Connected
Getting Connected To Online Backups
Jon Collins, 18 March 2004
I’ve long been an advocate of getting other people to do things for me. There are several reasons for this, which I’d like to claim are mostly down to time and will, but I must also confess that competence is a key factor. Fortunately, I know I’m not alone, particularly in the area of data protection.
Let’s do a quick straw poll. How many people out there back up their work laptops? Now, there will be a certain number who have no choice – the IT department has configured things to make sure it happens. Many others, however, will not. Now, how many people know somebody who has lost all the data on their laptop, through theft, hardware failure or accident? Look at all those hands – it doesn’t look good, does it? And that’s in the corporate environment.
Things get even more scary in the home, the small-office-home-office or the small business, where only the most anal are actually making sure that their highly valued data, be it digital photos, email, sales reports or partially developed programs, are being backed up. Given that computers are still so fragile, begs the question – why? Why do we leave ourselves so vulnerable? The only answer, I’ve come to the conclusion, is that it is actually quite tricky to protect data. Sure, anyone can burn a CD, but where do you put it? If you do it every week, how do you know which is the one you should refer to? If you do a full backup, it will be too slow, but an incremental backup (picking up only those things that have changed) is almost impossible to manage, as anyone who has trawled through the past six months of increments looking for a particular file, will attest. The proprietary formats used by many backup packages don’t help, meaning you often have to remember what you used for the backup, so you can do a restore. Now, there may be a package out there that has resolved these issues, but I’m not aware of it off the top of my head, and if I’m not (just your average, computer-literate soul), what chance has anybody who hasn’t spent the last 15 years working in IT?
The point is, there are answers, but you really have to work hard to find them out. There has to be a better way. In the quest for the answer, I realised that the only solution that would work for someone like me is where somebody else takes the problem away.
To this end, I’ve been trialling a service from a company called Connected.com ( HYPERLINK “http://www.connected.com” www.connected.com). Essentially, what this does is take backups, of my information, to their servers, somewhere out there on the Internet. Now, before anyone gets alarmed by the concept of putting one’s private data in the hands of an unknown third party, let me stress that (a) it is encrypted, and (b) Connected has some very big customers, here’s a list ( HYPERLINK “http://www.connected.com/customers/index.asp” http://www.connected.com/customers/index.asp) if you’re interested. Following the adage that security is about risk management, each company and individual needs to assess the risk for themselves, but I have taken the view that if it’s good enough for Deloitte & Touche, Visa International and Lockheed Martin, it’s good enough for me.
As for the service itself, there is remarkably little to it. To get up and running I had to download and install an agent, which runs on my PC as a little icon in the system tray. I then had to specify which files I wanted to back up – for me, this was the My Documents directory, and the elusive little place where Microsoft insists on hiding my Outlook inbox. Yes, I did try moving it a couple of years ago, but nothing ever worked as it should after that, so I learned my lesson – and if you’re looking, try right-clicking on “Personal Folders” in Outlook and selecting “Properties”, it’s in there somewhere. There were some other bits and bobs – nothing is ever that simple – but to select the backup set was quite a straightforward operation. And then – I just let things run. The first backup was decidedly, hopelessly uncomfortable, but perhaps understandable given that 1.5Gb of files were identified and needed to be sent over an ISDN line – fifteen years is a long time to be squirreling things away. It wasn’t so bad, files were compressed by about 50% and I let things run over the weekend.
After that, once every couple of days, I have let the backup software chunter away and do its stuff. Personally, I think there is probably a more efficient way to identify whether any files have changed, than have to scan the entire directory structure every time, but this has not been a major issue.
Indeed, six months on, there have been very few major issues. The only one I can think of is how the Connected client works with large files – again, it’s not all that bright. If I shift stuff around from one place to another on my hard drive, it doesn’t tend to realise that they are the same, and so it performs a new backup. On the same subject, while I understand that the client should be coping with Outlook files (which can become very large), it doesn’t always seem to do what is necessary particularly with offline folders. This can be a pain if I’ve been shifting information from one offline folder to another. Really though, these are niggles rather than showstoppers.
On the plus side, I now have a facility on my computer that is ensuring that every change to my own information is being saved somewhere offsite. The Explorer view in the Connected client shows me what’s been backed up, and restoration is a simple matter of selecting a file or folder and requesting the restore. I can choose to see only the most recent versions of files, or multiple versions, so I can restore, say, the version preceding when I had the moment of euphoric wisdom after last week’s half bottle of Chianti. There’s no hunting through CDs, no chasing which person who knows how to load the jukebox. Job done. I confess, I haven’t done a complete bare-metal restore of all my data using this service – to be honest, the 1.5Gb download that would be incurred was a little off-putting – but the omens are good.
From a wider industry perspective, what Connected.com demonstrates is that it is possible to deliver an Internet based service cost-effectively and deliver real value to the user. The company does a single thing well, which is probably the best approach for all parties. Connected can concentrate on how to make the best use of its own IT infrastructure, for example, using the most cost effective storage arrays, and shifting data between fast, expensive disks and slower, cheaper storage as necessary. Its pricing makes the package accessible to all but the most tight fisted of users (these are likely to be the anal ones anyway, so they’re more than capable to do their own backups). ASPs died because the level of service they could provide wasn’t considered up to scratch. There are some examples of companies that have emerged from the ashes, the (too-)frequently quoted example is salesforce.com ( HYPERLINK “http://www.salesforce.com” www.salesforce.com) but good on ’em, if they’ve made the business work. There will be others, each meeting different needs – for example, Web-based email security and compliance providers, such as MessageLabs (www.messagelabls.com), Black Spider ( HYPERLINK “http://www.blackspider.com” www.blackspider.com) and Zantaz ( HYPERLINK “http://www.zantaz.com” www.zantaz.com) – each is doing one thing well, meaning that the onus is on each organisation to decide how best to use the right combination of services.
Ironically there are a number of other companies that provide an awfully similar service to Connected.com, but they’re all arriving from different perspectives. Hosted providers of Microsoft Sharepoint such as Cobweb ( HYPERLINK “http://www.cobweb.co.uk” www.cobweb.co.uk), for example, enable users to upload information to Web-based servers so they can be shared – and the backup is delivered as part of the package. Companies delivering file transfer management, for example Akamai ( HYPERLINK “http://www.akamai.net” www.akamai.net), that provides the backbone for Apple’s iTunes, are also enabling resilient file sharing. Peer to peer file sharing companies, for example Groove ( HYPERLINK “http://www.groove.net” www.groove.net), provide a level of data integrity by virtue of the fact that files are replicated between everyone in a workgroup. None of these companies would consider themselves to be in competition with each other, but they offer a set of overlapping facets of a nebulous, nameless service that ensures both data accessibility and integrity, anywhere, any time. We are already used to somebody else having access to most of our data (how many people encrypt their emails before sending them?) so the idea of Web-based storage should not be too offensive.
The biggest question this raises – to my mind, anyway – is why such facilities as online backup are not delivered as bundled services from the likes of Dell or HP, in the same way that they bundle Antivirus. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time, and it is highly likely that it will be only though OEM deals that offerings such as Connected.com will reach the mainstream. At the end of the day, use of online services is, to many small businesses and home users, no more or less than an admittance that we can’t do everything ourselves. And the sooner we own up to that, the better.