Connected Backup Service from ITS provides regularly scheduled, automatic, secure backup and easy-to-manage disaster recovery for individual faculty and staff computers. It also works for small-scale servers.
Connected Backup uses state-of-the-art technology from Iron Mountain Digital to encrypt your data and save multiple copies of it to our secure servers.
Data stored on individual computers is vulnerable to
The best protection against the loss of valuable data on staff computers is the regularly scheduled, automatic backup of that data to a secure off-site location.
Connected Backup is for U-M faculty and staff who use individual laptop or desktop computers and save their data on their own internal hard drives.
If you're using a 32-bit Windows operating system (up to and including Vista) or an Intel-based Mac operating system 10.4 or 10.5, you can easily backup and recover your data yourself using Connected Backup on your own computer. We will also support upcoming operating systems.*
U-M departments can also use Connected Backup for small-scale servers up to 250 gigabytes, running Windows 2000 or 2003.
Currently, over 1500 faculty and staff members across campus use Connected Backup.
* Note: Iron Mountain expects a release later this year to support Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and 64-bit operating systems. Watch this website for news about the release.
Connected Backup is not appropriate for anyone backing up a large departmental server or requiring a research data archive. For those needs, see our TSM Backup Service.
Security: Connected Backup compresses your data and protects it with 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) during transfer and storage.
Self-Service File Restores: With Connected Backup, you can easily retireve (restore) clean, usable copies of your own deleted, corrupted, or infected files. You do not need assistance from your IT administrator.
Easy System Stability Fixes: If you make a change—such as installing an application or an update—that causes instability in your system, you can easily revert to a known good date and time. You do not need assistance from your IT administrator.
Full Retrieves: In case of a hard drive crash or other catastrophe to your workstation, your data is still safe. After you or your IT administrator restores the base operating system and the Connected Backup agent on your workstation, Connected Backup allows you to reconnect and retrieve your data stored on the backup server.
Choice of Storage Size: Connected Backup comes in three tiers (quotas), running from 40 gigabytes to 200 gigabytes (plus the small-server tier of 250 gigabytes).
Backup-to-CD/DVD Option: Your can order CD/DVD disks of your stored data for a small additional fee.
We strive to keep this service at the most economical level:
See Connected Backup Rates for details.
Ask your department IT administrator to request a Connected Backup account for you. IT administrators can get information about the service and how to sign up at our For IT Staff section.
Once you've been signed up with an account, your IT administrator can help you download the software and set it up for use.
