What’s a Backup Wallah ? Well, a Chai Wallah is a guy in India who sells tea or coffee by the road side. So in the backup sense, a Backup Wallah is the guy or gal who is in charge of changing the backup tapes.

We’ve always said that tape is a good way of backing up your data provided that it is setup correctly, tested and managed.

However what happens in your organisation when the Backup Wallah goes on holiday?

Do you have a handover plan?

Do you make sure that the backup success/failure emails are rerouted or that the email account is checked?

If you answer no to any of these questions the you need some help to organise your backup plan correctly.

I’ve just returned from a great two weeks in Greece.

Of course, we use backmeup’s online backup service. We have to take our own medicine right?

Since we moved from a tape system to an online service I have stopped worrying about nightly backup tape changes while I am on holiday and only have to worry about the occasional failure (most often due to semail server problems rather than the service itself) which, of course, is fixed post-haste by one of our engineers.

Backmeup can also advise you on back planning and backup strategy. If you have any data plan with us then we will provide this service completely free of charge.

If you prefer to use tape then who better to advise you than a company with over one hundred backup customers managed and a sister company that manages over sixty traditional backup systems.

Our Multi Level Marketing scheme has been designed to benefit everyone in the hierarchy and not just the people at the top.

Here it is explained. I will also note how we make money from this as a provider as we want to be as transparent as possible.

There are three levels in our scheme. We shall call them tiers as this is a convention of the MLM industry.

Let’s make you, the reader, a tier one affiliate.

What’s your demographic? Well you could be anyone, a small business person maybe. You might already have some customers that might be interested in online backup provision. You business does not have to be computer oriented but might well be in web design, graphic design or such like.

You might also know people who could find customers for online backup too. These will become your tier two affiliates, we’ll come to that in a moment.

So you find a customer for us? Great, we can be hands on or hands off during the sale. We’ll even talk to the customer beforehand if you require.

Once we’ve made the sale and completed installation on the service we will then start giving you 20% of the services fee (net of VAT) each month for the life of the customer..

Our average customer spends about €50 per month, so find ten customers and we’ll give you €100 per month.

But that’s not where it ends.

What about these tier two people again?

We’ll a tier two affiliate is just like you with one exception. You have introduced them to us.

If a tier two affiliate introduces us to a new customer then they also get 20% but here’s the nice bit:

YOU get 10% of the plan amount too.

The more people that you introduce to us as affiliates the more you’ll get in commissions.

Finally there is a big sweetener to this deal. A third tier!

If the tier two guys introduce us to new affiliates too, then you’ll get 5% of the total of their customers too.

The tier threes get 20%
The tier twos get 10%
YOU get 5%

Then the whole repeats itself.

But how, I hear you ask, can you afford to do this?

Our business model is finely tuned to provide both us and our affiliates with a healthy income, and our customers with the best value and quality service currently in the market place.

But above all, we’re not greedy. Our income suits our needs and also allows us to invest in the best quality infrastructure.

Don’t allow your customers to settle for paying over the odds for a more inferior service and make some extra revenue out of it too.

Greed doesn’t breed happy customers but we do!

See our main site at http://www.backmeup.ie/affiliates for more information.

Some lose a lot of data and never care to admit. The rest are on the brink of the abyss hoping that the first test of their backup (i.e. when something has just gone drastically wrong) is going to be successful.

A good backup test answers a number of important questions:

Is the data stored correctly

Can I get the data back

Do I have easy offsite access to encryption keys and passwords needed to be able to restore data?

Are we backing up everything that we are supposed to?

What happens when I try to restore the data onto a separate machine?

We will explain how to do all of these things in a second post.

We believe that it is better to write a new business’ website before you write the business plan.

Take a read: http://www.jameskennedy.ie/2009/04/29/to-bp-or-not-to-bp/

What do you think?

Although some of their figures are interesting, it does seem from the RightScale comments that there are some serious holes in the McKinsey Report math. If that’s the case then are all of the figures in the report fatally  flawed?

Take a look at RightScale’s comments:

http://blog.rightscale.com/2009/04/15/mckinsey-doesnt-get-the-cloud

All online backup systems are different and some require a combination of username and password.

Our online backup system is based on the Ahsay system which counts for about 45% of the current Irish marketplace by our research. Our system allows you to keep your username and password the same as your encryption key, although we wouldn’t recommend this. If you needed to change your password to get into your account then we could do it, but some of your encrypted data would be encrypted with your old password and the new stuff encrypted with the new password. It would become a chore to remember everything and we couldn’t help you because we don’t keep encryption keys.

Here is what we recommend to our customers:

• Keep account usernames and passwords separate from the key.
• Choose an encryption key longer than 20 characters.
• Choose a simple phrase and change the letters to numbers and further mangle it a bit.
• Use punctuation marks instead of spaces.
• Write the key down, seal it in an envelope and keep it in the house of a family member, an accoutants or with your solicitor - don’t include any other information with the key that could show what the key actually stands for.

For example:

Here is a phrase:

“Robbie is the name of my dog”

It could be made much more secure as follows:

“R0bb13!15!th3!n4m3!0f!my!d08″

This key would take a very long time to crack under a brute force attack which we would have picked up and caught long before the perpetrator could get your data.

I’ve had all sorts of interesting comments from people who I attempt to explain the concept to. Nearly everyone comments that our scheme is of the “Pyramid” variety. With all of the negativity that this is getting, especially with the Madof case in the US, it’s not surprising that some people find the whole idea rather scary and off-putting.

I thought that I’d write a post about our scheme and how it differs in transparency from many that I have come across. 

Check out the details of our scheme at http://www.backmeup.ie/affiliates

We give commissions to everyone and share the wealth that we are generating. By doing this we could provide a nice little income to those people who embrace the idea.

“But  what is the catch?” - You ask. This is the most common question of anyone who I discuss this with!
The second most common is: Why isn’t everyone doing this? A question that I have been asking too, because this is a great deal

The truth?

The Catch?

YOU have to find the customers!!

That’s it…That’s the catch.

For most people who read this, this REVELATION is not a catch at all because with some very simple techniques, customers who you have on your books already, might be making you a 20% recurring revenue stream, with very little work on your part.
For the BNI’ers in the audience. That equates to 20% for every successful referral that you pass on, although you don’t have to receive the commission if you don’t want to!

Simple commission schemes like this have been around f or a very long time. In fact some of our customers’ whole companies are based on this structure (i.e. look at a general insurance broker) .

Multi-level marketing (also called network marketing) simply provides an extra way of making a commission from the sales that someone else makes.

http://www.backmup.ie/affiliates has an example of how our multi-level scheme works.

Simply put - If you introduce us to a new potential affiliate, then you will make 10% of everything that she sells for us.
SHE’LL STILL MAKE HER 20% CUT

Furthermore, if she introduces us to another affiliate.
You’ll make 5% of everything he sells.
She’ll make 10& of everything that he sells.
HE’LL STILL MAKE HIS 20% CUT.

Above all:

• You get nothing for the inital introduction. Only when a sale is made.
• You do not have to pay to join the scheme, although you will be vetted by us.
• We pay the amounts as monthly recurring revenue, for the life of the customer.
• We have three tiers. You get nothing from an affiliate who is >2 tiers below you.

A traditional pyramid scheme is all about cash.

• There is no product for sale.
• You put in your €1000 and get another 100 people to do the same.
• Depending on what level they are on, each person gets a different cut of the money that has been put in.
• Those at the top walk away with thousands. 
• Those at the bottom lose everything once the scheme inevitably collapses. 
• Most of the people involved are on the bottom for the greatest length of time, meaning every likelihood of the pyramid collasping on you. The tier above might be family members, and so, often-times, the upper tier have inadvertenly screwed their entire families.

This is why pyramid schemes are illegal.

We only pay people on the basis of what they sell. We make money from this because we are only ever giving away a maxmium of 35% of the revenue from each customer. This is fine as we have budgeted this into our pricing model.

So are pyramid schemes scary?

Yes they are! If you are ever offered then politely decline!

Is our scheme a pyramid scheme?

Well it is shaped like a pyramid but that’s as close as it comes. We probably hold the prize for being the most transparent MLM scheme currently on the market.

We are going to make money by making YOU money. No catch!

Contact us if you want more information - http://www.backmeup.ie/contacts

Plus, piehole is a good site with a nice niche idea. Go over and vote for them now!!

I like the sentiment of this image. It suggests that we shouldn’t believe everything we are hearing in the media. People still have money, it’s just that they are not buying anything because of the scary stories that they’ve heard in the media. Admittedly that’s a simplistic view point perhaps by refusing to accept everything that we read in the papers we can prevent a total meltdown of our economy.

Let the policiticans worry about the banks! Who cares €2B or €10B we’re all going to be paying it off for the rest of our lives anyway.

The BNI btw is a good networking organisation set up to allow business owners to pass refferals on to other business owners and vice versa. It is very successful and works well for a reange of industries. If you are interested in having a look then contact me.

Once it’s keeping someone living in Ireland, in a job, then it’s fair game to buy.