Backup To The Web

I couldn’t resist sharing this article from the Associated Press:

Oops! Tech Error Wipes Out Alaska Info
http://breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8NVTE600&show_article=1

It seems that a technician reformatted a hard drive containing an account worth $38 Billion (that’s with a B). Not only that, but he formatted the backup drive as well. Undaunted, the IT staff went to their backup tapes, only to find all of them unreadable.

Luckily, there was a third backup - 300 boxes of paper documents. When the dust settled, it cost the state of Alaska more than $200,000 and six weeks to recreate the data. No fire, no hurricane, no tornado - just a technician doing the right thing on the wrong machine.

And we would probably have charged $22.95 a month for enough space to handle their backups. Think of the irony in that. We could give them 726 years of backup for $200,000. In fact, we would be happy to give them a rate - say, a thousand years, same price?

What’s your data worth? Can you recreate it? Think of the Alaska case: if the files had been worth less than $200,000, the data would simply have been lost, being more expensive to recover than its value.

It took several months, but Backup To The Web has finally achieved a Google Page Rank of 4!  It’s a start, and we have all of you to thank for it.

Thanks to all of you who have linked to our site, and to everyone who has visited, tried us out and become clients.  Because of you, we have reached “break-even” - our income exceeds our outgo, six months earlier than we projected. 

Why do people like us?  For one, we provide a great full featured backup service.  Second, it’s less expensive than any of our competitors.  Third, we answer your support questions quickly and with good humor.  What more could you want?

I’m sure that a lot of people are wondering which online backup service they should use.  That’s assuming, however, that they even know what online backup is, but that’s another challenge altogether.

You’ve probably noticed that there are dozens of online backup services.  These include the inexpensive ones (Mozy, Carbonite for two) and the expensive ones.  You can pay anywhere from nothing to $100 per month for 5GB, and from $6 to upwards of $500 per month for 50GB.

What’s the difference? 

The first difference is the feature set.  The expensive companies let you save multiple versions of each file (as many as you wish), let you store files (deleted ones, too), for as long as you wish.  You can schedule the backups at your leisure, your data is encrypted and only you have the key, and your data is saved in two widely separated centers for safety.  They send you e-mail if you miss a backup.  You can restore from any machine, even if the backup software is not installed.

The inexpensive companies offer backups, plain and simple.  Depending on the service, they may include some of the “expensive” features, but generally, you’ll find that they store your current data and everything else is deleted within a few days.  Some don’t store your data in an encrypted form, and if they do, some of them have access to the key.  There have been reports that some of them also “throttle” your uploads to discourage you from using all your space.  One user I talked to said he was trying to upload 35GB - he had been at it for two months and had succeeded in uploading only half.

The second difference is stability.  Most of the expensive companies do online backup as part of a larger set of services.  Many are ISPs, large consulting firms or other large groups, making their money from many sources.  Most are stable, profitable and dependable - and expensive.  Their main clients are large businesses with deep pockets.

The inexpensive companies are more of a gamble.  They are usually online ventures - new startups who are aiming to become the next YouTube or Friendster.  If they take off, they will make big bucks (think of Google) or maybe be bought up by a bigger company YouTube).  But many new internet startups reach a plateau very quickly, yet they can’t expect to show a profit unless they hit a certain size.  A good example is Amazon, a great idea that wasn’t profitable until it became the largest bookseller on the planet.  One inexpensive provider just put out a press release - they have obtained several million dollars in venture capital.  Now, that’s pressure.

Both the expensive and inexpensive companies have one thing in common - if they can’t become profitable, they’re going to close their doors.  With the big overhead of some startups, that’s a definite possibility.  They have employees, office buildings with exercise rooms, ad agencies, company cars and… investors.

Where does that leave Backup To The Web?  If you’ve been following this blog, you know we’re a pretty lean outfit.  We offer the same services as the expensive providers, but near the price of the inexpensive ones.  Do we, perhaps, end up with the worst of both worlds?  We hope not.

Let’s look at us:  we expect to achieve break-even with a very small number of users, because our opening scale is quite small.  At our current rate, we’ll reach break-even within a year.  And, since we have no debt and we aren’t living on the revenue, we can wait it out for a long time.  Not that we don’t want to be the next Google - we’re just willing to wait a bit.

And what about security?  No, we don’t have moats and bunkers and armed guards, nor generators with crankcase heaters, nor underground tanks of diesel fuel - we have something better.  We save your data on fault-tolerant servers in two places, more than three hundred miles apart, equipped with two hours of uninterruptible power.  Neither site is near a volcano, a fault line or a hurricane zone.  All your stored data is DES encrypted, and we don’t have the key.  If the primary site is knocked out, the secondary site will be back up within an hour, with all data intact.  Should someone burst through the doors with machine guns and steal our servers, all your data is safe because it’s encrypted.

Keep these things in mind when you’re looking at an online backup provider.  All of them have something to offer, but we’re really hoping you’ll choose us!

Backup To The Web’s client comes in several flavors: Windows, Mac, Linux, Netware and Solaris.  But - that doesn’t tell the entire story.

How about AIX, FreeBSD, SCO Unix, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Slackware, Knoppix, Gentoo, SimplyMEPIS, Mandriva, Damn small, CentOS, Mandriva, Xandros Desktop, Sabayon for a start?  Go see www.distrowatch.com for a few zillion more versions. 

What do all these have in common?  Well, they should all be able to run Backup To The Web.  Our client is Java-based, making it theoretically compatible with all these systems.  Plus, they’re all linux or unix based, sort of.

Naturally, we’re experts at all of them.  Yeah, right - I’m definitely kidding.  There’s too many possibilities, each with their own tricks and peculiarities.  It’s a little like the English language - I’m from Nebraska, USA, but there are places in London that I can’t understand a word they say.

So, we need a little help.  Have you installed Backup To The Web on any new platforms?  Would you like to?  The client has a 30 day trial, so it won’t cost you a thing to try.  We’ll be glad to help from this end, verifying that everything works correctly, but as for installing the client on exotic platforms, you’re on your own.

So what’s in it for you?  Fortune and glory, folks - fortune and glory.  If you are the first to install Backup To The Web on a new OS and we can verify that it’s working, you win!  We’re not sure what you win yet, but it will be something good. 

For starters, installers of new distros will receive a special designation of “contributor” on the forums, and the right to list your distros in the signature block as contributor (i.e. “Slackware Linux - contributor”).  When we build an install document from your findings, your name or handle will be attached: “courtesy of xxxxx”.  We will have a contributor page, listing your name and distros. If you have a web site and want it displayed, we’ll include it.

Well, that takes care of the “glory” part - how about the fortune?  First, do one install writeup and we’ll give you 5GB of Backup To The Web for three months free.  For three writeups, we’ll sweeten the deal to 50GB.  More than three?  We’ll have to talk about it - maybe Backup To The Web gear - T shirts, mugs, socks, nerf guns?  Maybe guided tours of Backup To The Web World Headquarters (watch your step, please)?

The rules are simple:  pick a distro that hasn’t been written about in the forum (Windows and Mac excluded), download the appropriate client, then tell us what it took to install it.  Give us some screen prints if you can, and write it up!  In the event of two submissions for the same distro, we’ll decide the winner based on which entry is simpler.

We will verify your installation, look at your screenshots and build some doc, maybe even a demo.  All entries become the property of Backup To The Web, but the glory is all yours!

Seriously, we could use your help, and we would like to make you part of our team.  Can’t find a distro to install but you have a Backup To The Web tip?  If it’s a great one, we’ll make you a forum contributor.

Cheers,
Cliff

Sorry - it’s been several days since I wrote the last installment of our story, but I have an excuse! Yes, I know - hand your note to the teacher and sit down.

Earlier this week, I was doing some early morning work with my computer, Golem. When I finished, it occurred to me that I hadn’t shut Golem off in weeks, so maybe he needed some rest. I powered him down and went to the office.

Upon returning home in the afternoon, I pressed the power button and found myself in a continuous reboot. In other words, my Windows XP installation was toast. Looking around, I found an Acronis backup image of my drive, dated September 7, over a month ago. Great.

Then I realized - I’m in the backup business now! Sure enough, my entire C: drive (minus \Windows) was resident on our Backup To The Web servers. I pulled out my Acronis boot disk and restored my C: drive to a month ago, and it booted up fine, if a little bit dated. To keep from repeating my original problem, I decided not to totally restore “in place”. Instead, I set the Backup To The Web client to “restore”, selected “all files” as of the day of the disaster, but elected to restore it to one of my empty drives. I pressed “start restore”, and stood back.

The Backup To The Web client began to restore, pulling back about 600 megs of files.  In the morning, I found that all my files had been brought back, including my precious Outlook .pst files.

Maybe it’s catching - Kevin and Jeff have both had failures lately, and Jeff had to restore from his online backup account.  Kevin was able to get the hard drive running long enough to extract his data. 

I thought it was strange - so many problems - until I realized that the three of us have more computing power than existed in the world before, say, 1960.  I have three computers, Kevin has five, I think, including one in his 4-year-old’s room, and Jeff - what can I say - you need to wear a lead apron and goggles to get near his computers.  (It’s alive! Alive!)

Well, I’m back in business, so I’ll have to think of another excuse to keep from blogging.

We’ve decided to place our web site on a commercial hosting service. That will let us generate status messages to users even if the backup server is down. That leaves the actual backup function to our new servers.

Okay - moment of truth, time to start buying stuff.

Jeff started doing research and he decided on the parts for our two servers.

Read the rest of this entry »

“You gotta have a gimmick
If you want to get applause.”
–From the musical “Gypsy”

Okay, that’s us in a nutshell, looking for our gimmick. What’s going to be ours? We’re selling backup services in a crowded market, with prices all over the place. We can’t be the cheapest - some of these yahoos (pardon the plug) are giving it away. We don’t want to be the most expensive, though if we sold it for a million dollars a month and just got one customer… nah, that wouldn’t work… I don’t think….

Our gimmick is going to determine our price, so let’s get to it!

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, so now it’s time to get out the calculator.

Looking at sites, it appears that there are two camps - 1) the full-featured, wildly expensive sites, and 2) the wildly inexpensive sites with few features.

Among the expensive sites, many of them use exactly the same software we’re going to use - Ahsay. Looking at their prices, I’m impressed. Let’s look at monthly costs for 50GB of storage: Data Deposit Box - $157.17. VIPBackup - $97.50. VCO America - $49.95. Storeitoffsite - $150 (for 40GB). Offsite Backup Solutions - $100.00. Data Vault - $49.95 (with “fair use policies” on bandwidth).

How about the inexpensive sites? Carbonite - $5 (unlimited). Mozy - $9.95 (for 60 GB).

Why are the inexpensive sites so, ah, inexpensive? Mainly, they have limitations.

Read the rest of this entry »

My background is consulting - I have extensive experience with a major mainframe application used by banks around the world.  My job is to make changes and enhancements to this application.

You might find it interesting that most big banks don’t write their own software.  Nearly every major bank runs one of three large banking applications, all written by software vendors.  The banks figure that they should reserve their programming staff for building applications that make the bank different, not for those that are the same as all others. 

Read the rest of this entry »

In June of 2006, three of us (Jeff, Kevin, and me) began discussing the idea of opening an online backup service.  It seemed like an interesting idea, if we could figure out the technology and manage the expenses.  We all have a common bond - Kevin and Jeff are my sons.

 Each of us had something to bring to the table.  I have a lot of experience with project management, large and small computer systems, and spent 15 years as an independent consultant to large banking institutions.  Jeff is an experienced lead technician, proficient with desktops, servers, Windows and Linux.  Kevin is an experienced web designer and currently hosts several other web businesses, including www.classic-novels.com, www.kevinpeterson.net and www.spinsmart.com. Both Jeff and Kevin have sold extensively on EBay.

 I asked Jeff if he would be interested in such a venture.  He was enthusiastic, especially after I told him he could build all the servers.  Jeff already has more computers than I care to count and is always up to a new challenge.

 Kevin agreed to do the web pages and promotion.  His own sites have been written up in Wired, the New York Times online, even British Rail’s onboard magazine, so I felt pretty secure with his talents.

 So… we have a pool of talent - so what are we going to sell?