Tips for Getting the Most out of the RBS Partner’s Portal
The RBS Partner’s Portal is a great resource for streamlining your online backup service. With tools for converting graphics, building Endpoint installers, file sharing and more, the Partner’s Portal is available 24×7 to all Partners with active Maintenance Subscriptions.
Log into the Partner’s Portal from our main website at http://remote-backup.com. Select “Partners” and then “Partner’s Portal.”
Your first login is your email address, and your serial number as your password. After your first login, you should change your password. Click the “keys” icon on the Portal menu to do that.
Your Hot Site – Everyone with a Portal account gets a free automated Hot Site. This can take backups from your endpoints if your RBS Server goes down. To turn it on, log into the Portal and just click the Hot Site switch ON. It’s on your first screen.
Some Partners use their Hot Site as an automatic failover site when they do maintenance on their RBS Server. Their customers never see any down time.
Some along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts turn it on at the beginning of hurricane season and leave it on for months. Same with the fire season in the West.
After you turn it on, your Endpoints can fail over to your Hot Site whenever they can’t reach your Server. The process is transparent to them. After your Server comes back online, your Endpoints will start using your own RBS Server again. Contact RBS to download your backups from your Hot Site to your own Server.
The backups that are sent to your Hot Site will be erased automatically from the Hot Site fifteen days after backups stop coming in.
Portal’s SMTP Service – You will notice that your Email Notification setup screens contain a checkbox labeled “Use Portal Mail Service”. Turn this on if you want to use the Portal’s SMTP server instead of your own. The default setting is ON.
However, we strongly recommend using your own if you can. The Portal’s SMTP service is shared by many people, and it is more susceptible to being listed on spam black hole sites than your own server. We don’t monitor it to try to correct problems with non-delivery.
Client Customization – There’s a nice Client (endpoint) Customization tool on the Portal, which confuses some Partners. Here’s a rule of thumb: If you have the Web Manager PlugIn installed, use that to create your Endpoint installers instead of the Portal. Your Web Manager’s Endpoint customization tool is more powerful and has more options.
If you don’t own the Web Manager you can download it for free from the Portal’s Downloads section. Search for “Web Manager.”
In an upcoming release we are going to strip the Customize Endpoint Installer tool from the RBS Manager (the older console application that is being replaced with the Web Manager) so it’s a good idea to stop using that now and either install the Web Manager or start using the Portal to build installers.
The Portal also has an easy to use file sharing system, a tool to convert graphics to the right format for branding your Endpoint software, a place for you to store your installers for download, a Web Files section that can serve graphics for your Email Notifications, and more.
