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.
I too have been somewhat bemused by this idea but I was asked by a new client for “an image of the whole server” the other day. I don’t think they would have paid a realistic price for it though. I just explained the impracticalities of it and suggested in a total disaster you would be getting a new machine installed anyway and the the normal backup can restore the data to the new OS with the drivers for the new hardware….
For what it is worth I agree with Rob’s strategy of a local copy on an external drive – particularly if it is set up so you can boot off that drive to perform the restore.
The other thing that client’s like the idea of but I have not figured out how to deliver at a price they are willing to pay is that in the event their machine dies running up a VM “in the cloud” with all their stuff until a replacement is ready.
@Jeff
Lots of good discussion on this topic! I like it. No doubt Acronis is good stuff, and it has been around a long time. But, I think you have your prices or products wrong.
Acronis True Image is the 3 for $79 product you’re talking about. It is supposed to be used for home use, and yes you can get three of them for $79. They have a very limited feature set, and are no good for business use like most of our Service Providers need.
If you want to compare apples to apples, compare Acronis Backup for Workstations, which costs $75/ each or the Advanced version for $99/ each.
Further comparing Apples ot Apples, the Acronis products in the Server catagory (where most of our Service Providers need a solution) Acronis’ products cost $499, $853, $1,399, and $1,799 – more in line with what we propose to compete with.
So, while I think you have a valid point insofar as consumer-grade image backup is concerned, you missed the (price) point on the products that really matter in the Business world.
I can buy a 3-pack of Acronis licenses for desktops at about $25 each, one-time cost. I can buy an enhanced workstation edition that includes centralized management at just over $50 each, one-time cost. (servers cost more)
Acronis has a long-standing reputation, and their products are reliable. RBS, being far less known in the industry than Acronis, will have their hands full charging prices higher than Acronis. IMO.
My two cents:
Most of our clients reside in our city. Considering that this service is sold to our clients an an ancillary service and that we are in fact the IT Department for most of our clients it stands to reason that we’ll be the ones helping out if/when things go horribly wrong. We’ve been using Acronis to create images of our client PCs in our shop and it has been working very well. We’re also accustomed to dealing with VMs. When Acronis gave us the ability to perform a Universal Restore, we got very excited. At last, we have the ability to restore a client’s backup to either alternate hardware or a VM so we can have hardware on standby for this purpose and restore their data locally to alternate hardware in perhaps 4 hours. This is a service you can charge for AND feel good about.
If, like us, you’re going to get the call when there’s a fire, theft, lightening strick or whatever, then I suggest that you’re going to want to consider the costs and challenges of restoring from System State backups on a Microsoft SBS Server. A one-time fee of $500.00 is nothing compared to the 2-3 days that it could take you to complete this disaster recovery task. Add to that the fact that your client will be looking over your shoulder and asking why it should take this long to recover when they’ve been paying you for a backup solution all along.
I think ideally, the best solution would involve a Windows Image Backup to an alternate HDD and then having a bit-level backup of that Image synchronized to the RBS Server. This way only data that was changed since the previous backup would be transferred and the backup provider would have the ability to restore the entire Image to a VM in the event of a disaster.
I feel that, in regards to required storage space, we may not be required to keep multiple copies of a server image. Multiple copies of data is good but a single image should be all that is required for a disaster recovery — especially if we can keep 30 days of data files alongside it.
Cheers,
Jason
My (unstructured) thoughts in this tiny little comment box
I am really scratching my head here…as to why anybody would want this capability (or want to pay for it). All Windows machines since Vista come with a built-in volume-based backup utility supported by Microsoft.
BMR (image) programs pretty much REQUIRE that you backup the entire volume – and thereby effectively need an amount of network storage which is greater than the size of the real drive.
If you needed to do a full BMR restore, you would need a Windows distribution volume to boot from (or a boot disk if you created one) but from that point forward, the system and all settings plus all apps, etc will be restored using Windows Backup. This capability is included in the base Windows OS at no additional cost.
To even think about moving 100′s of GB of data over the Internet (contents of a full image backup) is extremely naive. And, as Rob points out, the backups are large, (even the “incrementals”) and need to be shuttled to the server and the restore needs to be shuttled to the client, so really, what’s the point or where is the value add? (If you manage all of the client’s IT needs, then just rotate out a Windows backup disk every time you do a preventive maintenance call or onsite visit. Right?
Also, from a technical perspective…in order to create a stable, bootable, point-in-time image (on a live system), there is little choice other than to depend on VSS (Volume Shadowing) which itself can be very fickle and require substantial VSS shadow storage be available.
Any software which attempts to do a block-by-block disk backup without either shutting down the OS or invoking VSS…will create an image which will by definition have some “corruption”. I’m thinking about Exchange message stores and other mission-critical databases which cannot be “fixed” with simple chkdsk commands (as explained in some of the previous BMR documentation I read from the beta) Perhaps the close-to-finished RBS BMR offering does now use VSS?
One of the major downsides to using the Windows built-in Backup capability for BMR is that it is an unmanaged program. By that I mean if anything goes wrong…and you are not regularly looking at the event logs…who would know? I mean, its not like you get a nice email each morning that tell your if your windows image backup (full or dirty-block incremental) completed without issues.
Providing a management interface that allowed you to treat the Windows backup image backup … as another Rbackup job … now that would be interesting and value added. In fact, I believe that would adequately suffice for “most” folks image backup needs. (perhaps position as a plugin that sends across a session file with some Windows backup stats …similar to how the SQL plugin uses SQL to do the actual backup and reports out SQL error codes.) That would perhaps command a 1-time $499 fee (I would strongly consider it) since it would let me remotely manage my customer’s full backups. Remember, the critical data is offsite using Rbackup anyway!
Now, having said all of that, if the backup provider offered “a virtualized system restore” i.e., if the client had a crash, then their latest .vmdk or .vhd file would be “booted” into a virtual machine…that could be interesting. However, we are now moving from a product and pricepoint which can attract a large number of prospects…to a much smaller set of target prospects that have short RTO’s and enough money to buy what they need. Probably not the typical SMB marketplace. And, again, as Rob points out, any failures would be an immediate 24×7 crisis situation to deal with.
fwiw, I would also definitely pay for a plugin that swapped out the Rbclient backup.mdb file for a Microsoft SQL/Express high-performance database. Similar to the SQL upgrade available for the RBS Server. The increased performance would allow us to scale to larger backup sets for higher-end clients with 100,000+ files to backup (and synchronize). I would say a one-time cost of somewhere between $599 and $999 for a high-performance client SQL-based would be in the right ballpark.
regards,
Mitch
For 200 to 500 per user…. I can assure you I would NOT be using it anytime soon….
What price would you pay per user?
How about alternative pricing, like $15/month per user?