Summary
Bakop-™s cloud storage data backup is a convenient and reliable service for a wide variety of companies and general users. Its overall simplicity makes it easy to manage even the most sizable amounts of remote data. Rimu-™s web of servers worldwide also ensures the redundancy needed for a smooth operation. Bakop offers both free and paid backup services, depending upon the size and complexity of an operation-™s needs.
Introduction
Bakop.com is the remote FTP backup service product of New Zealand-™s very successful Rimu Hosting. The country-™s 16th fastest-growing company in 2008 according to the Delloite 500, Rimu operates worldwide cloud services, including web and cloud hosting, cloud storage, and others. Bakop is the company-™s portfolio service exclusively in charge of remembering and storing data created in the cloud.
Customer support teams are located in three countries, servers exist in four, and technical staff are spread among six different countries. Rimu’s Bakop operates billing based upon data space used, versus flat-rate billing, and its services are very easy to register and use. Bakop offers support for multiple operating systems, and aside from its advertised FTP backup, it supports multiple access technologies like SSH, rsync, and many others. Bakop.com offers free backup service accounts with limited capability and features for those with minimal backup needs, and many-tiered payment accounts exist for those wishing better features, faster server speed, more FTP accounts, and greater data storage.
Rimu pursues clear, simple goals, which are defined here:
- Offer a flexible, reliable hosting service
- Keep customers happy with quality support
Plans & Pricing
Bakop offers attractive, simple pricing schemes and easy plan modification to accommodate differences in the number of FTP accounts, storage volume space, and bandwidth for up and down server transfer. As-needed extra resources are made simply and cheaply available. Bakop’s pricing packages are attractive for both residential and commercial users. Major plans and pricing schemes are shown in the following figure. 
Free Bakop FTP Account @ No Charge: 500MB Storage Space, 1 FTP account, 2GB Transfer to Server, 2GB Transfer from Server, Support for Secure Transfer, FileZilla & rsync supported
Bakop Pro FTP Account @ $4.99/Month: 10GB Storage Space, 3 FTP accounts, 20GB Transfer to Server, 10GB Transfer from Server, Support for Secure Transfer, FileZilla and rsync supported
Scale-up Resource Schemes:
$0.50 For Additional FTP account
$2.00 For Additional 1GB Storage
$0.08 For Additional 1GB to Server
$0.20 For Additional 1GB from Server
Features
Features play a vital role in most competitive service industries today, and the cloud-hosting market is definitely no exception. Bakop is backed by strong technical and business teams who are considered experts in their respective work fields; technical geeks who have meticulously developed and tweeked Bakop’s features to be as useful and easy to use as possible. This is clear to see by witnessing the company-™s customer support, supported security protocols, ease of client software use, and simplicity of service registration.
Here are some of the many features provided with a Bakop membership. The applicability of these features means they are as useful to home users as they are for companies. Their ease of use makes them accessible to novice and expert alike.
- Simple website with easy to follow web pages
- Easy FTP plan registration
- Easy-to-use service interface
- Experienced teams of JBoss J2EE and JSP hosting experts managing servers and services
- Diverse server-farm locations in places such as London, Dallas and soon Brisbane
- Available backup location selection
- 99.9% uptime SLA
- FTP, rsync, sshFS, scp, and rdiff-backup protocol support
- Supports Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows computers
- Secure, password protected backups
- Support for Automate with SSH keys to avoid frequent logins
- Multiple FTP client support from a single account
- Easy FTP username and password creation through a dedicated webpage
- Highly secure transfer of data through secure FTP ports
- Attractive pricing and plans useful for all types of users
- Easy and affordable way to scale up resources
- Pay only for space used
- Diverse data backup locations, providing peace of mind against physical damage to data
- 24/7 basis customer support and service
- Dedicated teams to support customers across the globe
- Well defined privacy and security policies
- Third party payment options such as PayPal
- Detailed transaction history
- Single-step FTP account creation
- Monthly invoices based upon space used during the entire month
- One Week Free Trial Period available for any account
Security
Security is instrumental wherever data exists. Since the market place is knowledge-driven, data equals knowledge equals money. Businesses can’t afford security compromises of precious data. In fact damaged, lost, or stolen data can prove disastrous to a company. The Bakop team understands this, and subsequently has implemented the best possible physical and logical security to their servers and clients’ data stored on them. The following are key security features offered by the company to its customers.
- State of the art data centers and co-locations for housing servers in highly secure environments
- Diverse geographical locations, ensuring redundancy and security
- Industry-grade security policies, ACLs, IDS, IPS and firewall systems
- Industry-grade security from viruses or malicious programs by enterprise antivirus software
- Secure transfer of data on secure links and secure transmission protocols such as secure FTP, rsync, and others
- Highly robust OS platforms to ensure perfect security
Briefly summarized, Bakop’s industry-grade data security is tight enough to protect data both at rest and in transmission.
Customer Service
Having been around for a decade or so, Rimu Hosting is a company experienced in Cloud-based services. They know the importance of quality customer service and support, and the support team for Bakop is trained on these ideals. Dedicated teams are available for around the clock customer support. The major features of Bakop’s customer support can be summarized thus:
- 24/7 customer support
- Support available through email, trouble tickets, or live chat
- Well-defined service-level agreement for customer support in terms of market standards
- SLAs, TATs, privacy policy, terms of use, and refund policies are properly defined
- A substantial, satisfied community is available for open discussions and help
- Up to date blogs by Rimu Hosting to keep customers updated regarding events, issues and activities
- Training material is available on the website for immediate guidance and help
In other words, Bakop-™s customer support is professional, reliable and responsive.
The process (Sign-up & Install)
Bakop.com’s website makes for easy navigation and service registration. The process is little more than a single page with minimal information to provide. Navigation and installation of services are similarly simple and user-friendly.
Here are the steps:
- Log on to the company website at http://bakop.com
- Click the large -œSignup today- icon in the page’s upper right
- You’ll be presented with the following simple registration form
- After filling the fields, click on -œCreate My Login- at the bottom of the page
- You will be taken to the following account confirmation interface
- Click your FTP link in the middle of the page, where it says ‘Visit your ftp:’
- You will be taken to the login interface depicted below
- Input username and password, and log in.
- Welcome to your FTP account root folder, as shown below
- You can easily create additional FTP users from your FTP account page
- Input a username and password In the appropriate ‘Setup FTP Account’ fields for your additional user account
- Click -œCreate FTP Account- as shown in the figure
- The next page lets you know ‘We created your FTP account.’ at the top of the page, and ftp link to the new account, activity (in this case none, since it’s a new account), and an option to change the password found at the bottom of the page.
- You’ll also find a ‘backup ftp guide’ link available, as shown in the above figure, which will describe how to use the backup service.
- Click the ‘backup ftp guide’ link (under the ‘FTP Account’ heading) and you will get the following page.
- You will also find a host of FTP client software under the ‘FTP clients’ heading.
- Click on any suitable client that runs under the operating system installed on your computer (FileZilla for example)
- For FileZilla, if you trust the recommended software, just click the big green ‘Download Now’ tab for your operating system.
- Choose to save the file from your system’s download window
- Double click the setup file you saved in your download window
- You’ll be presented with an application installation popup window, as shown in the following figure
- Click ‘Run’, which should start the installation process
- Choose the location file to install the client software to, as shown in the following figure
- Click ‘Install’
- Once installation is complete, Click ‘Finish’
- Click ‘OK’ on the ‘Welcome to Filezilla’ popup
- The next step is logging into your server through your FTP client software
- Provide your Host, Username, Password, and Port in the appropriate fields
- Click ‘Quickconnect’, which will provide you with the following information
- Click /.ssh directory
- Right-Click it and choose -œCreate directory- option as shown in the following figure
- You will be asked to provide the name of the directory
- Click ‘Create’
- A new directory is created in the Remote site directory, which I named ‘New Directory’ as seen in the following figure
- You can now upload files to your host server by simply dragging and dropping selected files or folders from left pans to the right pans as shown in the following figure
- Selected files will begin uploading into -˜New Directory-™ folder
- Files in the process of uploading will be listed under the ‘Queued file’ tab until they become either Successful or Failed transfers
- File progress can be viewed in the lower status pan, as shown by green progress bars in the following figure
- The status of files shift to -œSuccessful Transfers- once the files are successfully uploaded as shown in the following figure
- You see the status of any failure file in -œFailed Transfers- tab as shown in the following figure
- You can also retry a transfer if failure was due to curable issues
- The file download process is similar to uploading. Simply click and drag files where you want them to go, from the server to your hard drive
- You can also download by right-clicking the file or folder you want to download and choosing -˜Download-™ from the pop up menu
- View download status of files the same way you view uploaded ones
- To modify contact details for a Bakop FTP account, go to the control panel at Bakop.com
- Modify the chosen fields and click ‘Save’
- To monitor Bakop transactions, simply go to the ‘Control Panel’ and choose ‘Transactions’, which will provide a history
Conclusion
Bakop.com is a quality cloud backup service provider. From navigating the website, to setting up or modifying accounts, the process is simple and direct. Server setup and use is equally simple. Client data is password protected and transmission is done through secure protocols. These are optimal methods for secure data backup. Services are feature-packed, simple to operate and control, and are offered affordably. Bakop is recommended for SMBs and personal users alike.
You may find the following scripts/tutorials help for those with Linux servers wanting to backup . Just change the hostname from backupspace.rimuhosting.com to the correct hostname
http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2009/12/30/quick-and-easy-automatic-backup-script/
http://blog.rimuhosting.com/2010/01/14/rdiff-backup-script-using-sshfs-for-larger-backups/
They were all written for the same setup/system before we made it as a service on its own.
ps. Thanks for the fantastic review and howtos – you guys rock!
Short and sweet, good service. Thanks to them!