In most cases, your account will allow you to exceed your paid storage quota on the backup server. If you exceed your quota, it is likely that a message will pop-up on your screen to notify you that you have exceeded your quota and you are likely to incur an additional charge for the additional storage used. Check your pricing plan to determine the costs for additional storage. Currently, additional storage costs $xxx per month for each additional ___ MB over your paid storage quota.

In order to control how much data is stored on the online backup server, your online backup software allows you to view all of the data stored on the server and selectively remove files from the server. To view the data stored under your account, run your online backup software and click on the folder tab labeled "Restore". In the left windowpane, Right-Click on the Desktop icon and select "Get Volume List from Server". This will show you each computer that has been backed up to your account. Now you can navigate the folders to see what data is stored on the server. To delete files, click on the button with the Red "X" to enable the Delete Files mode. Mark any files you wish to delete by clicking your mouse in the empty box next to the file(s) you wish to delete. Click the "Delete Files Now" to issue the command to delete the selected files from the server. WARNING: Once a file is deleted from the server, it can no longer be restored.

Yes. We allow you to backup any number of computers to your account. You only pay for the storage space that you use. Your account should already be setup to allow you to backup several computers. If you have any problems backing up more computers to your account, simply contact technical support to request additional computers on your account.

It's up to you. Users that want an added level of protection may perform local backups in addition to their online backup. Local backups can allow you to backup ALL of your files, while the online backup is a great way to automatically store your critical files off-site. When it comes to your important data, you can never be too safe. Since everyone has different needs, you'll find a wide variety of backup software and services available to help you find the one that best fits your needs.

The Personal Recovery CD is a service that we offer which copies all of your data from our servers onto CD(s). This allows you to restore the archive of your data from a CD without requiring an Internet connection. This is great for keeping long-term archives of your data or restoring large amounts of data without connecting over a slow Internet connection. When the Personal Recovery CD is ordered, it includes all of your account data. Each CD holds approximately 650 MB, so accounts with more that 650 MB of storage will require multiple CDs.

Monthly Billing Customers - On a monthly basis, we will compare your pricing plan to your actual storage usage and determine your costs for that month. If your storage usage is below that amount of storage provided in your base plan, no additional charges will be processed. If your storage usage is greater than your base plan amount, an additional charge is calculated based on the additional increments of storage space needed to accommodate for your storage usage for the month. A new calculation is performed every month to determine the billing total for that month.

Monthly Billing Example:
Base Plan: $xxx per month for up to ___ MB of storage;
Additional Storage: $xxx per month for each additional ___ MB

Scenario 1 - Actual Storage Usage = 425 MB
(Cost=$xxx; 425 MB is less than the allowed ___ MB for the base plan)
Scenario 2 - Actual Storage Usage = 895 MB
(Cost=$xxx; $xxx for ___ MB, 2 x $xxx for each additional increment of ___ MB)

Annual Billing Customers - When you purchase an annual plan, you purchase a certain amount of storage for an entire year. For instance, a customer that purchases a ___MB annual plan can store up to ___ MB on the backup server for an entire year. Each month, your storage usage is compared to the storage allowed by the annual plan that was purchased. If any additional storage is being used, a charge for the additional storage will be processed for that month. This additional charge only applies for months where the storage usage exceeds the amount allowed by the base plan that was purchased.

You can use your Username & Password to log-in and then view your account history and print any receipts for charges to your credit card.

You can use your Username & Password to log-in and then change your credit card and other billing information on the site.

We never like to see anyone cancel their online service, but in the event you must cancel your service, please login in to your account then click on the "Account Status" link and follow the instructions to cancel your account. You may contact us to speak with someone regarding the cancellation of your online backup service. Once an account is canceled, the data may be permanently deleted, so if you want a copy of your backups, please consider a Personal Recovery CD prior to cancellation. If you wish to cancel your account via E-mail, send a message to backup_support@alexssa.net and please provide your complete contact information including address, phone & E-mail along with your Username and Password for the online backup service

During business hours (8:30am - 5:30pm Central) you can call our technical support group for assistance. You can also view the support section of our web site for some helpful information.

A. In the case of many backup software programs, files and databases that are in use during the backup may not get backed up successfully because they are locked to prevent any other program from altering the data. To solve this problem, BSI's Online Backup can be used with the optional Open File Manager program to make sure that these open and locked files get backed up successfully.

A. The FastBIT patching process is the core technology behind our speedy backup service. The patching process involves the comparison of two different versions of the same file and extracting the differences between the files. When the differences are extracted from the two files, they are saved into a new file and compressed into what is known as a Patch. The patch file is often 85% to 99.9% smaller than the file which the patch was extracted from originally.

In order to perform a FastBIT backup, the software has to backup the files 3 times: the first backup is a full, the next backup will perform an incremental, and the third performs the first FastBIT backup.

A. It's very difficult to analyze those requirements because of all the variables added by FastBIT. However, the basic formula is pretty simple:

Take the expected size, in MB's, of the data you might see in a day, divide it by the amount of seconds in the day and divide that number by 8 to obtain MB/Sec Bandwidth. This will result in the required bandwidth (MB/Sec) needed to sustain 100% load throughout the day.

Example: Let's say we have 500 users sending us an average of 600MB per month (this is about what we see at the NovaStor Online Center), then the formula follows:

600MB * 500Users = 300000MB (300GB) / 30days (per month) = 10000MB Per Day (10GB) / 86400seconds (1 day) = 115.74Kb/sec * 8 (to convert to MB/Sec) = .93MB/Sec or about 61% of a full T1.

Of course, this assumes that you have full saturation throughout the day, which isn't going to happen. It typically gets a bit peaky around noonish and around midnight, so to accommodate the mean, you should probably have a 30% overhead, which in the above case, would translate to just about a full T1 (1.5MB/Sec).