What weaknesses?

• The core backup routines are hand written scripts, tested briefly by one maintainer.
• The scripts are often old and not maintained unless they are broken.
• When backups are broken, no one is notified until a critical event occurs.
• There is often excessive, daily emails generated by the backup system--which are set to be ignored--or auto-filed--in email folders after a few weeks of seeing correct operation.
• The alternative is too little notification, with no notice being sent--and therefore no way to evaluate when backups have failed.

The only solution to these weaknesses is to have a 3rd party monitoring your backup activity--providing error alerts and reporting. This is RightMirror's mission and we're finding great adoption in the SMB marketplace.

It's true. RightMirror is more attractive to product and business owners than it is to a sysadmin or programmer. A product or business owner creates a RightMirror account and an initial asset to track backups for. The owner also provides the email address of their sysadmin or tech contact responsible for maintaining the asset backups. RightMirror handles the rest.

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Lenovo recently discussed the issues of faulty backups saying: "93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. Of those companies, 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately"

"We've just started using RightMirror and it has already brought value to our business. The process of identifying what we were tracking uncovered 50 different data sources. As we started adding tracking we realized that 20% of our backups were inadequate. The dashboards and alerts have allowed us to setup our backup assets under the pervue of our Director of Operations. We were unable to even consider this in the past as the backups were really siloed and visibility into their operation near zero. " — Jonathan Siegel, ELC Technologies

Analytics for your backups:
RightMirror provides easy-to-interpret graphs of your backup history. We highlight missing backups, missed events and dramatic backup size changes.

How easy is it to setup backup monitoring? Just add one call to RightMirror from within your backup scripts and you are done. Here's a Ruby example:

Sample Ruby code:
# Let RightMirror know we're done with the backup...
require 'net/http'
url = "http://www.RightMirror.com/backups/ping?secret=SECRET_FROM_SITE&size=#{size}"
html = Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(url))
if(html == "OK") # Note html is "OK" on success.
puts "Just posted update to RightMirror: \n\t#{url}\n\t#{html}."
else
puts "RightMirror update failed: \n\t#{url}\n\t#{html}."
end