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Space For Rent: Page 8 of 17

A Protect account for our test server cost $156 per month for up to 5 Gbytes of data, based on a 24-generation retention policy. EVault pointed out that our small test server would likely be assigned to an entry-level SMB service at $50 per month that supports only seven generations of restoration. EVault has recently announced a number of services aimed at customers with records requiring special handling for long-term archiving, life-cycle management, legal compliance and business continuity purposes.

Standard phone and e-mail support is available Monday through Friday, excluding U.S. holidays, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. After-hours support is available but may be subject to additional fees, while priority phone support is available 24/7.
EVault Protect. EVault, (877) 382-8581, (925) 944-2422. www.evault.com

Hidden in yet another undisclosed location somewhere near Victoria, British Columbia, is the massive archive facility of DBFT (Data Base File Tech Group), whose InfoSure service is the only non-U.S. offering we tested. Known as "the Fort Knox of the North," the facility houses Canada's Federal Office of Critical Infrastructure Protection and Emergency Preparedness, as well as emergency backup for the Canadian Joint Rescue Coordination Center.

InfoSure is based on Atempo's Time Manager Software, which takes an approach to backups we found more complex than the norm, but well-suited to those requiring long-term file archiving. To set up an InfoSure account, our server's address had to be publicly routable, which we accomplished by setting up simple one-to-one address translation and forwarding the single TCP and UDP ports the system requires. This was necessary because the InfoSure system was the only one in our test group where backup-and-restore actions were initiated by the remote storage system rather than locally.

Although this dedicated connection to an off-site backup server may raise security eyebrows in some organizations, the provider contends it's not an issue because access is needed for two unique port addresses and nothing else, and those ports are bound to a single, specific and monitored application. The setup and configuration of the Atempo agent make InfoSure the most IT-intensive service of our group, but we feel it's also the most powerful when it comes to long-term archiving and information life-cycle management. Still, the complexity hurt InfoSure in our scoring.

Learning to use the InfoSure agent took a bit of an adjustment, because even though the interface looked like a basic file tree, it was really a representation of our online archive's data state relative to the time and date set in the Date Control window. Like a Wayback Machine (remember Mr. Peabody and Sherman?), we could use the date control to scroll through our backup history and select specific time-based restorations from as many as 28 levels of historical recovery. There was even a handy indicator to show whether we were in the past or present--a feature that would be helpful in the real world for some people we know.