• Water Wheels and The Cloud Have More in Common Than You May Think

  September 07, 2010

  Historically, factories needed to generate their own power. For example, a water wheel may have been built to power a factory’s machinery, with the construction of the wheel and its operation and maintenance falling entirely on that business. At some point, these local generators were replaced with centralized power generation, where power was generated remotely, distributed as a utility, and priced based upon consumption. There are many reasons why this development was a good thing. Utilities presumably know how to generate power better because that is their primary business, there are economies of scale, the consumer can ramp up or down its consumption quickly and easily, and the consumer doesn’t have to pay for the excess capacity that the consumer does not need.

   

  From:  The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr

  I recently came across this excerpt and it got me to thinking about the data backup options available to today’s businesses.  Those who choose to manage their own backup are not unlike the early factory owners who generated their own power – entirely responsible for the operation and maintenance of a local backup system. Similarly, those who have migrated to an online backup solution, like Carbonite Pro, are like those factory owners who outsourced power consumption to a centralized utility service.  They are free to focus on their core business operations, while only paying for the amount of backup their business consumes each month. Just as the utilities trumped local power generation, I have no doubt that cloud-based services will soon be the defacto data backup method for businesses of all sizes, worldwide.

  As in the days of do-it-yourself power generation, do-it-yourself local backup carries with it inherent inefficiencies and hidden costs.  Here’s an example:  “Harold,” the owner of local company we interviewed (they are resellers for small business phone and data systems) has six computers in the office and three laptops that came and went with the sales people.  In theory all the computers are backed up to a local server with an external hard drive.  Once a week, Sally, the receptionist, had been taking the backup drive home where she swapped it out with the one from the previous week.  In theory, if a fire destroyed their building, they could recover everything to at least where it was the previous Friday. 

  But there were problems:  Sally would go on vacation and the backups wouldn’t get swapped while she was away.  The salespeople with laptops would forget to connect to the office network and start their backup processes.  Nobody ever checked the actual backups to see if they were actually getting done properly and could be restored.  Nobody even checked to see that the external hard drives were working.  The final straw came when Sally decided to leave the company and got into a dispute with her employer over severance.  She refused to return the backup drive until her demands were met. 

   
  Here are the differences between this common backup strategy and using an online backup service like Carbonite:

  • More efficient use of disk space:  Harold used 1TB external drives to back up a mere 20GBs of data, a 2% disk utilization.   A shared service like Carbonite can use more than 95% of its disk space.
  • Greater reliability:  External hard drives are notorious failure-prone – something like 3-4% failure rate per year.  Carbonite stores data on RAID6 redundant arrays that are theoretically 36 million times more reliable than a single drive. 
  • Safety:  The data on the drive in Sally’s basement was not encrypted.  If she lost it, somebody would have the whole company’s data.  Carbonite encrypts everything before it leaves the users’ PCs.  There is NO unencrypted data floating around. 
  • You know it’s working:  Unless you run tests on your external drive, you have no idea whether the backup is really usable.  Carbonite checks the integrity of every backed up file at the time it is stored and again every 3 months.  It will always work. 
  • Because Harold wasn’t in the backup business and really didn’t know much about backups, the whole process was risky, time consuming, and completely irrelevant to the core mission of his business.

  Keeping those water wheels working was completely irrelevant to making sweaters, or shoes, or machinery.  What a pain it must have been to mill owners in the 1800s.  It’s no wonder that they replaced those water wheels with electric motors as soon as they could.  The ones who didn’t eventually went out of business. 

  So it will be with backup.  It’s just a matter of time before people recognize that they are being penny wise but pound foolish with their data assets. 

  — Dave
  CEO, Carbonite

   

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• Your Disc is About to Expire – Please Backup Again

  July 01, 2010

  Those of you out there manually backing up using CDs and DVDs to protect all your previous files are in for some bad news. Having spent a lot of time and energy backing up, imagine how frustrated you would be to discover years down the line the data you 'protected' by backing up has been lost due to the deterioration of its disc.

  
  

   Research published last month by the French National Centre for Scientific Research has discovered data stored on physical discs has a limited life span, in some cases very limited. 

  
  

  After testing the longevity of portable media, results showed discs designed to last for centuries rarely lasted longer then five to ten years, and in some extreme cases merely a year! Additionally, the results revealed the life span of a disc can be artificially aged by heat, water and light, increasing its vulnerability. 

  
  

  This is potentially a big issue for both consumers and businesses. Jerome Duc-Mauge, an executive producer of documentary films, is not fully confident in manual backup. 

  
  

  "This is a big drama, this issue of how long these pictures will last. We don't know. The manufacturer says to us, 'Yeah, five years, 10 years, 15 years'."

  
  

  The question is which would you choose for your 'digital life' insurance? A time-consuming process with a short life span? Or online backup, which automates the process and ensures you can always backup an unlimited amount of data that can not be lost to theft, fire or father time. 

  
  

  If you're reading this, you're most likely already a Carbonite subscriber. But if you're also using CDs and DVDs to backup, make sure you’re double backed up and, as the researchers suggest, you're "spreading digital data rather than keeping it all archived in one place."

  
  

  -Alison

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• Laptop Failure Rates

  November 23, 2009

  I read an interesting article on Yahoo news this morning: 1 in 3 laptops die in the first three years.

  The survey, conducted by SquareTrade, a warranty company, highlighted the following statistics: Looking at the first 3 years of ownership, 31% of laptop owners reported a failure to SquareTrade. Two-thirds of this failure (20.4%) came from hardware malfunctions, and one-third (10.6%) was reported as accidental damage. The complete report is available here: http://www.squaretrade.com/htm/pdf/SquareTrade_laptop_reliability_1109.pdf

  These findings correlate quite well with the actual behavior of our users: approximately 11% of our users have to do a full restore of their data each year. Over three years, that's almost exactly the same 33% number. Another interesting statistic from our own user base is that almost half of all users do a partial restore each year — mostly to recover accidentally deleted or overwritten files.

  I'll bet that if you asked the average computer user what the likelihood is of their computer data getting destroyed, they would guess a much lower number. Having a 1 in 3 chance that you are going to lose everything on your PC only highlights why online backup is so important.

  — Dave
  CEO, Carbonite

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• Think you’re safe backing up to an external hard drive or second computer?

  February 10, 2009

  The Sunday New York Times had this little story regarding one of the passengers on the US Air flight that crashed into the Hudson River:

  “

  When US Airways Flight 1549 went into the Hudson River last month, it gave William Wiley, an engineer at Software Associates, a new meaning for the term "computer crash."

  Mr. Wiley was on his way home to Johnson, Tenn., from the company's headquarters on Long Island. He had years of work on his laptop, carefully backed up on another laptop — but both were on the plane with him.

  Now the two laptops are among approximately 50,000 passenger items that a mortuary company has frozen, in refrigerated trucks, to preserve them until they can be dried, cleaned and returned to their owners."

   

  Good luck getting the data back from a wet and frozen hard drive.

  This particular situation is not likely to happen to anyone, but you can imagine innumerable similar circumstances. The more frequent event is that someone breaks into your house or car and steals your computer and the external backup drive sitting next to it. We hear stories like that all the time.

  In any event, the US Air story, like the California wildfire stories last Fall, all mount up to a compelling reason to backup online where the data is safe from all these hazards.

  
  

  — Dave
  CEO, Carbonite

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• HP Upline and the challenge of large scale backup

  May 02, 2008

  I'm sure that many of you have read that HP’s online backup service went down shortly after it was introduced. It’s back up now, and HP has explained that what they experienced was a "technical glitch." Here are a few links about this story:

  Enterprise Storage Forum: HP Upline Suffers Downtime

  InformationWeek: HP Shuts Down Online Storage Service

  Beta News: Bringing down the cloud: HP's Upline down for a third of its life

  Why am I blogging about HP’s problems? Only because it underscores the difficulty of building a reliable large scale backup service.

  When I was out raising money for Carbonite, one venture capitalist dismissed backup as a "trivial" application. It reminded me of an incident when I was teaching at MIT a few years ago: one of my students insisted that Google wasn't worth billions of dollars because "anyone can write a search engine." It’s true. But Google's barrier to entry is their huge scale. To build a backup service that can flawlessly store and retrieve billions of files is not so easy, as HP has learned.

  When we first started out, we were using Microsoft’s NTFS file system. When we got to about 500 million files, it started to crash and gave us all kinds of problems. When we called Microsoft for help, the engineer on the other end asked us how many files we were storing. When we said "about 500 million", there was silence on the other end of the phone. He said "Uh, well we didn’t really design NTFS for that many files." So we set about building our own proprietary file system that could handle more than a trillion files, because that’s where we’ll be in a couple of years. We currently receive almost 40 million new files every day. And we have close to 7 billion files backed up. We restore millions of files every day.

  To do all that without losing any data is an enormously complicated engineering challenge. We're three and a half years into this effort and there is no shortcut way to get to where we are, no matter how much money you throw at the problem. Our confidence in our own infrastructure is due to the fact that we’ve built a customer base of hundreds of thousands of users. Until a company does that, they’ll never know whether their systems are going to fall over. HP, with all their resources, is going through the same learning curve that we’ve gone through for the last 3 years.

  
  

  — Dave
  CEO, Carbonite

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