Since 1993, LiveVault has offered online backup, recovery and electronic vaulting services to large enterprises, remote offices and SMBs (small and midsize businesses). We were impressed by the provider's experience in supporting reliable backups of remote servers where access to IT staff is limited. LiveVault currently provides several levels of storage, ranging from short-term server backups to multiyear, archival accounts in data centers from IBM and Iron Mountain in the United States and BT in the United Kingdom.

The LiveVault agent was the only one for which management was totally Web-based, so we could check on our data from anywhere we had a Web connection. To set up the test server, we simply logged in to our test account on LiveVault's secure "MyLiveVault" management site and added the test server to our LiveVault account; unlike other services, we could configure LiveVault only online. After entering contact and server-specific information and configuring the backup environment, we downloaded an agent installer that was specifically preconfigured for that server and unusable on any other system. This was unique among the services tested--in general, we downloaded agents and configured them on local machines. But as we explored the world of LiveVault, the reasons for this difference became apparent.

As you may have deduced, LiveVault's system is extremely Web-oriented. Configuration changes are initiated through the Web-based user interface, passed through the vault system and returned to your unobtrusive local agent for execution. This makes remote backup-management control a breeze--all local-agent functions are available through an SSL browser session on any system. Our concerns about security were eased when we discovered that LiveVault augments its password-protected Web access with 192-bit AES encryption, electronic keys and digital certificates.

Setting up a backup was relatively simple, once we resigned ourselves to the somewhat laggy nature of the Web interface, when tested at multiple broadband locations. We believe the culprit is latency introduced as changes to the configuration are sent from the browser to the online service, then to the host machine and back to the service--and updated on the browser. If you choose to do a complete server backup, the system will configure itself to back up open registry and system state configuration files; this is necessary to LiveVault's emergency system restoration capabilities, and a requirement if you want to use its database-backup capabilities. By default, the agent excluded our backup, temporary and deleted files hanging out in our recycle bin, but we could tweak inclusion/exclusion rules as needed.

We set up our backup scheduling using a simple graphical interface. As with rivals, we could define any combination of hourly, daily and weekly intervals, but only LiveVault supports continuous backups, where file changes are communicated to the off-site backup as they're saved on your local server. This may be useful for servers handling fast-moving transactional data but overkill for a typical remote office or SMB installation. After the initial backup and synchronization, incremental backups were handled using byte-level comparison, with only changes transferred.

LiveVault handles open database, e-mail and system files by means of three tools: proprietary replication technology that captures changes as they occur on the agent computer; software agents that use Microsoft's NT Filter Driver APIs to interact directly with file-system-level functions; and algorithms that run against the data stream to ensure that complete databases, including all associated files, are captured and stored in transactionally safe states. There are also accommodations made to ensure the synchronization of continually backed-up databases, but because of their complexity, these advanced features should be set up during the initial agent configuration with the assistance of a LiveVault technician. According to LiveVault, this functionality works with any relational database.

Restorations are available for files and machine state, and complete system restorations can be done on a replacement server with a base OS build and network connectivity. In an emergency, LiveVault can supply your data on CD-ROM for $25 per gigabyte, or it will ship a NAS device starting at $400 plus shipping. For files with multiple historical iterations, LiveVault guarantees availability of at least one historical save per day, giving customers the option of restoring the most current version of a file or reviewing its historical saves for a specific restoration date. As with all the services in this review, when we went back and checked random files, everything was copacetic, and our full-restores went off without a hitch.

The LiveVault online service is not marketed directly; all direct sales are handled by a network of certified vendor partners. For our tests, we were quoted a price of $199 per month per server for up to 5 GB of storage, based on a 30-day retention plan with no set limit on historical levels. Longer retention plans are available, and though first-level user support is usually provided by vendor partners, direct LiveVault support is available online and through e-mail. The company also offers a free emergency 24/7 telephone support team that will walk you through the process of getting up and running.

LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service 4. LiveVault Corp., (800) 638-5518, (508) 460-6670. www.livevault.com