The hospital I am working for purchased new servers, desktops, and other networking services from a vendor in 2012. Part of the services offered was automated off site backup of our Windows 2008 R2 Servers and VMs. The quoted price for one year of service @ 75GB was $600. Incremental backups were done everyday, weekly and monthly images were archived - supposedly....
The vendor said they would forward logs and reports on a weekly or daily basis. No report was ever received. When I came on board in late 2012 no one mentioned anything about this. We were doing our own back ups via tape and storing some images off site in a safety deposit box.
At the beginning of the month our hospital Administrator gets a bill for all of 2013's backup to the tune of $900. She then asked me what this bill was for and why didn't anyone know about it. We contacted the vendor and they said they apologized for not getting the bill out sooner but they had simply forgot. I say ok, if you did the backups where are the logs and the testing to show that the backups are working and WHY is the bill now $900 instead of $600. They explain that the logs were supposed to be emailed every day and they would get them to us ASAP. The increase to $900 was because the size of our backups increased to approximately 100 GB.(this sounds about right because we recently had to increase the size of our tapes to accommodate or own backups)
We have been asking for logs and documentation for the 2013 backups and received nothing, nor have they corrected the emails we are supposed to be receiving weekly. I'm looking for some advice - is this kind of redundant backup worthwhile? Is $900 a year a good price for this kind of service? And how upset should I be that they haven't sent us ANYTHING in concerns to the service they are supposed to be providing?
I am really tired of not having any answers to give to the hospital Administrator and I am wondering if there is anyway I can check on these backups? Any input anyone has would be extremely welcome!