data backup followup

pcpete

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We are a break-fix mainly company. With that said we have about $3000/month on our managed AV program, mainly residential. We do some businesses, but more on a break-fix model. So what you MSP people do as second nature is not second nature to us. We have been setting up clients with hard drives with SyncToy for years, we even have some clients on our rebranded cloud backup. I have always worried that the client will screw something up and blame us for the backup not completing as we implied. I can see it from their side and feel like we let them down and even are a bit responsible.

I have been setting aside one hour to work on something from home before I go into the shop with the idea of getting something important done before the inevitable distraction of the shop takes over. This morning I came up with a simple idea, that I wish we would have started years ago. We are going to ask all clients when we set them up with backup if they would like us to contact them to do a proper followup where we verify the important stuff is backed properly like it should be. We can offer to do this monthly, quarterly(will suggest this one), semi-annually, etc.... We will let them know that we will prorate the time and if it goes simple it may just be the 15-minute minimum at $23. Then when the time comes we will just suggest that they purchase one hour of prepaid time for $89 to use for this check and towards other support needs.

To keep it simple to track these clients we can just add a repeating entry to google calendar with the appropriate time interval depending on how often they want us to contact them. In the calendar we will just link to a google document with their info and a simple ticket to keep track of it. Right now we make about a one time profit of $90 to setup SyncToy on a new drive from us, now we will have an extra $90/year recurring
 
Probably here is most customers don't know what is important until it is gone.

I simply set them up with the platform and let them decide what to and what not to backup.

Just actually went through this on Monday with a customer that got hit by ransomware.

They wanted to know why all their stuff wasn't backed up I told them you didn't want to pay me to set it up or look it over and selected the items being backed up yourself. They still felt like it was my fault like I should have just done it for free

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This sounds like a lot of fiddling around and Rube Goldberging to build a solution that's probably not going to be as good as other available ones and which is going to require more manual attention.
 
This sounds like a lot of fiddling around and Rube Goldberging to build a solution that's probably not going to be as good as other available ones and which is going to require more manual attention.

any solution should be manually inspected on a regular basis
 
Manual attention as required yes, but make sure you're charging enough to cover the actual time you spend on it each month. If you spend a minute a day reviewing each machine's emailed backup logs, are you charging enough to cover 20 minutes/month of your time?
 
Manual attention as required yes, but make sure you're charging enough to cover the actual time you spend on it each month. If you spend a minute a day reviewing each machine's emailed backup logs, are you charging enough to cover 20 minutes/month of your time?

Tis one of the reasons we stopped doing entry level backup. Our backup programs used to start at 25 bucks a month. Even if it was just 100 megs of data. 25 bucks a month covered 1 meg to 25 gigs. And it went up in 5 gig chunks/4 dollar intervals above that.

Wasn't worth our time to deal with that....and we really try to avoid low prices like this for backup. We try to start clients servers at 150 bucks/month and go up from there to around the 800 dollar range for our largest clients.
 
Manual attention as required yes, but make sure you're charging enough to cover the actual time you spend on it each month. If you spend a minute a day reviewing each machine's emailed backup logs, are you charging enough to cover 20 minutes/month of your time?
the whole point of the post was to say we will set up a time to login and charge our hourly rate of $89 to login and verify the data.
 
A service like this is really needed. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, does what I tell them when it comes to this stuff. I'll set up Veeam Free Endpoint and an external hard drive to run automatically, plus Backblaze. I'll put an icon for each on their desktop and show them how to review it and tell them to check it once a week / month. I'll come back 6 months later, Veeam hasn't backed up for 5 months, drive is disconnected.. they have no clue.
 
I'll put an icon for each on their desktop and show them how to review it and tell them to check it once a week / month

It needs to be the responsibility of one particular person, and they need to be responsible for making sure it happens if they're going to be on vacation. If it's everyone's responsibility, it's nobody's responsibility.
 
all I know for sure is it takes no time to offer this extra benefit to clients. The ones who take it will be better off and we will be better off. It is a win win for everyone.
 
Stop using Mickey mouse solutions.

If you are selling managed backup you need to watch after it.

If you are not then setup email alerts to go to client and advise them to reach out if issue.

Use products that have great reporting and central management. Crashplan is great for residential. Solarwinds is great as well.
 
Stop using Mickey mouse solutions.

If you are selling managed backup you need to watch after it.

If you are not then setup email alerts to go to client and advise them to reach out if issue.

Use products that have great reporting and central management. Crashplan is great for residential. Solarwinds is great as well.

We cater to residential and some people just want a simple plan like a hard drive to backup to. We also do have a managed backup plan using ibackup if clients prefer webbased with us monitoring it. No matter what plan you use, no matter how complex or professional, it should on a set schedule be manually checked. That was the point of the post.
 
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