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Most people tend to do backups themselves at home on either a spare external hard drive or they do a DVD backup but what they don't realize is that backing up in the cloud is easy and risk free, automatic so much more reliable than a DVD or external hard drive backup.

You don't have to worry about losing your backup due to a scratched DVD or a failed external hard drive because the cloud takes care of your data so that it is never lost or unrecoverable.

Backing up in the cloud is extremely important and safe and how beneficial it is in keeping all of your important data, documents safe and secure.

The first time the backup runs it performs an Initial 'Full' Backup. The Initial Backup time is dependant on the total size of the data you are backing up as it needs to copy all selected files to the backup server. Typically this process can take many hours or even days to complete the Initial 'Full' Backup.

Once the Initial Backup has completed the daily backup will only do an 'Incremental' backup of the exact parts of any files that have been changed, which is very small and typically only takes a few minutes or sometimes less than 10 seconds.

All backups occur automatically in the background and you can continue to use your computer while the backup runs.

If you have a large amount of data to backup you can avoid doing the lengthy intial backup over your internet connection by using our Local Backup Seeding service instead.

To efficiently minimize your backup storage costs, we recommend that you only backup your "important data" and documents that are of great value to you, which means all your financial records, your daily reports and sales figures etc. All those crucial business or day to day documents that you would be lost without! For a home user this may include your photos and music, although these two items can often be quite large in size.

For the great majority of customers this simply translates to backing up your "My Documents" folder (on a Mac it's just called "Documents").

Right click on the folder you are wanting to backup and click "Properties" (If you're on a Mac Right Click and choose "Info"). This will calculate and show you the total size of the data.

Local Backup Seeding is a service where the Initial Full Backup is copied to an External Hard Drive or USB stick and then posted to us and directly copied to the Backup Server in our Datacenter to eliminate the need to perform this initial backup over a slow internet connection. This saves both considerable time and cost. All daily backups, thereafter are performed over your internet connection as they are incremental and very small in size, requiring only a few minutes or even seconds a day to be completed.

Contact us for more information on this free service.

Go to the Soteria Web console, login, click on the green triangle under "status" on your backup schedule.
You can only check the progress, when the backup is actually running

In our experience Soteria Guardian will not normally affect your PC's speed because it runs very efficiently in the background. However, if you do find that Soteria is slowing down your computer you can fix this by limiting the maximum amount of your computers CPU processing that Soteria is allowed to use as follows:

1. Edit each Backup Schedule in the Guardian Web Console
2. Click the Advanced Options Button in Section 5
3. Change CPU Utilization from "High" to "Medium" or "Low".

During the backup process Soteria will normally try to transfer the backup data over your internet connection as fast as it can to minimize the time taken. Especially during the Initial "Full" Backup process many customers may feel like their internet connection is slower than normal because they are sharing this connection with the backup process.

To fix this issue you can limit the amount of Bandwidth speed that Soteria is allowed to use to transfer the backup as follows:

1. Click Settings -> Bandwidth Throttling Settings
2. Click Enable Throttling and set the maximum to "50Kbps" or "100Kbps".

NB: For customers with large amounts of data we recommend using our Local Backup Seeding service instead of doing the backup over a slow internet connection.

Before starting your first backup you should first check that the size of your backup does not exceed your monthly ADSL quota.

For example if the total size of your backup data is 25GB, the initial backup could require up to 25GB of ADSL Bandwidth.

NB: For customers with large amounts of data with capped ADSL connections we recommend using our Local Backup Seeding service instead of doing the backup over a slow internet connection.

Your Email data is generally stored inside a hidden folder inside your My Documents folder, so in most cases backing up your My Documents folder will also include your Emails automatically.

However for customers specifically wanting to backup their emails we recommend using our Outlook Plug-in which is designed to backup your email even while Outlook is currently running. To create a backup using the Outlook Plugin:

1. Open the Guardian Web Console
2. Click Backup -> MS Outlook Plugin
3. Schedule as required and click Save Backup

An Encryption Password is a password that is used to fully secure your data backup against unauthorised access. It is recommended for backing up very sensitive data such as Financial or Medical records.

You can select to enter an Encryption password or disable the Encryption option entirely in Step 3 of the Create Backup Schedule process.

NB: It is essential that you write down and store the Encryption password in a safe location, because without this password there is no way to restore your data in future. ,For security purposes this password is never stored anywhere in our systems, and therefore there is no way to recover this password if it is lost. Home users can choose to disable the encryption option if it is not required for their data.

A plug in is a specialised or additional tool (add on) used for backing up specialised applications while they are running live data.

Here's how it works:

A snapshot is taken of the actual live data and then backs it up to our backup server.

For example:

An Outlook plugin backs up emails configured in the Outlook profile, of course for this to take place, the Soteria guardian backup console should already be running where outlook is installed to be able to do actual Microsoft Outlook backup itself.

How do I do this?

Double click or right click on the Soteria Guardian backup console, click guardian backup console. It should take you to the Soteria Guardian 'login' page. Enter your username and password and login.

You are logged in to the page, 'list of backup schedules already created'

Click on Backup (top left) tab, add Plug in backups and select the plugin for example: Ms Outlook
Go through the scheduling process and click save backup when complete. You are done!

Log into your Soteria Guardian backup console.

You are logged in to the page, 'list of backup schedules already created'

Click on Restore, list backups for restore. Follow the steps and select the files and folders needed to restore, Enter your encryption password and hit the restore button!

We would recommend an Uncapped ADSL line or Telkom line as your best option!

The very first initial backup of a computer is very large and takes a long time over an ADSL connection, usually several days or even weeks, and will always be interrupted due to computers being shut down or moved when not in use.

Once the initial backup is completed however the daily backups become very very small, as only the block-level changes (incremental changes) need to be transmitted to the server.

We suggest initial seeding for large initial backups

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