Questions:

1)    Where is their facility? Is it near by?

a.     If not, a disaster recovery takes much longer, since they can’t just come and get your server and bring it to the facility for recovery. They must download tens of Gigabytes of data first. That could take days, especially if bare metal restore is not available.

2)    Is there another backup facility?
a.     If so, where is it?

3)    How is it physically protected?
a.     Multifactor authentication?
b.     Video Cameras?
c.     Guards?
d.     Environmental Controls?

4)    How is information encrypted at the site?
a.     AES?
b.     Other?

5)    How is information encrypted in transit?
a.     AES?
b.     IPSEC?
c.     SSL?
d.     Other?

6)    What ports need to be opened on the firewall and who is responsible for configuring that?

7)    How is data selected for backup? Are there files that can be archived to reduce backup size and total cost of backup? If so, how is archiving performed?

8)    Can they perform a bare metal restore? In other words if your server fails and you need to buy a new one, can they recover to a new box, or must you first build a server, install all of the service packs, load all applications, and then restore data? The difference can be a matter of a few hours or multiple days down-time.

9)    Do they have Exchange and SQL agents?

10) Can they do message level restore for Exchange?

If not, then if you need to recover specific e-mail messages (sent or received) you must build a new server, install exchange, perform a restore of the Exchange database, copy the mailbox and then move the necessary messages to the old Exchange server. That, as it may sound, is very expensive from a labor standpoint.

11) How is backup rotation performed? Is it:

a.     Continuous?
b.     What interval?
c.     Is it selectable?
d.     How many versions are or can be stored?

12) Are there also scheduled rotated backups, and what is the rotation? Is it:

a.     Daily?
b.     Weekly?
c.     Monthly?
d.     Are multiple months saved and archived?
e.     What is the limit for months archived?

13) What is the backup method?

a.     Full, then bit-wise differential?
b.     Full then block-wise differential?
c.     Full then file-based differential?
d.     The answer to these questions determines the bandwidth requirement and the load on the WAN and the server.

14) Are backups compressed before being sent over the WAN?

This will also affect the bandwidth and server load.

15) How are files selected for backup?

a.     All files?
b.     Only selected files?
c.     System state?
d.     All system and application files?

16) What is the price per gigabyte?
a.     What other charges are there?
b.     What is the charge for a major restore?

17) Who else is using this solution?

a.     Are there references?
b.     Can we talk to them?
c.     Have any of them had to do a major restore?