Online Backup Challenge: What to Do When the Initial Backup is too Large

Here's a common question:

Our backups are large and with the compression to get a full backup to our FTP server is looking like it would take forever to transmit, considering we can only run it out of business hours and with limited bandwidth. Is it possible with BackupChain to perform one backup to a local, portable hard drive, then physically copy the data from that drive to the FTP server, and then to pick up the remote backups from there?

Recommended Strategy

The strategy of creating a portable, initial backup is indeed standard practice. The initial backup can be processed locally, for example to an external USB backup drive.
Then, you need to physically move the data to the other remote server and copy the files to its FTP root.

The steps to achieve this are as follows:
1. Set up the local FTP server in BackupChain and configure it to store the files to the local external drive
2. Make your first backup to ftp://localhost using BackupChain's FTP server. This will ensure the file/folder structure is correct.
3. Manually copy the files from the external hard drive  to the local path of the remote server's FTP root
4. Change the BackupChain backup target to the remote server's FTP address

Now, while you're testing this you may see strange characters in the file names when you back up via FTP. This is a necessary step when file names are transcribed over FTP to preserve special characters. When you restore using BackupChain, the file names are also restored to their original names.