Quantum Windows & Doors Protects 1.2 TBs with Carbonite Cloud Backup

Peter Jacobson—the longtime IT manager for Quantum Windows & Doors in Everett, Wash.—remembers the challenging days before his company had a backup system with granular restore capabilities.

Whenever an employee lost an individual file that was part of a database, Jacobson had to restore the entire database from backup. The process was time consuming and bad for productivity.

“Granular backup is extremely important for databases like Microsoft SQL Server,” Jacobson explained. “When it’s a non-granular backup, you have to restore the entire database, which means everybody’s work throughout the entire day gets overwritten, just to get that one file back.”

It was clear that the company needed a better data protection solution. That’s when Quantum Windows & Doors and Jacobson turned to Carbonite Cloud Backup.

“Initially I looked at a whole bunch of vendors, but they could not guarantee granular file backup and restore on SQL Server databases,” Jacobson said. “Our company uses SharePoint all the time and people regularly update spreadsheets and other documents. If one document needs to be restored, the ability to go directly into Carbonite and restore it is huge. It’s a very big deal.”

When Computer Viruses Attack

In addition to providing granular backup capabilities, a high-quality backup system also protects your business data from computer bugs and ransomware. It’s a lesson that Jacobson learned firsthand back in 2013 when a computer virus ruined every single Adobe PDF file and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet in Quantum’s IT environment.

Quantum’s most valuable files are .DWG engineering files, which are like blueprints that detail how Quantum’s designs come together. For redundancy, the company makes copies of all DWG files and turns them into PDFs. But the process came to a halt one day when an employee unwittingly opened an infected email attachment and the virus began spreading to “thousands and thousands” of files.

Fortunately, all those files were backed up with Carbonite. After removing the virus from company servers, Jacobson immediately began restoring files from the Carbonite cloud.

“It took just a few hours to get everything back,” Jacobson recalled. “It was all restored on the same day.”

Speedy Backups, Excellent Support

Jacobson also likes the fact that nightly backups happen pretty quickly with Carbonite. In the past, Jacobson had problems with backup systems that continued to take up bandwidth when employees arrived in the morning.

“With Carbonite technology, the compression algorithm is so good, it’s completely done by 2:30 every morning,” he said.

Jacobson has called the Carbonite customer support team for assistance a handful of times. 

“They’re instantly on top of everything,” he said. “If there’s something the service representative can’t address, they escalate it right away.”

Sage Advice for IT Pros

Jacobson’s advice for IT professionals who are interested in launching a new backup and disaster recovery strategy is simple: Consider speed, cost and ease of use—and don’t forget about the value of granular backup and restore.

“It’s almost useless to restore something from, say, a couple of days ago if you don’t have granular restore,” he said. “If you go ahead and restore the entire database, you’ll ruin everybody’s work and productivity for the last two days.”

Learn more about Carbonite Cloud Backup today.

Still not a Carbonite Partner? Learn the benefits of partnering with Carbonite and become a Partner today.

This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.