How It Works

SmartFiler backup and data storage appliances are designed for businesses that have large amounts of data – 100 GB to 10 TB.  With large amounts of data, creating and maintaining offsite data backup is a challenge that many small and medium businesses fail to overcome.  Conventional backup solutions, such as tape backup or online backup service do not work for high data volumes.  Tape backup solutions are plagued with hassles and failure. Online backup service is limited by WAN bandwidth that precludes backup or restore of huge volumes of data. SmartFiler Backup solution is simple.  You buy a pair of SmartFiler Backup Appliances; one for onsite and the other for remote offsite.  Connect both to your LAN for the initial backup which may be very large.  After the initial backup, relocate the Offsite SmartFiler to a remote location.  The Onsite SmartFiler will continue to perform the incremental backup to the remote Offsite SmartFiler.

Demo Screenshots Getting Started Adding Windows and Unix Folders from Network for Backup Setting Backup and Snapshot Policy Restoring Data

In addition, the Onsite SmartFiler can also be configured to take hourly snapshots of your data to enable point-in-time recovery during the business day.  Recovering data from the SmartFiler is as simple as drag-and-drop from SmartFiler to your folder. To recover data from SQL, Sharepoint, and other databases, simply locate your database file and transaction log in the snapshot or backup folder of interest, and copy it to your original location.

Watch a 5-Minute Presentation

Configuring SmartFilers for Backup & Snapshots

Restoring Data from SmartFiler Backup or Snapshot

Here’s how it is done:

1. Connect an Onsite SmartFiler Backup Appliance to your LAN and assign it an IP address.
2. Connect an Offsite SmartFiler Backup Appliance to the same network and assign it an IP address.
3. Access the Onsite SmartFiler via browser from any computer in the LAN and login using a factory preset username and password.
4. Pair the two SmartFilers using the Onsite SmartFiler UI – just provide the IP addresses of the two SmartFilers.
5. Specify the folders/directories that need to be backed up from any computer on the network.
6. Specify a backup and snapshot policy.

You are done!
Now, after the initial (first) backup is completed you will perform the following simple steps to move your Offsite SmartFiler to a remote location:

1. Shutdown the Offsite SmartFiler through SmartFiler UI.
2. Take it to your location of choice and connect it to a LAN.  Assign it an IP address as before.
3. Configure the firewall/router, on both remote and onsite locations, to allow SSH port forwarding access to the SmartFilers in the respective LANs.
4. Pair the two SmartFilers again, using their WAN IP addresses.

Your offsite backup is now configured and automated.