Many of our customers contact us to ask, “What’s the difference between BackupRight Pro and BackupRight Express?”

Well, to clear things up we have put together a great comparison chart.

Take a look at the new BackupRight Pro vs. BackupRight Express Features Chart.

Coastal Community Credit Union in Nanaimo, B.C. has reported a theft that threatens its 120,000 members.

A courier truck pulled up to the Credit Union to make its regular transport of backup tapes when thieves made off with them. Although the backup tapes do not have PIN numbers or access codes, they do contain personal information and the social security numbers of the members. CCCU’s CEO is reassuring the public by asserting that he doesn’t believe the criminals can hack the encryption security on the tapes.

Coastal Community Credit Union isn’t alone, the day after their theft the state of Ohio reported that a backup tape with similar information for more than 60,000 Ohio state employees was stolen from an intern’s car.

Via Dark Reading

At BackupRight we work hard to provide the most cost effective online backup service. Today we are pleased to announce the availability of new higher capacity backup plans.

You can now choose a remote backup plan ranging from 5 GB to 100 GB with BackupRight Express, and 20 GB to 3 TB using BackupRight Pro.

Enjoy!

Online Backup Pricing:
BackupRight Pro
BackupRight Express

BackupRight has reached a very important business milestone - the 50 millionth file was successfully restored by a customer on May 7th 2007.

This speaks volumes for the reliability of BackupRight, and we hope to arrive at 75 million files restored in the near future.

Read - Press Release (PDF)

We are pleased to announce the release of BackupRight Express, our latest remote backup solution designed for home and laptop users.

BackupRight Express offers the same security and reliability of BackupRight Pro (our original product), but with one-button backup simplicity.

Read - Press Release (PDF)

Om Malik has just put together a quick, but interesting list of fun storage facts.

My personal favorite - “Consumers bought 739.7 million gigabytes of hard-drive storage space last year. That is 11 times what they bought in 2003. (NYT).”

People certainly have a lot of new photos, music, and documents that need to be protected. I can only imagine what that number will be in another three years. At the same growth rate we would hit 8.1 billion! My guess is that it will be closer to 15 billion.

Read - 10 Fun Facts About Storage

People interested in using online backup are always very excited about our service, but they almost certainly have some questions before signing up.

One of the most frequently asked questions that prospective clients ask us is, “How long will it take to complete my backups?”

Answer: The primary factor in determining backup speed is the computer’s internet connection and the amount of data that will be backed up.

To make things easier we’ve put together an awesome online backup calculator that will automatically determine the estimated time that it will take to complete a backup using various connection speeds and file sizes.

Try it out: Online Backup Calculator – Estimated Time

Three Googlers, Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andr´e Barroso, have released a study on disk drives and their failure rates in a large population.

The study surveyed 100,000 drives of different specifications from various manufacturers. They founds that often times drives using only SMART specifications (designed to monitor drive health) did not accurately predict the drive failures.

Even more interesting is that they found drive temperature and activity were less of a factor than previously thought.

The moral of the story - all drives will fail and often times without warning.

Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population - (PDF Link)

Since GMail hit the scene many people have suggested that it is a viable option for online file storage.

GMail is a fantastic free service for email. GMail is not GDrive, and was built for a purpose - email.

One also needs to remember that it is still a beta product, and is subject to outages etc.

Don’t forget that you always get what you pay for, using GMail as an online backup solution may be satisfactory for the advanced users, but for those of us who need a reliable, purpose built, secure product there are many better options for meeting your remote backup needs.

Guy Kawasaki has an interesting post on his blog about “Why Smart People Do Dumb Things” and this often includes not backing up their data.

Backing up your files is so easy, is it really necessary to make a dumb mistake and suffer loss of your data?

Read - “Why Smart People Do Dumb Things” (Like Not Backup Their Hard Disk)