Overview
CloudBerry Online Backup version 1.5 is a front end application for Amazon S3 storage for backing up your Windows Home Server data. It makes backing up your essential data to Amazon S3 an easy process in the event the disaster strikes.
Installation
You install the Cloudberry Addin as you do for any addins for Windows Home Server. On a PC on your network, browse to the shared folders on your server and open the Add-Ins folder and copy over WHS_CloudBerryOnlineBackupSetup_v1.5.0.81S3o.msi (link below), then close out of the folder.
Next launch the Windows Home Server Console, click Settings, then Add-Ins. Click on the Available tab and click the Install button.
It installs very quickly, and when you get the Installation Succeeded dialog click OK.
You will lose connection through the Console, just click OK, then reconnect.
After reconnecting, you’ll see CloudBerry Backup has been installed, and you can begin using it. You can setup a backup plan right away or find out what’s new with version 1.5.
Amazon S3 Account
If you don’t already have an Amazon S3 account, you’ll be prompted to create a new one.
Click on the Create an account hyperlink, which takes you to the Amazon S3 page where you can sign up.
After reviewing the functionality of Amazon S3, click on the Sign Up for Amazon S3 button.
Enter in your contact information and accept the Amazon Web Services Customer Agreement. You’re then shown their pricing for storage plans. The amount of storage space you use will depend on your needs. It’s relatively cheap for smaller amounts of data. Just keep in mind the more data you store and download, the more S3 is going to cost.
Note: Amazon S3 is introducing Reduced Redundancy Storage which will lower the cost of the data stored on S3. CloudBerry 1.5 will support this new feature. You can find out more about this new pricing structure.
Note: Keep in mind that after you first sign up for an Amazon S3 account, it can take up to 24 hours to be authorized. In fact, you may want to sign up for the S3 account before installing the Add-In.
After you sign up for your S3 Account, you’ll be given access credentials which you can enter in and create a Storage Bucket name.
Features & Use
CloudBerry is wizard driven, straight-forward and easy to use. Here we take a look at creating a backup plan. To begin, click on the Setup Backup Plan button to kick off the wizard.
Select your backup mode based on the amount of features you want. In our example we’re going to select Advanced Mode as it offers more features than Simple Mode.
Select your backup storage account or create a new one. You can select a default account by checking Use currently selected account as default.
Now you can go through and select the files and folders you want to backup from your home server. Check the box Show physical drives to get more of a selection of files and folders. This also allows you to backup files from your data drive as well.
It has full support for drive extenders so you can backup your shares as well. The cool thing about Cloudberry is it allows you to drill down specific files and folders unlike other WHS backup utilities.
Next you can use advanced filters to specify files and/or folders to skip if you want.
There are compression and encryption options as well. This will save storage space, bandwidth, and keep your data secure.
Purge Options allow you to customize options for getting rid of older files. You can also select the option to delete files from the S3 service that have been deleted locally. Be careful with this option however, as you won’t be able to restore files if you delete them locally.
You have some nice scheduling options from running backups manually, specific date and time, or recurring daily, weekly or monthly.
Receive email notifications in all cases or when a backup fails. This is a good option so you know if things were successful or something failed, and you need to back it up manually.
Email notifications…
Give your plan a name…
Then if the summary page looks good you can continue, or still go back at this point if something doesn’t look correct and needs adjusting.
That’s it! You’re ready to go, and you have an option to start your first backup right away.
After you’ve created a backup plan, you can go in and edit, delete, view history, or restore files.
Restoring Files using CloudBerry
To restore data from your backups kick off the Restore Wizard and select the backup to restore from. You can select the last backup, a specific point in time, or manually browse through the files.
Browse through the directory and select the files you need to restore.
Choose the destination to restore the files to. You can select from the original location, a specific location, to overwrite existing files, or set the location as the default for future restores.
If the files are encrypted, enter in the correct passwords.
If the summary looks good, click on Next to start the restore process.
You’ll be shown a progress bar at the bottom of the screen while the files are restored. After the process has completed, close out of the Restore Wizard.
In this example we restored a couple of music files to the desktop of Windows Home Server…
But as shown above you can save them to the original location, other network locations, or WHS shared folders. This can make it a lot easier to keep track of files you’ve restored.
You can also access different options for CloudBerry by clicking Settings in WHS Console then CloudBerry Backup. Here you can set up a new storage account, check for updates, app options, Diagnostics, and send feedback.
Under Options there are several settings you can tweak to get the best experience for your WHS backups.
CloudBerry Web Interface
Another nice feature is the CloudBerry Web Interface so you can access your data from anywhere you have an Internet connection. To check it out in WHS Console, click on the Backup Web Interface link…you’ll probably want to bookmark the link in your favorite browser.
Note: This feature is still in beta and at the time of this review, the Web Interface wasn’t up and running so we weren’t able to test it out.
Performance
The Cloudberry app works very well through the Windows Home Server Console. The amount of time it takes to backup or restore your data will depend on the speed of your Internet connection and size of the files. In our tests, backing up 1GB of data to the Amazon S3 account took around an hour, but we were running it on a DSL with limited upload speeds so your mileage will vary.
Product Support
In our experience, the team at CloudBerry offered great support in a timely manner when contacting them. You can fill out a help request through a form on their website and they also have a community forum.
Conclusion
We were very pleased with CloudBerry Online Backup for WHS. It’s wizard driven interface makes it extremely easy to use, and offers comprehensive backup choices for your Amazon S3 account.
CloudBerry will only backup files that have been modified, so if files haven’t been changed, they won’t be backed up again.They offer a free 15 day trial and is $29.99 after that for a full license. Once you buy the app you own it, and charges to your S3 account will vary depending on the amount of data you upload.
If you’re looking for an effective and easy to use front end application to backup your Windows Home Server data to your Amazon S3 account, CloudBerry is a recommended affordable choice.
Download CloudBerry for Windows Home Server
Sign Up For Amazon S3 Account
Rating
Installation: 9
Ease of Use: 8
Features: 8
Performance: 8
Product Support: 8
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