Nine lines, since the things worth copying share almost nothing with one another. Workstations, physical servers, hypervisor guests, two tenants, a directory and a set of books each need their own handling, and a ninth exists purely to prove the rest of them hold up.
A copy left on the same machine, inside the same tenant, or behind the same credentials will not survive a genuinely bad night in any useful sense. Everything on this page is held clear of whatever it covers, and that separation is the entire reason it costs money.
Hardware belongs to N-able Cove: rolling versions on workstations, whole disk images, physical servers and hypervisor guests, and databases taken in a state that will agree to be restored. The Microsoft tenant sits on Cove too.
Three more platforms sit with Dropsuite, well clear of the platforms they came out of. These surprise people most, because a platform staying up gets mistaken for data being kept.
Retention on a live platform is a courtesy and not a contract with you. Deletions propagate. Bins empty. A billing dispute can put an entire tenant beyond reach for a fortnight. An independent copy is the only version of this that answers on a bad day.
Every figure below comes out of billing while this page draws. Anything entered waits inside the almanac, and reading on will not disturb it.
The quiet failure is not a dead disk. It is a good file overwritten by a bad one on a Thursday afternoon. This line keeps rolling versions of the folders people genuinely work in, so going back a few days is an errand rather than an incident.
| Sighted on | Windows workstations and the folders nominated on them |
|---|---|
| Tracks | Changes to whichever files you chose to protect |
| Archived for | Twenty eight days of recoverable versions |
| Resolved by | Restore of the version you name, run with our engineers |
| Observed by | N-able Cove |
Files are half the job. The other half is the hours spent rebuilding a machine back to the state somebody was working in. A whole disk copy means a replacement can be restored rather than reassembled out of memory and a drawer of licence keys.
| Sighted on | Workstations running macOS, Windows or Linux |
|---|---|
| Tracks | The whole disk, copied on whatever schedule you set |
| Archived for | Retention drawn against a 500GB pooled allowance |
| Resolved by | File level or whole machine recovery, run with our engineers |
| Observed by | N-able Cove |
A server carrying a database needs its copy taken in a way the database will agree to, or what you own is a file that restores into an argument. This line handles that properly on physical Windows and Linux hardware.
| Sighted on | Bare metal servers, Linux ones and Windows ones |
|---|---|
| Tracks | Whole system state, with databases taken consistently |
| Archived for | Retention drawn against a 2000GB pooled allowance |
| Resolved by | Whole server or granular recovery, run with our engineers |
| Observed by | N-able Cove |
Virtual machines are easy to create and easier to forget. Every guest counted on this line gets its own copy, taken with the same care around databases as physical hardware, so the convenience of spinning one up does not become a hole in what is protected.
| Sighted on | Virtual servers, Linux or Windows, on your hypervisor |
|---|---|
| Tracks | Whole guest state, with databases taken consistently |
| Archived for | Retention drawn against a 2000GB pooled allowance |
| Resolved by | Whole guest or granular recovery, run with our engineers |
| Observed by | N-able Cove |
Your tenant will be kept running by Microsoft. A copy of that tenant will not be kept for you, and a recycle bin empties long before an argument over a deleted mailbox concludes. This line lifts separate copies of mail, of files, and of the places conversations happen.
| Sighted on | Microsoft 365 mailboxes, sites, drives and Teams content |
|---|---|
| Tracks | Tenant content, on the schedule set for the line |
| Archived for | Retention drawn against a 1TB pooled allowance |
| Resolved by | Item level restore into the tenant, run with our engineers |
| Observed by | N-able Cove |
Identical reasoning applies over on Google. Mail, drive contents, contacts, calendars, tasks: copied somewhere that is not Google, so a deletion, a departure or a billing dispute never gets the final word on what you still hold.
| Sighted on | Google Workspace mail, drive contents, contacts, calendars, tasks |
|---|---|
| Tracks | Tenant content, on the schedule set for the line |
| Archived for | Retention agreed for the line and written into your record |
| Resolved by | Item level restore into the tenant, run with our engineers |
| Observed by | Dropsuite |
QuickBooks Online offers no undo for a bad import and no spare copy of a year somebody restructured by accident. This line keeps a continuous copy of the company file, priced by company because that is how books are actually kept.
| Sighted on | One company file inside QuickBooks Online |
|---|---|
| Tracks | Ledger changes as they are made |
| Archived for | Retention agreed for the line and written into your record |
| Resolved by | Restore of the ledger, run with our engineers |
| Observed by | Dropsuite |
Nobody backs up the directory, and the directory decides who can reach everything else. Groups, roles, policies and application assignments are copied here, together with a record of alterations as they are made, which is very often where an answer turns up.
| Sighted on | An Entra ID tenant and its configuration |
|---|---|
| Tracks | Directory objects, policy and assignment changes as they occur |
| Archived for | Unlimited retention on this line |
| Resolved by | Configuration restored from the copy, run with our engineers |
| Observed by | Dropsuite |
An untested copy is a hypothesis. This line runs recovery tests to a schedule and produces evidence that what came back was what went in, which is the thing an auditor, an insurer or an uneasy board member is really asking for.
| Sighted on | Systems already covered by another line on this page |
|---|---|
| Tracks | Whether each scheduled test restore completed |
| Archived for | Test evidence kept while the subscription continues |
| Resolved by | A failed test raised with our engineers as an observation |
| Observed by | N-able Cove |
More is assumed about backup than about anything else, so this list runs longer.
Heads up: card statements show FORTIFY 24X7 - Starlight IT Services is a Fortify 24x7 brand, and your subscription is billed by Fortify 24x7.