EzBackup: The Best Backup Around By William Van Winkle (Click here to download this article in PDF format)

DPS’s EzBackup offers the perfect blend of backup performance with rock bottom downtime in the event of primary drive failure.

One of the best but little known value-adds we’ve seen for storage comes from Data Protection Solutions (www.ezd2d.com), which has been selling to OEMs for roughly 15 years. DPS has many products spanning RAID and backup applications, but we feel the best SMB play in the company’s lineup is a dual-drive, dual-5.25” bay devise called EzBACKUP. In a market filled with resource-sucking background tasks and backups solutions that don’t actually back up everything (thus requiring the user to waste time reinstalling several software packages before commencing a restore), the EzBACKUP is a sub-$600 way for companies to keep critical systems online 24 x 7 without the complexity of RAID management. At the heart of EzBACKUP is DPS’s patent-pending Hidden Device Technology, which places the primary drive in one bay and the backup spare in the other.

“Hidden Device Technology (HDT) takes two hard disks in the system – doesn’t matter what brand or capacity or operating system – and does full imaging with them,” says DPS’s Steve Hammond, senior vice president, sales and marketing. “That means doing preferences, settings, the data, the DLL files, everything. We image the entire computer and we keep it separate with our HDT. We call up the drive for scheduled backup, not the operating system, then dismount it when we’re done. That’s the patented part. You can’t see it. Your OS can’t see it. This lets you control intrusion prevention and detection, virus threats, and so on. The backup disk is unique in that if you just point the system to it, you’re up and running. It’s all a full bare metal restore. This is enterprise-level technology brought to the SMBs at usually sub-$50 price points. Most users can get in for under $199.”

EzBACKUP is not mirroring, and important distinction since a mirrored array will immediately back up viruses, spyware, and other unwanted elements. Incremental files are written in the background with an onboard processor, so there’s almost no system resource impact, and backup transfer rates clip along a comparatively zippy IGB/min. DPS’s solution, when set up with a responsible backup schedule, is one of the most elegant, simple ways for companies to keep data safe and assure virtually no downtime and IT management time expense in the event of drive failure. Companies such as DPS probably won’t shower you with back-end program incentives, but their solutions lend themselves to high-margin sales and lucrative installations.

Visit our online store to purchase EzBackup.