – the fastest way to restore from a drive crash. It is good for restoring an entire drive. With just a few exceptions it is not good for restoring individual files or folders, so you still need standard file-based online backup.
BMR backups are HUGE. If a customer has 500GB of stuff on the drive, the size of the first backup is 500GB before compression and maybe 350GB after compression. Subsequent backups are smaller, but still bigger than file-based backups.
With BMR, Service Providers have to provide storage space for entire drives, including temporary files, junk files, swap files, duplicate files, EVERYTHING on the drive. This uses up far more storage space than just backing up carefully selected file sets, which by the way, compress much tighter than whole drives.
After the first BMR backup (the full backup) even the incremental backups are much bigger than incremental file backups. Just think about it – your operating system changes a lot of stuff on a drive besides the files you work with. Just booting Windows changes things in the registry, gigantic swap files, and temp files – hardly any of which are critical for backups, yet all of which will get backed up in incremental BMR backups.
So here are my basic questions –
Are your customers really willing to pay for storage space for those huge backups?
An average computer doing BMR backups might need 700GB of storage space after six months – the full backup and lots of incrementals. This is FAR more space than might be required for file-based backups.
How much do you charge for storage? If you charge $.50 per GB per month, that’s $350/month. Most of my Service Providers charge more than a dollar per GB. Will your customers pay that much money in addition to your other charges for standard file-based backups, which they still need even if they are doing BMR backups?
How long will your customers wait for a first full backup, or for a restore?
Uploading it for the first time is nearly impossible. So, the first backup will have to be done on-site in a labor and travel-intensive procedure using a portable drive, which is then transported back to your Server and imported manually.
Restores would have to be done the same way in reverse, because downloading 700GB will take too long. Your customers probably won’t be able to do it themselves. You will have to do it, and do it fast, because… (and here’s the kicker.)
Every BMR restore job is an emergency by definition. An entire computer is down. Are you able to drop whatever you’re doing at a moment’s notice to do an on-site restore that might take a few hours?
If that restore is to a new computer (which is the case much of the time) you will have to replace drivers, perhaps set up peripherals again, reset software licenses, and maybe tweak network settings. This could run into many hours of work, which must be done with very high priority.
Will your customers pay for your time and materials to assist them with a lengthy on-site restore?
Will they pay you enough to make it worthwhile for you to drop other customers, leave your shop for a half day, whatever it takes? Will the customers you postponed because of this restore job lose faith in you?
As an alternative to online BMR, my idea to make BMR backups easier to sell is to sell end users a big USB drive to leave on site, and to do BMR backups only to the onsite drive while doing standard file-based backups online like normal. Then you have an easy and very quick way to restore an entire system (from the on-site drive,) and then you can restore all newer files from the Online Backup server through standard file-based online restore.
The BMR backup is not stored on the Service Provider’s server, so storage costs for the end user would be very low. This idea, of course, assumes that the onsite drive isn’t destroyed in a disaster.
Now, lately I’ve had about even numbers of people calling about doing online BMR backups for personal users and for business users. I think many (but not all) businesses will pay an adequate premium for online BMR backups. I do not think personal users will. What do you think?
What pricing structure will you use? Will you charge separately for your time and materials to do the first full backup, and then again if a restore is needed?
Let’s look at some possible costs for providing a BMR backup service.
- You’ll need a few big, fast USB drives. I don’t know, maybe $300 each?
- You’ll need the BMR software. That might cost $299 per end user.
- There’s normal overhead like phones, gasoline, millage, etc.
- There’s the hourly cost of your time.
- Don’t forget possible loss of business because you had to delay work for other customers with very little notice.
- If you’re providing an online BMR backup service, you have the cost of your storage space. You can calculate that here:
OK, so what have I missed? Half my sales calls these days ask about Bare Metal Backup. So, you must know something that I don’t. There must be an adequate business case out there somewhere. Please comment with your thoughts.
Trusting you, I have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars to develop a BMR solution – two of them, in fact. You will probably see one of them within a few weeks. But will you be able to sell it at a profit, and will you buy it from me in quantities that will allow me an adequate return on my investment, and enough to pay for its support costs?
Most of the callers I have spoken with assume I will include this as a standard feature of the RBackup software without raising the price. But I am sure I cannot. It has been far too expensive to develop, and it will be far too expensive to support.
I expect one out of every two restores to generate a call to RBS Tech Support, not because restores are hard to do, but because they are so important, and each is an emergency. No time to read the documentation, and you will want to check with an engineer to make sure you do it right. I don’t blame you at all.
But, tech support calls are expensive, and I have to cover their costs with the price I charge for software and maintenance subscriptions. That’s just proper business, and I think you want me to stay in business and continue to support you. So I have to cover my expenses.
We have not yet set a price for RBS’ BMR solution. My best guess is that there might be three versions with different capabilities selling for $199, $299, and $499 per end user. You would need to buy one copy for each of your users.
These prices are FAR cheaper than software with similar features that sells for $800 – $1200 per copy. So while the price might sound high, it’s actually a really good deal.
How will you use a BMR solution? How much will you charge for it? Will you charge a monthly fee? Will you charge separately for the first backup, and again for a restore?
After you work out how much you will have to charge for a BMR service, how many of your customers will pay that much?
Rob Cosgrove is the President of Remote Backup Systems, founder of the Online Backup Industry, and a vocal advocate for maintaining the highest standards in Online Backup software. His latest book, the Online Backup Guide for Service Providers: How to Start and Operate an Online Backup Service, is available online now, on Amazon.com, and at bookstores.
Remote Backup Systems provides brandable, scalable software and solutions to MSPs and VARs enabling them to offer Online Backup Services.
