We also use Solarwinds for MSP and for RMM but Cloudberrylab MBS is far more cost-effective backup solution than Solarwinds backup. Been using it for 5 years and it just keps getting better and better.

The software works with local drives, Remote shares or NAS drives as destinations for local backups.

The concept of a periodic full is what confused me in the beginning. I assumed it was like tape backup - a whole new full backup of every file. But if a file never changes, it never gets backed up again. Think pdf's, jpg's, mp3, etc. Our "Full" is run once per month and takes only a little longer than an incremental as it is only uploading full copies of any files that have changed since the last Full backup.
We have many customers with >1 TB of data. We do file level incremental backups of the changed data to the cloud nightly. Typically the monthly "full" on 1TB is only about 30 - 50GB. We run it on weekends and it finishes with no problem.
We also do VHDx file backups to the cloud each weekend for DR purposes. We have separate Hyper-V guests for the Domain controller, File server, SQL app, etc. Further, we use different vhdx files File server instance C: (OS) drive and the D: (data) drive so we only need to upload the C: Drive VHdx which is under 30GB (compressed).
One of our customers has 4TB of data , and once the initial upload was done (that took a long time), we have had no issues completing incremental backups to two cloud locations each night as well as a local backup and weekly VHDx backups.
There is no need to do a VHDx backup of the Data drive as you have the file backups to pull from.
And if your setup has apps and data on the HyperV host, then an image backup can be done the same way, just exclude the data paths.
I apologize if I am misinterpreting your situation, but would be glad to assist you in any way that can.

For us plain old users, I finally found out that you can get the MBS prefix code by clicking on the icon next to each user in the user tab. Wish I knew that years ago :)

So the GFS model makes a lot of sense for customers who have a 7 year retention requirement where we could eliminate eleven out of the twelve months after a year or so. Right now though most of our clients are satisfied with 90 days retention - a few want one year and one (the one I was referring to above) wanted 7 years. The thing is we have been doing our model for a few years now - it will be interesting to see how much work it is to migrate to a GFS model for existing backups.

In the absence of a GFS-type of long-term retention, we did something different.
We utilize Google Nearline for our operational Cloud backup/recovery where we keep 90 days of versions. For those customers who require longer-term retention, we utilize Amazon SIA and run monthly full backups on the first of the month. We then use a Lifecycle policy to move the monthly backups to Glacier after 30 days. This lowers the cost significantly in that Glacier is only $0.004/GB/Mo (~.05/GB/Yr) compared to SIA @ $0.0125/GB - $0.15/GB/yr.
The problem with using one back-end Storage Account for operational and long term retention is that you cannot transition files to Glacier as it would result in elongated restore times. And what was hard to understand in the beginning is that a FULL backup is not like it was in the old days of tape, ie. a fresh copy of everything. As the Novus Computer writer knows, a Full in Cloudberry backup is only a full backup of anything that has had a block incremental backup since the last "FULL". So files that might never change, but are essential to daily operation, would wind up in Glacier - with a 4-5 hour restore delay.
So you would have needed to leave all long term retention files in SIA or Nearline meaning we would have had to keep all daily versions of the files for 7 years.

So we did the math and it costs a LOT less money to use the Nearline and Glacier model than to keep all daily incrementals in SIA . That calculation even included the "Migrate to Glacier" fees.
And even with a GFS model that mimics the "keep only monthly fulls" that we are using, it is still less expensive to utilize Glacier and Nearline than only Amazon SIA.

Our calculation shows that if you start with 200GB and add 5GB per month of version data (assuming a GFS once per month model), the 200GB turns into 615GB in 7 years. The total cost of that over 7 years in SIA comes out to only $427 (our approach was $356). An average of a little over $5.00 per month over 7 years.
And with all that being said - How much would you charge your client for 200GB of data under protection? And how much more for the extended 7-year retention?
Even if we had to keep daily incremental for 7 years in SIA or Nearline, the 7-year total cost of probably $600+, would represent a small percentage of what we charge customers for our Backup Service with a long term retention option. Storage costs are "peanuts" compared to the cost of managing the backups - doing the upgrades/migrations/conversions,monitoring the daily results, dealing with the overdue/failures, etc.
If anyone would like more details on this approach and/or the calculations I would be happy to share them.
- Cloud Steve

The 1TB of files is on a Windows server, but now that the CLoudberry Linux versions support block- level backup, the results would be the same.
-Steve

To answer your last question first: The purge occurs after the backup completes, so there needs to be enough space to contain two fulls plus the incremental. I run into this a lot when doing image or Hyper-V backups to the local hard drive but it is not a problem with file backups.
A full file backup is only a backup of the files that had new incremental versions created during the month. So if you have a Quickbooks file that gets modified and backed up incrementally 20 times in the month, the full backup will simply include the entire QB file again. We have over 1TB of data with over a million files and the monthly "full backup" is only about 50GB in size. That is because only a small percentage of the files on the server actually change during any given month. Files that don't change only get backed up once and never again.
So I would recommend using a custom policy setting and specify 30 days retention plus 30 days retention of deleted files. The previous month's full + 29 incrementals won't get purged until 30 days from the date of the last daily incremental, but the space consumed by keeping this number of fulls and incrementals sghould not be a problem.

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We gave up on B2 precisely for this reason. I find that Google Coldline is much faster and more reliable than B2 and is only $0.007 /GB/Mo. Data has to be kept for 90 days to avoid early deletion charges, but that is our standard retention period anyway.

Another feature that would be useful would be the ability to search all backups across clients for particular file names/types. For example, we want to be able to use Cloudberry to determine if we have any active snapshots of HyperV machines. If we could search for *.avhdx across all backups it would be great.

Thanks for the replies - I would just like to know what is actually happening during the refresh of the Storage Tab? Is it doing a repository sync of all of the storage accounts for that customer, or just the account that I clicked on to refresh? Or is it not doing a full repository sync, but just an update?

Glad to hear that you are working o improvements to the reporting in MBS.
Top priority is being able to have the system produce a periodic (wkly, mthly annual) summary for each client/company with the following:
- Total plans run
- Total number of failures/completed with warning
- Pctg success
- Historical graph/reports of the above stats over time - summarized by month
Since so many of the errors fall into just a few categories it would be nice (though not essential) to have a summary of number of failures for each type:
- Files could not be found/could not access files/permissions
- VSS Writer in invalid state
- unable to reach MBS website
- other

Another important feature would be for us to get the reports separated by Back-end storage account.
We backup to local drive, Amazon, and Google, but we only report failures to customers if the Amazon backup fails, so we would want to have the option to only include the Amazon stats in the report, or to have it generate a separate report for each backend account - (lump all Local into one report).

The idea is to provide a summary to the customer but to also have the detail available. We would want to be able to send the summary reports via email to our clients.
He is a link from one of your integration partner's website that shows one type of backup summary:.
https://docs.labtechsoftware.com/LabTech11/Default.htm#UsingLabTech/ReportCenter/DefaultReports/BackupHealthReport.htm

Ryan,
We backup a server with over 1 million files, totalling over 3 TB, to both Amazon S3 and to Google Nearline each night. Each backup job takes 30-40 minutes to complete each night. Not sure why your block level backups are taking so long to complete. What kind of server are you running on?

Denis,
I too have been trying to change the customer email notification - to modify the wording that says "files will be permanently deleted.." to something less scary to the clients. But when I change that wording (and also changed to Plan name as mentioned above), the email subject does not contain the status of the backup - It used to say "Success" or ... WITH WARNINGS" Now it just says "backup completed". Now I am sure that all I need to do is add a variable to the subject template in place of "backup complete" but seeing as I really have no idea of the proper syntax, it is easier to ask an expert.
Thanks