One question, I get asked a lot is why does a cloud backup take so long?
The big problem is that the initial point of sale data is so big and there is a lot of data to back up.
There does not seem to be a pattern as sometimes it goes quickly and sometimes it takes forever. Part of the problem is that few SMB have commercial grade internet. So in my experience, the backup times are at least double the times quoted by the salesmen for cloud backups.
This seems to be what others report too.
https://www.cloudwards.net/how-long-should-my-backup-take/
So if you the most backup software says it's six hours for the initial backup. I would suggest you budget 12 hours.
After that many of the cloud backup software can take advantage that it has a copy and so only requires a smaller amount of time to send down, this is what we call sending the changes. How big are these changes depends on many factors including your software, whether you use encryption on your database (note you should not do this if you intend to use cloud backup which is a security issue to many people in itself), how much work you do and your cloud backup software? Still, I would budget about double the quoted figure times quoted as a first level approximation.
All this is often not the problem in itself as the computer is just left on till its done what the problem usually is, is that while it is doing the backup the internet in the shop runs very slow. People complain that they cannot get an email, they cannot order and that if they are using EFTPOS, it does not work.
One option I do suggest is that you set your cloud backup to only work when the shop is closed say your shop runs from 6 am to 9 pm, have your cloud backup only operate between 10 pm and 5 am. This also has advantages as far as ransomware is concerned too.
Note most of our clients that use cloud backup software use it as an emergency backup to their regular backup.
