What is a Seed Load and why should I care?
Everyone claims they don't have much data until its time to upload it. These days (sadly, even with some 'business-class' offerings), while you might have killer download speeds, you likely don't have great upload. The amount of data we consider critical is growing day in, day out, causing the first backup job you run to take multiple days in some cases.
To resolve this, we offer a free seed load for each of your companies every year. This means that you can request a free seed load for every one of your companies, every year, if needed. We have Seed Drives available up to 12 TB.
(If a company has received its free seed load within a year, but needs another seed load before a year has passed, an early seed load drive can be sent out for a $150 fee.)
This allows you to upload your backups to our seed drive via USB 3 and ship it back to us where we will upload it with a dedicated gigabit connection. This way, if your customer has a weak internet connection, you don't have to burden it with the initial backup job which is usually the largest.
What does our process look like?
The specifics of this procedure may change based on the particular company and its setup. However, the following general steps should remain consistent:
- You'll receive confirmation along with a tracking number for your seed load drive.
- Once the drive has arrived to the location you specify, the seed load drive will need to be connected to the machine that will be performing the offsite backups.
- A backup will be ran to the seed load drive.
- Once that job completes successfully, we will provide a return label for the seed load drive.
- Immediately upon receipt of the seed load drive, we still start the upload and inform you upon its completion.
How do I request a Seed Load?
Simple! Just visit the Servosity Control Panel, click on the name of the Company you want to seed load, then select Request Seed Load from the Company drop-down menu. We wrote up this process in more detail in this article: How to Request a Seed Load
Seeds for Gold Companies
Gold Companies, managed by us, can also receive seed drives. You won't have to request anything. During the initial backup configuration, your dedicated engineer will reach out if we determine that a Seed Drive is optimal for your company. All we need from you, is an address to ship the drive to. We'll handle the request form and make sure the drive gets shipped to you. After that, the process is the same as any Seed Drive!
Seeds for temporary systems
Sometimes it is necessary to restore or VirtualBoot a DR backup to temporary hardware while a permanent repair or replacement is secured. While these temporary production systems should always be backed up, we do not recommend seed loading those backups to the cloud. The backup chain will need to be rebased again after the final production system is in use, which means that to seed both the temporary system and final production system would incur a reseed fee.
If there is no way for the offsite backup to complete for a temporary chain, we recommend using a third party tool to setup automatic local replication to a secondary storage device.
Seed load jobs larger than 12TB
While Servosity will never charge extra for larger accounts, there are limitations to the amount of data that can be stored on a single external drive. When you need to seed more data than will fit on a 12TB USB drive, there are 3 options.
- Multiple Disks - If you are backing up 2 or 3 separate servers and the total is over 12TB, we can ship multiple drives and split up the seed data between them. This won't work for a single system unfortunately. There is no additional charge for this option.
- Servosity Seed NAS - We have a NAS with a capacity of up to ~30TB. We can ship it in a custom padded case for safety. Because we only have the one, and the shipping is much higher we unfortunately cannot offer this option for free. To ship the NAS we will charge a $500 deposit to your account, and $250 of it will be refunded after the NAS is received.
- Amazon Snowball Edge - Amazon allows us to drop ship a network connected storage device with up to 210TB of space. The costs for the 80TB version are $300 for the first 10 days, $30 per day after that. Shipping is extra. Costs for the larger models are not disclosed by Amazon and will have to be quoted per request.
If you have any questions feel free to reach out to us at Support@Servosity.com.