Non-profit organization for women reduces IT costs through online backup

“MozyPro gives me the same backup resources that Fortune 500 companies have, but at cost both of us can afford.”

Ralph Fenner didn’t have much success with his tape-based backup solution at Women for Sobriety, Inc., a non-profit organization based in Pennsylvania. Searching for an online backup solution the organization could afford, he signed up for MozyPro and reduced his annual backup costs by 50 percent.

During his 26-year career in the steel industry, Ralph Fenner managed to fill a six-page resume with his side jobs as a machinist, licensed electrician, tractor trailer driver, certified boilermaker and welder, and computer hobbyist. His history of eclectic job titles continued when he retired from the steel industry and took a part-time job at Women for Sobriety, Inc. in Quakertown, Pennsylvania.

Fenner helped the non-profit, self-help recovery program for alcoholics get their website and workstations set up, and even printed newsletters. Before he knew it, he was a full-time employee tasked with improving and managing the organization’s IT needs. He set up a SQL database and file server to store the organization’s Microsoft Office documents and performed full-system tape backups daily.

“Luckily I never had to use my backups because the tapes began to fail,” Fenner said. “I’ve been around computers long enough to know that backup systems are worth every penny you pay for them because sooner or later, something is going to happen to your computer. But when my backup started to fail, I realized I didn’t have anything else to fall back on.”

Fenner began looking for a dependable backup solution that wouldn’t require full-system backups every day. A web search brought up Mozy, an online backup solution that allows users to store data offsite in a secure data center. At the time, Mozy only offered online backup for home users via MozyHome, but Fenner contacted the Mozy team and began beta testing the MozyPro backup software for businesses before it was officially released to the public.

Wanting to test Mozy’s accuracy, Fenner created a series of files and, every two hours for three days, added a sentence to each Microsoft Word file. He noted the date, time, and changes made, then saved the file and let MozyPro back up the files again.

“I restored the previous file versions and they matched my documentation of the changes I had made perfectly,” he said. “MozyPro was still in beta, but even the beta was ten times better than the tapes I had been using before, so I threw out the tapes and stuck with Mozy.”

One month later, MozyPro came out of beta and was globally released for business use, offering an alternative backup solution to traditional tapes and external hard drives. Since Women for Sobriety is strictly funded on donations and sales, MozyPro’s ten percent discount to non-profits allowed them to be as cost-effective as possible with their backup strategy.

“There are other backup companies out there, but they’re not affordable for businesses of our size,” Fenner said. “MozyPro gives us the same backup resources that Fortune 500 companies have, but at cost both of us can afford.”

Perhaps more importantly for Fenner, MozyPro delivers the key controls he needs to efficiently track backups and restores through the web-based Administrative Console. Automatic backups are performed every two hours when the organization’s server is idle, and after the first backup, Mozy only needs to back up new or changed file blocks, making subsequent backups lightning fast.

“There’s a huge capability available with MozyPro that I’ve never had before,” Fenner said. “Incremental backups allow me to get any file version from to 30 days ago at the click of a mouse, and backups take only a few minutes instead of a few hours.”

On several occasions Fenner has posted entries on www.techsoup.org, a distribution point for donated software and a site where non-profits exchange information and tips for other non-profits. Fenner encourages them to sign up for MozyPro to protect their organizations’ data.

“You’re paying for insurance with data backup systems, and you’ll eventually use it,” he said. “I’m happy with the ease of how Mozy will work when it comes time for a full-system restore. Every charity and non-profit should be using MozyPro.”