Features

Archiving

BaQapp can archive any incremental or full file backups indefinitely.
BaQapp Archiving allows you to select a backup that will never be deleted.

Standard Configuration

The BaQapp System is supplied pre-configured as follows:

• Incremental Backup of all changed files on each PC every 4 hours during working hours.
• Full file backup every 7 days.
• Incremental image backup every 7 days.
• Full Image backup every 30 days.
• If the BaQapp hard drive becomes full, the oldest backups will be deleted first, unless a particular backup has been set to be archived, in which case it will never be deleted by the BaQapp.
• The BaQapp will automatically backup the "C" drive on Windows computers with the BaQapp client software installed, and can easily be instructed to also backup any attached Windows drives.

Drive cloning and upgrading

Another feature of BaQapp is the facility to easily duplicate or clone and even replace a drive. You or your IT supplier can add an extra or larger hard drive or replacement drive that will continue to add backups, while the extra drive or removed drive is safely stored in another location or in a secure place.

It is expected that a removed hard drive will store information for 3 to 5 years without material loss without being activated. If the drive is activated every few years, it should store the data safely indefinitely. With the falling price of hard drives this seems to be an obvious method of storing your data almost indefinitely, much as data was stored on floppy disk and then compact disc.

Access

Your backups can be accessed without special software. You can also access the backups directly from your PC without using BaQapp, as long as you have your secure key.

Back To Base Reporting

Would you remember to pay your insurance, your car licence, your NRMA without a reminder?
The BaQapp Back-to-Base monitoring checks if your backups are current and then tells you if not.

Default reporting includes weekly global email reports on all the endpoints that should be backed up, warning email drawing attention to any endpoint backups that are more than 10 days overdue, then optional SMS and by phone if more than 2 weeks behind. The reporting service includes reasonable online and telephone help.

The Back-to-Base Reporting Service does not include fixing network and internet service that are not directly related to the BaQapp Software.

Peace of Mind

There can be no better way to know that your backups are being done.

BaQapp Pty Ltd has no access to your data.
All that our the monitoring system receives is an extract of the backup report text file. BaQapp automatically analysis this report, and if the analysis show that an endpoint (a Macintosh, PC or Server that is not backing up) or is overdue for a file or image backup, you will be sent an automatically generated email drawing your attention to the missed backup.

Should you not respond, and the backup continues to be missed, a few days later you will receive a second reminder. Again should no response be noted, optionally you will receive a reminder SMS on the mobile phone number that you entered when installing BaQapp.

There will additionally be the option for a phone call. These reminders can also be sent to your computer consultant or reseller who will be able to deal with the problem.

Privacy

BaQapp Pty Ltd has no access to your data. All that our monitoring system sends is an extract of the backup report text file, which contains only the endpoints last file and image backup dates.

Back-to-base backup reporting is like comparing the often ignored noisy burglar alarm to a back-to-base monitored alarm where someone will contact you, send a technician or call the police.

Deduplication

Deduplication enables more backups to be stored in less space for a lower cost.
BaQapp uses both file level deduplication and block level deduplication.

Block Level De-duplication

BaQapp compresses the amount of data by using block level deduplication, so that you can store more backups in less space at lower cost. Block level deduplication goes a step further. With block level deduplication (sometimes described as Delta copying) only the changes in a file need be stored, and if recovery is required the File system will combine the parts of the file to make a full copy.

BaQapp does both File level deduplication and block level deduplication, making it extremely efficient at saving storage space.

Encryption and Password Protection

Encryption with Password Protection is the first layer of data security.
Encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security.

"Encryption is the most effective way to achieve data security. To read an encrypted file, you must have access to a secret key or password that enables you to decrypt it. Unencrypted data is called plain text ; encrypted data is referred to as cipher text."
From Wikipedia

"The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known as Rijndael (its original name), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001."
From Wikipedia

As for now, there are no known practical attacks that would allow anyone to read correctly implemented AES encrypted data.

Error Correction

BaQapp uses the Btrfs Operating System with inbuilt Error Correction.
Error Correction allows the repair of missing data.

"Error detection and correction codes are often used to improve the reliability of data storage media. Reed Solomon codes are used in compact discs to correct errors caused by scratches. Modern hard drives use CRC codes to detect and Reed–Solomon codes to correct minor errors in sector reads, and to recover data from sectors that have "gone bad" and store that data in the spare sectors.

File systems such as ZFS or Btrfs, as well as some RAID implementations, support data scrubbing and resilvering, which allows bad blocks to be detected and (hopefully) recovered before they are used. The recovered data may be re-written to exactly the same physical location, to spare blocks elsewhere on the same piece of hardware, or to replacement hardware."
From Wikipedia

Global Settings and Reports

Global reports and settings make administration much easier.
With central administration, you are able to see who isn't backed up....

What are the settings

Settings that can be controlled include time between both incremental and full backups of both files and images, maximum number of backups before old backups are deleted, excluded files, included files, default directories, clean-up time when old backups are deleted, for all or any of the endpoints in the network.

Global Reports

BaQapp reports are for all the endpoints that are being backed up in one consolidated report. This report shows the name of each endpoint, with the time and date of the last file and incremental backups. Backups that are behind schedule are highlighted.

Imaging

An image of a computer's hard drive will save you a lot of grief if a drive fails
Imaging is the missing essential feature from many backup applications

Should BaQapp be required to restore an image that has not had a full backup in the last week, it will automatically add the changes to the full backup, allowing easy restoration of your entire drive up to the last incremental image backup.

Recovery from Ransomware

Should your PC have been attached by malware, namely a virus or Ransomware some time ago, you have the ability to restore from a date in the past before the malware attack.

Recently one of our PCs in the office was attacked by Cryptowall, and a demand made for a $500 payment within a few days, or a greater payment if delayed. All the backups made after the attack by the Ransomeware had been corrupted before being backed up, but the malware was unable to attack the previous BaQapp backups, one of which was used to do a recovery.

Bare Metal Recovery

Image backups are used to make a "bare metal" recovery, where the backup is used to restore everything to its original state before the loss, onto a replaced hard drive or in a different computer. Let us assume that you have destroyed your computer by driving over it, something of which we have had personal experience. Despite spending thousands of dollars on costly recovery services, the recovered data was useless.

However new computers at the time came installed with Windows 8, and several programs that were working perfectly well in the older damaged computer such as MYOB needed to be upgraded at a heavy cost as the old versions would not work with the new Windows 8 system. The chosen option was to then find and install a copy of the older operating system, and then re-install everything again.

There was a backup several months old of most of the files, but no image backup with all the software, applications, apps, fonts, emails and email addresses, bookmarks and shortcuts. Restoration took days and much was never recovered. 'You don't know what you got until it is gone.' became a truism!

If there had been an image backup all that would have been needed was to install the image on the new computer using the Restore system downloaded from the BaQapp website. Using the image backup the new computer would be operating with its old software, systems, emails, addresses, bookmarks, shortcuts, etc in a couple of hours as if nothing had changed.

Incremental

An incremental backup saves only those files that have
changed or are new since the last backup, saving storage.

Should your computer have been attacked by malware, namely a virus or ransomeware some time ago, you have the ability to restore from a date in the past before the malware attack.

BaQapp default settings

• Incremental Backup of all changed files on each PC every 4 hours during working hours
• Full file backup every 7 days
• Incremental image backup every 7 days
• Full Image backup every 30 days
• If the BaQapp hard drive becomes full, the oldest backups will be deleted first, unless a particular backup has been set to be archived, in which case it will never be deleted by BaQapp
• BaQappBoxx will automatically backup the "C" drive on any computer that has the client software installed, and can easily be instructed to also backup any attached Windows drives

You can of course easily change the backup timings and other configurations yourself at any time.

Incremental and Differential Backup

Should a computer that is usually backed up not be available to the BaQapp at its expected backup time, as soon as that computer reappears on the network the BaQapp will catch up on the missing backup.

Offsite Archiving

Easily create a duplicate storage drive for safe offsite storage.
Data Mirroring, cloning or a duplication of storage drive onto an additional drive is easy with BaQapp.

How long can you store a hard drive?

Expert opinion is that a hard drive will hold data for at least 5 years unused, longer if it is refreshed every few years. The BaQapp feature where the data is stored with redundancy and Error Correction will add the storage life of the drives.

With the falling prices of hard drives it is now an economic proposition to buy a new larger drive, often at a lower cost than the older drive, and keep the data on the older drive stored for years. Old photos, accounting or legal records need not be deleted or overwritten.

Definition of Data Mirroring

"Data Mirroring is the act of copying data from one location to a storage device in real time. Because the data is copied in real time, the information stored from the original location is always an exact copy of the data from the production device. Data mirroring is useful in the speedy recovery of critical data after a disaster. Data mirroring can be implemented locally or offsite at a completely different location."
From Webopaedia.

Two-factor authentication (2FA)

Two-factor authentication (also known as 2FA) is a technology that provides
identification of users by means of the combination of two different components.

BaQapp additionally will soon offer 2 Factor authentication, where any administrator changes need to be confirmed through an SMS sent to a registered telephone. No disgruntled employee can maliciously damage or remove the backup data through the BaQapp without access to the BaQapp password with two step authentication, and even then the data is only removed during the next cleanup action.

RAID

Simple Raid setup by BaQapp
BaQapp includes built-in RAID for extra storage security.

BaQapp will also give you the option of RAID 1, where all data is stored twice. If you are using 2 drives, the second drive will be a clone of the 1st drive, and any change to the data will be made on both drives.

This second drive can be removed and stored off-site for additional security. When reconnected it will be updated automatically.

RAID allows you to store the same data redundantly (in multiple places) in a balanced way to improve overall performance. RAID disk drives are used frequently on servers

How RAID Works

With RAID technology, data can be mirrored on one or more disks in the same array, so that if one disk fails, the data is preserved. Thanks to a technique known as striping (a technique for spreading data over multiple disk drives), RAID also offers the option of reading or writing to more than one disk at the same time in order to improve performance.

In this arrangement, sequential data is broken into segments which are sent to the various disks in the array, speeding up throughput. A typical RAID array uses multiple disks that appear to be a single device so it can provide more storage capacity than a single disk.

"RAID (originally redundant array of inexpensive disks, now commonly redundant array of independent disks) is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into a single logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both.[1]

Data is distributed across the drives in one of several ways, referred to as RAID levels, depending on the required level of redundancy and performance. The different schemas, or data distribution layouts, are named by the word RAID followed by a number, for example RAID 0 or RAID 1.

Each schema, or a RAID level, provides a different balance among the key goals: reliability, availability, performance, and capacity. RAID levels greater than RAID 0 provide protection against unrecoverable sector read errors, as well as against failures of whole physical drives. "
From Wikipedia.

Standard RAID Levels

RAID devices use many different architectures, called levels, depending on the desired balance between performance and fault tolerance. RAID levels describe how data is distributed across the drives.

Standard RAID levels include the following:

Level 0: Striped disk array without fault tolerance

Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.

Level 1: Mirroring and duplexing

Provides disk mirroring. Level 1 provides twice the read transaction rate of single disks and the same write transaction rate as single disks.