Knowledgebase & FAQs

How do you secure, and how secure is, the Remote Backup service?

The Remote Backup for Small Business service uses secure data transmission to ensure your data is encrypted both in transmission and at-rest.

This means that:

- Before anything is sent from your Desktop, Laptop or Server system, the data to be transmitted is encrypted on a file by file basis. For server services such as SQL Server or Exchange, this is at database, catalog or mailbox object level (or more granular depending on the setup you have) - but always and without exception encrypted before it ever leaves you.

Unless you have instructed us otherwise, or your service has not been upgraded since 2008, you'll be using AES-128 or better encryption for your data.

- We also compress the data although this does not aid security (but does speed up transmission)

- The data is always held encrypted on our systems, and recovery requires customer-specific unique security keys, so it is not possible to access your data with anyone else's key, and there is no further backdoor or recovery method available

A number of other security measures are also taken which we cannot discuss publicly, and we hold more than one copy of data, all adhering to the encryption rule (because we never receive the data in an unencrypted form, we can only re-transmit it in the same way) - this applies to our backups of your backups, secondary copies, test copies, recovery versions, and all other files and data you send via the service to us.

In addition:

- If you take the "Initial Backup to Disk" options, we supply and use Fully Encrypted Drives that both require specific PIN entry for access and have a number of self-destruction modes should anyone tamper with the units or try to brute force them. In the event these drives were lost in transit, they're also encrypted to AES-128, AES-256 or better level, require the security codes (which we never send with the drives, ever), and if tampered with destroy the key making recovery impossible.

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