Cloud Backup

Cloud Backup

Note
With Triofox's Cloud Backup, you can turn your Triofox server into a backup appliance or create a self-hosted backup solution with the ability to back up endpoints and restore folder permissions.

In this section, you will learn how to enable backup for file shares and endpoint devices, and how to access and restore the files in the backup.

Enabling Cloud Backup

Cloud Backup is enabled on a cluster-wide basis. Instead of purchasing an expensive backup appliance, your Triofox server takes on the role of the virtual appliance, allowing you to create a self-hosted backup service or use Triofox's hosted environment to secure the offsite copies of your data.

Backing Up File Shares

You can back up file shares from the local file server using your Triofox server as a conduit to the Triofox backup cloud, or you can define your cloud backup destination if you want to use a different storage service.

Backing Up Endpoint Devices

Folders and file shares on remote PCs and servers are backed up using existing Triofox agents to take advantage of existing HTTPS/SSL connections that are rigorously architected to maintain connectivity and reliability.

The following data flow illustrates how the basic architecture functions for this solution works.

Note
Traditionally, enterprises use on-premises backup appliances to obtain backup sources from servers and desktops on the company network. This is a very secure setup because the backup data resides within the appliance. However, it presents a challenge for remote devices because they are not always inside the company network and the VPN (a virtual private network) of remote devices is not always on to observe certain backup schedules.

On the other hand, cloud backup solutions such as Carbonite and CrashPlan can back up remote devices directly to the cloud, solving the remote backup problem. However, the backup destination is in an opaque location controlled by a third party. This becomes problematic when there are business policies that prevent data replication to third-party controlled locations.

Triofox Cloud Backup solves both of these problems. First of all, the Triofox server maintains the connection to remote PCs and file servers via HTTPS/SSL, so the connection is always on. This means that remote PCs and file servers can always use Triofox's communication channel and data channel to back up via the Triofox backup appliance. And because Triofox's cloud backup is storage agnostic and allows you to back up to a storage service you control, you can now provide continuous backups of your file servers and endpoints to a storage service you control or the Triofox defaults.

Enabling Cloud Backup

Go to Published Shares -> Manage Share and select Cloud Backup.

Then you can enable Cloud Backup by clicking the button below.

Cloud Backup Settings

Cloud Backup Snapshots

Once enabled, Cloud Backup is stored in snapshots. The snapshot must be initially seeded, and new snapshots are created to capture updates to the data set. The data can be restored from any snapshot.

Seeding a Snapshot

Go to Cloud Backup -> Snapshots and click "Force Initial Seeding Now".

Browsing a Snapshot

To browse a snapshot, click the icon that looks like an eye on the right side of the listed snapshot. You can then navigate through the folder hierarchy in the snapshot to download and restore files and folders using the action icons at the top left of the page. You can use check boxes to filter the list of items to which the action is applied:

Downloading and Restoring from a Snapshot

For example, in the image below, you can click the highlighted icon to restore the selected items:

Backup Log

On this page you can browse the backup logs.

Backup Task Status

You can go to Backup Task Status -> click "Force Start Now" to start backup tasks.

When backup tasks start, you can see the progress bar with progress details.

Failed Tasks

After the backup job is finished, the failed tasks are displayed here and you can manage the tasks.

Retention Policy

There are three retention policies.

"Keep last n snapshots" defines the maximum number of snapshots allowed at a given time. However, this setting can be overridden by the value of "Keep snapshots for at least n days" if it is not 0. For example, you may want to only keep the last 2 snapshots available, but if the system is configured to keep a snapshot for at least 30 days, a daily snapshot could result in 30 snapshots being created before any one is deleted.