 So, we use the SolarWinds backup tool and one thing I do like about the program is it works really, really well. The things I don't like, the documentation is a little bit lacking, a lot of reading, and they don't have any good demo videos. So, this video serves a couple of purposes. One, to help out my fellow IT friends who are looking at this product to go, I want to take a deeper look at it, but I want them to have an understanding of how it works, so I'm going to explain how it works. And it's also a training for some of my staff. As we onboard sometimes new staff, they're not always super clear on how it works, but I like to make sure they have a good, clear understanding of it. So this video is also for my staff. And I really like the product because of the way it works of pre-encrypting everything, keeping a local copy, and making management really, really simple of doing the backups all through a nice web dashboard. Now, I'm going to show you how that works, and this is what was a little bit confusing about it, especially when we start with the deployment of it. I have all my clients filtered out, so you can't see anything in here, but normally there's a dashboard that shows all the clients on here, and that will give you an idea like, you know, what the status is, whether or not they're backed up, and when the last time the backup ran. I really like the dashboard. It also has reports that will email to each of the clients, and they're really nice. One nice feature I will comment on those, they give you a red or green box around them to tell you whether or not the backup's complete. So without even reading the details, if the box is red, there's an error message you have to go after. So I hit Create New Device just by the add over here, and it's got options to filter everything. I'm filtering everything since I created one profile just for my company here, so we're going to do a demo server here. And you have regular automatic deployment and documents. Documents is something really new. I'm confused by it right now because it's like a cut down version for less money, but that's going to be a separate video because they literally just announced this last month. I tried it, I'm a little confused. It doesn't seem to have all the options I need to set up. So we're going to focus on these two here, which is their full service backup. Now I created like it's a disfilter, so I can filter it just to my company. It actually has a lot of filtering options, so you can organize all your backups into different groups, so they have a lot of fine-grained controls. So we're going to start with the regular backup. I can do the automatic deployment, and I'll kind of cover it real quick. The automatic deployment feature allows you to pre-define all the backup settings without doing any settings. So if you were going to deploy the same backup to a company across a whole lot of workstations and servers where everything lands exactly the same places, you can do an automatic, and it'll create the profile. You create the profile in a settings manager, and then you can just choose that profile and deploy it. Really, it's kind of cool. I've not really done it. I usually just do regular. Now we got to name this, and we're going to call this Tom's Windows Box. Now, I can do things like this. I can put these in here. I believe I can put dashes, but I cannot type caps. They have that restricted. So it has to be all lowercase. Don't know why, just the way the product works. I usually put some underscores and make the labeling pretty simple. For us, we should put the company name and then the server that it represents. It makes it easy because they have easy filtering at the top, so you can find these things. So we're going to add the word test in here. So it's a testing box for this demo. All right, so now we got the device named. Next. Now, it's really simple from here, and if you can see in the background, it popped up. I had the word test, so it already filtered and says, hey, this has the word test in it. Now, I can copy this to Clipboard Instructions. This is password one. This is where it gets a little confusing. This is the first part of the password. We're going to go ahead and download the backup manager. But this password is important to keep. This one you can see. The next password you create is the AES encryption key, and that is done on the local machine directly. That way, all the encryption stays on the other side. As in, from the web interface here, there is no way to get the encryption key back, so you must keep track of that. This password is the one they give you so you can create a backup of that box and attach it to the recovery console here. So I'm going to wait for this to download and kind of stop the video here, and then we're going to jump into the machine once it downloads. And show you how we actually deploy the server software, and then come back to the dashboard and show you how we manage it. All right, so we have the file copied over, which is from the download. And if you notice, it actually has that address in there that's the password that the system sets to do this. When it creates the downloader file, it automatically puts that in there to know it belongs to the system. Now, you can just go and straight up download the backup manager. I'll show you this real quick. While that's installing, the backup manager directly, and that's where you use that password and machine ID that it gave you. But this won't prompt us for that, because we're installing it from the download file it creates on the fly, which is nice, because that way it's customized for this machine. Now, if you notice, I clicked on it, and it seems to be taking a second here, even though I have an i7. That's because of the way the backup loader works. There's not a GUI for the install. Everything is web-based. So here comes the security code part. Now, this is the part where you're creating a security code on the machine and creating a password. So you've got to do some really good password here, and make sure you don't forget it, because this is being created on the machine side, not on the web portal. The web portal does not have access to this, the main web portal for the system. Therefore, you have perfect secrecy of this, because it's all encrypted when it lands in the cloud. So someone takes your speed vault, which we're going to talk about in a second, which is the local copy, or someone does something terrible at the cloud company. This security code is stored within this machine. Therefore, to decrypt everything, you need the security code. It does do this. It flashes a few times, and if you notice, it's bound to localhost port 5000. So let me show you something about that. So I can ping the machine, but I can't get to the port, because it only ties it to localhost. So it doesn't create this big security hole, so it's big of, oh, I don't know, anyone can just get into the backup on there. It specifically restricts it to tied to localhost, so it's the only one allowed to access that. So just so you know. All right, so now we can run a backup. So the system is waiting for next command. We can go through the preferences here, the schedule, daily backup. I have, it said it's actually copying the settings I had, I already put in the system. So we'll go ahead and set this up for five, 25, save. Well, I don't really, I'm gonna bump it down actually, so it doesn't run in a minute, and I'll just run it manually. Save, local speed vault. I put this in here. This is a storage place that we have locally, and this is the speed vault I was talking about. It can be a local drive if you have a USB drive attached to server or it can be a network share. And in this case, it's set up as a network share. And we can just go ahead and run over here to backup. And we'll just kick off and run the backup. Now, when it's doing this, it's gonna run through, it's gonna find what files are there and synchronize everything. So it's like any normal backup. Now this is where the system gets pretty neat. So I'm gonna close this right here. And this is of course what the user sees and we don't really need this file, so we'll delete that off the desktop. So when we go back over here to the box, and it has a failed backup from when I was testing it earlier. So there's just some errors in here probably. But we can launch the backup client. And this is what's really interesting about how the system works. So this system allows us to launch the backup client from here. And it's going to essentially do a proxy into the system and let us see the web interface for it without logging into the machine. I'm launching this completely from within there and I don't have to be in the same network or anything. I can get to those other machines. It's actually gonna go a little slow because it's launching it. So I have an our client already finished with a backup that we can show you that's gonna work a little faster. It does go a little slow on that initial backup because it's sucking up a lot of bandwidth and here it comes, it's gonna load. So let me pull up another client that's already done. This is the one that's running now. So it shows you that everything's going. And here's what a client that's completed looks like. So here's this client. This is one of the systems that are on backup. You see that the remote gateway is connected, that the local storage synchronized and the remote storage is synchronized. And like I was saying about the color coding, you make it really easy just to look at this. If any of these are any of these colors, you know that that day had a particular error with the backup. Now, when you're choosing what to back up in here, we choose system state, files and folder, no network shares or no databases running on this particular server. But if those are there, they show up down here and you can simply add them as sources such as Microsoft SQL server or Oracle server. There's a few different options that show up in here. And it's on a per server basis. It finds them. If it detects them, you can add them in here. I believe my SQL is supported on Windows as well, but I'm not positive on that. But I know the Microsoft SQL is and so is several other databases. So pretty straightforward for doing that. This is their C and then E QuickBooks data folder, the two we do. And you may have noticed too, in the overview, that we have a selected storage of 183 gigs versus a used storage. They give you the used storage as in the compressed storage, which is great. So you can understand how much the storage is compressed and your account does have limitations. It's not unlimited backup. But the nice thing is they're basing that on the compressed storage size of what you backed up, not the uncompressed version. Now let's look over how the restore works on this. So this is really slick. If I wanted to choose, so 8.8 at 10.33 PM was the last 8 backed up, which was yesterday, I could say, give me a file from this day off of this one here, QuickBooks data. And I can easily restore a specific file from there. And we're gonna go over to C, for example, Dell OEM. And I can say, just restore all those files. And I can restore them right to where they were. I don't really wanna do that. So we can say browse and restore them somewhere else. But this is kind of cool because what this allows me to do is without having to get on the client's machine or server in this case, I can actually just push a file back either to the same location or a new location. Now this restore works the same with the system state. So in case of we wanna restore a system state to a previous day, that works as well. Now this is where it gets really cool is the virtual disaster recovery option. And we can choose an image from a different day and do a full disaster recovery in store to different targets. For example, VMware ESX, Azure Cloud, Amazon Cloud, local VHD files, or just a VMware VMDK file. So the VHD, for example, or VMDK, you can actually bring those even into virtual box or other things. So you can actually take this server and virtualize it this way. It's just pretty slick. And if they need something restored fast because something physically happened to it, well, you can push this server right to the Azure Cloud with your credentials. Now I haven't tried this yet. I was told it works really well. I don't have a use case for it at the moment. We don't have any clients that we plan to do this for. But it's pretty slick, the fact that we can restore this directly. Now this does support bare metal restores as well. And we'll get to that towards the end and kind of show you how the options work on that. So this being all the features that are here, it's a really simple system to use. You can see I'm doing this all from the dashboard and not having to log on the client machine. But I can, if there's no internet, for example, go to the client machine, localhost 5000. And even without an internet connection, if I have a local speed vault attached, I can restore files, I can do complete disaster recovery. All these same features are available right there. Of course, I wouldn't be able to push it to an Azure Cloud or that, but I could export a VMDK file off the local machine without even a network cord plugged in as long as they have a local copy of the files in a speed vault. Now let's talk about the speed vault real quick. The speed vault, this is the one for their test box that we're backing up right now. It creates this long string of characters and keeps revisions and everything in there. And they're all a bunch of strange.IFS files. This is all part of the encryption key that you chose. So if someone were to physically remove this speed vault or get a hold of it, they can't take the data off of it. All the data at Rust is encrypted, which is really important. It's a good security practice and it's how this system works. Because back to that password recreated at the very beginning, having a local password on this means that was created and there's no way to get that password back out of the cloud. Now, the local speed vault has the option to be a local or network share in this particular machine. It's a local connected there. We have it set up as this. Now this is an open share that I set up for testing purposes, but what you do here and it has a little thing, domain slash username, it does fully support domain logins and all of that. So you can do a full domain path logged in, put the credentials in here. I kind of like that it doesn't display the password, but you put it in, it clicks to set it and confirms the password. And it does the test here to tell whether or not it can get to the local storage. The advantage of that is when you're doing this completely remotely, you want to make sure it can do what it says it's going to do and use that local speed vault. So back over to this one here. We also have some backup filters. I have not used this, but you have an option to archive certain backups, not something I've really used. We have a standby image backup. This is kind of neat. This is a feature so you can create a standby backup of your computer with its operating system that is already done and ready. It'll actually create a local copy sitting there. So maybe you have another drive where you want to put it on a speed vault so that VHD file is just already there and ready for you to do kind of novel or maybe you have a network share. You want to keep that on and have it attached to one of your virtual storage devices. Now, seeding is kind of cool. So if you have a client that does not have much bandwidth, this allows you to specify the seeding. And what that does is you can create a seed drive and then bring it back here and upload that. Now we haven't had any clients that this has been an issue because internet's generally fast enough, but if it's not, if they have a really slow connection, you want to bring it back to your office with a fast connection, you can get a seed drive where you build the copy on there, bring it to your office and then finish uploading it for this account. A couple of preferences here. So you can have alternative user for backup or file size display if you only like megabyte, kilobyte, couple other things there. Proxy and of course performance where you say limit the bandwidth and for this client between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. they have long work hours that they're using it. We make sure the bandwidth is limited to only a couple of megs and this has got a 50 meg circuit attached to it. So slowing it down then to only two means in case the backup runs long, which generally this backup only takes about a half hour because it's doing incrementals after that. So it's kind of an overview of how the system works and it's pretty simple overall. Now the bare metal recovery, let's kind of give you an overview or insight into what that looks like. All right, so this system boots into a standard kind of Windows PE environment. We can put the device name and password in here which is what we created when we first set up the machine. And then it prompts us for the security code recreated when we are creating a machine and backup search to initialize and you can restore the entire machine based on one of the snapshots here. Or I should get an error because I didn't finish the backup before I did this because I wanted to finish the video but we have tested this before and taken machines and randomly restored them to other virtual machines to make sure that the system works. Yes, there's no sessions available. If I logged in with one of the other ones and had the right password it will download and this is not off a speed vault. It'll completely connect to the internet and download the computer remotely but it works much faster when you're doing it off the speed vault. Now the nice thing about the way the restorer works in general when you're doing restore files it doesn't ask you to pull it from the local speed vault or remotely it does it on an intelligent basis and automatically determines which one is there. So it's gonna pull whichever one's faster. So if one's missing it just goes to the other one. But I just want to give you guys a number of you with this product. I'm really happy with it. A lot of people had some questions about it. I did before I signed up for the demo because it was not super clear in how it worked because using everything through web interface is a little bit strange at first but it's greatly convenient and now that we've been using it for a while our clients really like it because we're able to restore things very fast. We can just jump in the dashboard and go right to where we need to go. Now the nice thing is with it all being color coded and I'll show you how it color codes the emails as well. So here's what one of the backups look like. And it's nice because if you're looking at it from an email standpoint we can send these to clients as well. When it sends it this green box turns one of these colors down here when it's not working properly. So it makes it very clear whether or not this is done and I like that in the header backup Lawrence Tech service the name of the server completed how many days and so many hours. So pretty slick system. We've been really happy with it. Like I said it's not had any problems. We've been able to restore files. We still do some occasional spot checking to make sure we can do things because even though it's a backup service I almost feel like every backup service needs another backup service but just in case but the fact that they have a nice local speed vault and if something happened like the SolarWinds dashboard went down for some reason other than not being able to do remote backups the local ones are still available. They're still accessible. We can still manage things in the system. So overall I'm pretty happy with the system. Like I said we use it for a little while you can't really discuss pricing because it's based on a lot of factors and what you can negotiate with your sales rep and probably not relevant to this video. So anyways if you're interested in this product reach out to SolarWinds. I'm not commissioned or paid by them we just use the product and we like sharing some of the knowledge and insight we have from using these products with other technicians and if you know a better system or whatever let me know or if there's something you didn't like about SolarWinds or some warning thing that we should know about please let me know. We've been happy with it and we heard about from other technicians that said they liked it and we tried it and liked it as well. So anyways thanks for watching you like the content here like and subscribe.