Rumors are all around for the much hyped ‘G-Drive’.  Initially people said G-Drive will become a part of Gmail and will help the users to store emails, documents and pictures etc. Now it all turns to ‘Google Docs’ as the Google Docs Product Manager Vijay Bangaru announced the storage options.

Google Docs now offers 1 GB of free storage and users can purchase more for $0.25/GB. Being in the backup business, we do come across questions on how Google offers raw storage at such a low price point and the same kind of price point is not being offered for online data backup. The reason is that there is a significant difference between raw storage and data backup. What Google charges ($0.25 / GB) is just for the raw storage and there is no intelligence to the storage.

Data Backup is lot more than raw storage as there is a backup application which intelligently processes the data and ensures data protection with the help of features like versioning, file retention, customized restore process etc. On top of that a backup application offers a completely automated process with protection for millions of files with sophisticated motoring, reporting and management features to identify problems if any and troubleshoot quickly. So it is actually an apple to orange comparison when you compare Data Protection and Raw Storage.

An analogy to the above situation is a SaaS based CRM service. Ultimately even for the CRM service it is about storing data. But CRM services are never priced based on the raw storage as the value is in the intelligence of the CRM application.

Many say G-Drive, the mother of all storage, will be released soon and will result in the end of all online backup companies. But as I said earlier, data backup differs significantly from raw storage. For online data protection applications raw storage is just one component of the whole solution and the significant value lies in the intelligence, convenience, the ease of use and automation it offers in backing up large number of files along with the monitoring, reporting and management features it offers to identify issues and troubleshoot quickly. Hence we feel that G-Drive will simply be one other storage option for a full databackup service rather than being something that will obsolete the online data backup industry.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups.

Dropbox, provider of Internet file synchronization, sharing and security services, today announced that it has passed the 4,000,000 user milestone. Now more people than ever are experiencing the benefits of having their digital lives in sync – having all of their files, media and projects available to them from any location or device. Once synced with Dropbox, these files are automatically available to share with their friends and colleagues, making sharing and collaboration easier than ever for millions of people. This rapid growth is another example of increasing use of cloud-based services in the everyday lives of consumers, students and businesses.

“We are delighted to see so many people embracing this new way of syncing and sharing their files and media,” said Drew Houston, founder and CEO of Dropbox. “The success of our community and their passion for Dropbox is powerful validation for our vision of the company – that the Internet can become a seamless extension of all of our desktops and devices.”

Using Dropbox, users around the world now keep their office documents, photos, music and other files in sync and automatically available across their computers and devices. Supporting Mac, Windows and Linux PCs, and iPhone and iPod Touch devices, Dropbox seamlessly integrates with the local operating system so that files are synced and backed up directly from the desktop, allowing users to get the benefits of the service without changing how they work. Additionally, Dropbox folders can be shared across not only across computers, but also around the world, letting users easily collaborate and share files with friends, family and co-workers. Basic Dropbox two gigabyte accounts are available for free, with add-on plans offering additional storage and functionality available for a fee.

Industry Recognition

Dropbox’s strong user growth is complemented with broad recognition from the industry as a leader in the file sync and collaboration space.

- Dropbox was awarded the Crunchie for Best Internet App at an event this month hosted by TechCrunch, GigaOM and VentureBeat in San Francisco

- In December, Dropbox received the 2009 “Eddy” Editor’s Choice Award from Macworld

- In 2009, Dropbox won PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice

In addition, Dropbox was featured in numerous 2009 Top 10 Lists and awards, including ReadWriteWeb’s 10 Most Exciting Web Apps, Laptop Magazine’s Best Online Storage App, Lifehacker’s Top 10 Cross-Platform Apps, and the Apple Blog’s Best iPhone Apps.

Expanded Management Team

https://www.dropbox.com/ is also announcing that Adam Gross has joined the company as Senior Vice President, Marketing and Sales. Gross spent the past seven years at salesforce.com as Vice President of Platform and Developer Marketing, where he helped grow the company from early-stage to over $1b in revenue. During his tenure, Gross launched key cloud computing technologies including salesforce.com’s Web services API and the Force.com platform-as-a-service.

“I’m thrilled to be part of Dropbox, and to help accelerate the success the team has already achieved,” said Adam Gross, SVP of Marketing and Sales at Dropbox. “As the entire industry shifts from a PC-centric to Internet model, there is a tremendous opportunity to bring the benefits and success of cloud computing to consumers and teams everywhere, with Dropbox playing a key role in that transformation.”

About Dropbox

Dropbox is the easiest way to share files across computers and with other people. Millions of people use the service to sync, share and secure their files and media across all of their PCs, phones and devices. By keeping their files on their desktops and in the cloud, Dropbox users have their most important information available wherever they are, and shared across their families, friends and teams. Founded in 2007, Dropbox is funded by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.

SOURCE Dropbox

If you love the free 2GB online storage plans offered by Mozy, Fabrik, and others, you’ll wax ecstatic over Memopal’s free 3GB plan. An extra gigabyte? I’ve always assumed that a Rhodes Scholar somewhere had figured out that 2GB account is just enough to get you hooked on online backup, yet not quite enough for most folks to fit everything. The extra space makes a world of difference.

An extra gigabyte isn’t all that Memopal Online Backup has going for it. It’s easy to use, and a bit prettier (if busier) than its aforementioned competitors. You have must live with a rather conspicuous “Buy” button at the top of the main program dialog, but that’s a small price since you’ll rarely visit there. Speaking of price, the next level of service is 200GB for $49 per year, which is more than competitive. The company even claims it has servers on multiple continents for locational redundancy; i.e., if one location goes down, your data is still safe.

The language used by Memopal is often interesting. It notifies you that it’s “Crawling” when it’s inspecting and cataloging the folders you or the program has decided to back up. And when it’s finished backing up, you see a system tray notification that the backup was “taken.” I suppose that makes sense if you consider the backup a snapshot of your data. What’s far more interesting is that Memopal can be used on up to 10 PCs-as long as you don’t run over your account limit.

Browsing backups and restoring files via your local PC (you may also access them via Web browser from any PC) is a bit different than it is with most programs. Memopal creates a My Memopal icon under Other in Windows Explorer which is actually a secure Webdav connection rendered as a Web folder. As a Web folder, you’ll notice that the location of files appears as a URL. It’s no more difficult than with Memopal’s competitors. However, all the URLs might be a tad disconcerting at first for less tech-savvy customers, so I thought I’d mention it.

In my two days of testing, Memopal worked great for me. It has the usual options, such as throttling to let you raise or lower the computer time and resources it takes to perform backups. The only thing I missed–and I didn’t miss it much–was a local backup option. All in all, I have a new favorite online backup service. 3GB, multiple PCs, Internet file access: Get yourself an account and use it.

Source PCWorld – Get 15% Discount here

Livedrive, a popular provider of simple and secure online backup, today released a new iPhone app called Livedrive Mobile. The app is free for Livedrive customers and available from all iTunes App Stores worldwide. It lets Livedrive customers access their backups at any time from their iPhone or iPod Touch – including viewing Office or PDF documents, streaming music, displaying photographs and watching videos.

Livedrive already lead the way with extremely easy to use and simple to install online backup. Once the backup software is installed on a PC it just works in the background to protect files as the user works – there’s no need to set a schedule or remember to back up. And once the files are backed up online, customers can access them through a feature rich web portal – including playing their music, viewing their photos and watching movies from any web browser.

The new iPhone app takes this accessibility to a new level – allowing users unprecedented access to the files on their PC. The app lets users quickly and easily browse through all of the files they’ve backed up, and then view them instantly – all streamed through the iPhone’s 3G or Wifi connection. iPhone users are therefore no longer restricted by the space on their device – if their music or photo collections are too big, they can still access them at any time.

Andrew Michael, Livedrive’s CEO, says: “We’re delighted to be able to launch the new iPhone app just before the festive season! Livedrive’s core goals are security and accessibility – we want to help people protect their data and be able to get at it whenever they want. This new iPhone app is a massive step forward in achieving these goals, and will enable our customers to get so much more from their Livedrive subscription.”

The iPhone application comes free with any Livedrive Backup account, which costs only $6.95 or £3.95 per month for unlimited storage space. It is available in the App Store immediately, or from www.livedrive.com/iphone

About Livedrive
Livedrive is creating technology that will revolutionise the way people store and access their files, photos, music, videos and other digital content. Livedrive is backed by Andrew Michael, founder of Fasthosts Internet Limited, the UK’s largest and most successful Internet hosting company, which he sold in 2006 for over $120m. For more information, go to www.livedrive.com

Source LiveDrive

ZumoDrive, the personal content mover that brings consumers’ content to all their devices, today announced it raised $1.5 million in venture funding from both previous and new investors.

ZumoDrive, which recently launched a new version, will use the funding invest in product development. The technology startup will also focus on building channel relationships to more widely distribute ZumoDrive.

New investor Sherpalo Ventures led the funding round and was joined by previous investors Tandem Entrepreneurs and VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron. Bergeron is the largest limited partner of Tandem Entrepreneurs who made an initial investment in the Company in 2007.

”ZumoDrive has a rapidly growing user base that is already generating strong revenue, so this funding is simply a boost that will drive additional improvements in the product to make this the best solution for users” said Shriram, founder of Sherpalo Ventures LLC. “As consumers continue to purchase additional mobile and portable devices, ZumoDrive is poised to be a key player in helping them access content seamlessly from any device.”

The funding round follows the launch of ZumoDrive 1.0, which enables users to access their music playlists, photo albums and document folders on any device. ZumoDrive mimics a standard hard drive but saves content in the cloud and then streams it to each device instead of saving local copies, making it the killer app for the netbook and other devices with limited storage.

The new version of ZumoDrive wirelessly syncs playlists between devices, auto-detects content, and lets users link file folders on their device to ZumoDrive only once so that changes in that folder will always be linked to ZumoDrive. It also integrates with media applications especially well so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content. Additionally, ZumoDrive released a new version of their iPhone app which supersizes the device, allowing users to enjoy all their content on their iPhone without worrying about exceeding local storage capacity.

”This additional funding positions us to continue to accelerate the rapid growth we have experienced this year,” said David Zhao, founder and CEO of Zumodrive. “We’re looking forward to working closely with our investors in a really exciting and prosperous 2010.”

This funding follows previous rounds raised from Douglas Bergeron, Tandem and seed-stage startup funding firm Y Combinator. Zecter was the founding company and Y Combinator participant that became ZumoDrive.

About ZumoDrive
ZumoDrive connects consumers to their content on any mobile device. With patent pending technology, ZumoDrive allows users to bring their music, photos, videos, and documents with them even on mobile devices that are limited in local storage capacity. Zecter, the company behind ZumoDrive, was founded in 2007 and has received funding from Ram Shriram, Tandem Entrepreneurs, Douglas Bergeron and Y Combinator.

Source Backup Review

After winning a National i Award earlier in the year, Memory Box have won at the APICTA awards held in Melbourne last night as part of the Asia Pacific Digital Innovation Summit.

In further proof that Memory Box is a ground breaking product, it took out the Tools and Infrastructure category. 150 International competitors in 16 categories and across more than 20 regional economies were competing for the APICTA awards.

The APICTA is an international awards programme which is aimed at increasing ICT awareness in the community and assisting in bridging the digital divide. By providing networking and product benchmarking opportunities to ICT innovators and entrepreneurs in the region, the programme is designed to stimulate ICT innovation and creativity, promote economic and trade relations, facilitate technology transfer, and offer business-matching opportunities via exposure to venture capitalists and investors.

Trevor Glen, Managing Director of Memory Box commented:

“This is a great result for us and gives Memory Box further exposure into the Asia Pacific region. It could not have come at a better time as we complete our final market testing.”

Memory Box provides an innovative solution to online backup by using a community of users on which parts of the backups are stored. It is the first system to use a community of networked computers to store backups rather than a single server in a data centre.

Every year, one in 10 hard drives fail and 40% of computer users lose precious memories or hard work…yet many users still do not backup their files. Memory Box research showed this was often due to apathy and users seeing it as a time consuming hassle. The Memory Box solution is specifically designed to solve this as it is automated and runs in the background of a user’s computer after a simple set up.

Anyone interested in trialling Memory Box can take part in final market testing by logging on to www.memoryboxbackup.com

Storage is cheap and getting cheaper all of the time. Customer acquisition costs can be high. It turns to be much much cheaper for us to give users some level of free account and use that as our marketing tool instead of working so hard on existing paid marketing channels. So as of today, Backupify is free for the next 6 weeks.

If you sign up during this time period, you get unlimited storage, for free. You get an account that is not a free trial, not free for a limited time, free forever. You can backup your Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook (our app is here), Basecamp, FriendFeed, Twitter, and a total of 15 services we backup. And it is 100% free. We don’t sell your data or anything like that.

You are probably wondering how we make money giving away accounts for free. The answer is that we have a lot more data now on the different types of customers that use our service, and we are building features for the small business and advanced consumer users. Those users will pay for premium accounts. Until then, our goal is to give this away for free for a while to get as many people as possible using our service. This helps push the limits of our technology, test the outlier cases, and gives us more user feedback to incorporate on our product development roadmap.

So if you find yourself storing more and more data online, and you think it might be nice to have your own copy of that data just in case, sign up for Backupify today.

UPDATE: If you have an existing free trial or free twitter account, you have automatically been upgraded to the full free account.

Source Backupify Blog

Sign up for a free account here

BackMii has launched a safer online Backup service with optional archiving aimed at capturing the small business and home user market globally.

BackMii was created with importantdifferentiators to make it a smart choice for small business and consumers.

BackMii CTO and Co-founder, Hugh Emberson states that, “People backup to keep their data safe. So it is essential that the method of storing their backup is safe.

BackMii’s online backup is over 100 times safer than most other providers who store only a single copy of a user’s data, or who typically store a copy on a single RAID array. BackMii stores a user’s data in triplicate, on three servers, in two geographically remote locations. The user only pays for one copy.

With the recent reported loss of customers’ data by a well known provider, BackMii’s launch of this safer service is timely.”

CEO and Co-founder Vanessa Wilson adds, “BackMii’s other big advantage over most providers is that we also offer online archiving. So with the click of a button, you can keep automatic daily versions of your digital backup forever, or as long as you choose. Even if you have deleted a file off your computer months or years ago, you can get it back from your BackMii archive easily, via the Internet.

Archiving is ideal for any business required or wishing to keep records, and it’s essential for home users who want to keep their family photos and spreadsheets safe forever. It greatly increases the attractiveness of online backup to users and offers an affordable, safe and automated alternative to manual paper archiving.

BackMii’s business edition BackMii Pro, enables an account holder to backup and give trusted employees access to specified computers’ backups via sub-accounts. The account holder, usually the business owner, can therefore ensure that all of the data on their employees’ computers is backed up and archived.

Now all businesses and professional services practices can safeguard themselves against future legal claims and meet compliance requirements by safely, automatically, backing up and archiving all digital data of their employees, including emails and contracts. Even if the data is on their employee’s laptop. Even if an employee leaves the business, their data will still be accessible online in the business’ archive.

BackMii’s aim is to bring safe and simple online backup and archiving to businesses and consumers globally. BackMii is affordably priced. Our per-GB pricing is cheap, we include unlimited computers under one plan, and we include 60 days of backup history for free. BackMii Archiving is also reasonably priced and is billed only on the difference between your last backup and the archived version.

By creating an affordable, simple, online backup service with optional archiving, and by making online backup safe to rely upon, we believe that we are offering a product that consumers and businesses need and will love.”

BackMii offers a 15 day free trial of both its home and business version, and a 30 day money back guarantee to all new customers.

About:

BackMii is a private company founded by entrepreneurs with start-up, and software security, robustness and scalability expertise. BackMii’s aim is to provide safer, simple, affordable online backup and archiving protection to small businesses and consumers globally.

BackMii’s online backup is designed to be simple to install and use, so that anyone can use it. It automatically backs up a user’s digital information, including photos, emails, spreadsheets and financial documents, and protects it from data loss in the event of computer crash, deletion, natural disaster or theft. All files are encrypted first on the user’s machine, and when stored on BackMii’s remote servers. Users can retrieve their files quickly from any computer, via the Internet.

BackMii offers three services: BackMii Home for consumers, BackMii Pro for small to medium businesses, and BackMii Archiving for home or business users who wish to keep their backed up data forever, or a shorter specified time.

Source Backupreview

15 days Free trial, 20 GB for $ 9,95 monthly

We’re pleased to announce a big update to the ZumoDrive iPhone app that hit the iTunes Store last week.  If you’ve been using ZumoDrive on your iPhone, you may have already received the update.  If you’re not using it yet, what are you waiting for?  It’s FREE!