Online Data Backup
Is it time to store your data in the “cloud?”
Lenovo certainly took a big step towards that end not too long ago by introducing our Online Data Backup service. While not strictly a cloud application, it is a big step towards achieving that end and worth spending a few minutes discussing – not just for the product aspect of it, but also for the broader implications of where we’re heading as an industry.
If you’re a smallish business, (below 250 seats) you probably don’t have an offsite backup strategy. According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, D.C., 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. Of those companies, 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately. A Price Waterhouse Coopers survey calculated that a single incident of data loss costs businesses an average of $10,000.
Even if you are a home user, almost one third of you have lost all of your files due to circumstances beyond your control, like a hard disk drive crash. If you then tried to get a quote from a data recovery service, you likely gasped at the price. An estimate of $2,000 or more is quite common. Why? Because desperate people pay lots of money.
We all know we should backup our data, but most of us continue to put it off for a variety of reasons. It takes too long. We hate shuffling DVDs/CDs in and out. We’re too busy scheduling root canals at our respective dentists. Even if you’re vigilant about copying your data to a second storage location, how many of you, home or business user, can say that you have an off-site backup that will protect you in case of a fire or other natural disaster? I’ll bet good money that the answer is “not many.”
Online data backup programs are nothing new. They’ve been around since the days of dial up modem access. In the heady days of the Internet bubble, you could get a GB or two of free space just for agreeing to look at advertisements. Eventually all of the offerings went out of business and the data people stored on their servers went POOF.
Lenovo’s offering was built from the ground with the principle of “Your data is yours to do with as you like. We just protect it and make it accessible to you and only you.” We use EMC as our provider. All of your data is encrypted locally on your own machine before it gets sent to the cloud. The backup servers are under lock and key at a secure data facility. We’ve posted a FAQ document, which is actually pretty good at answering most questions. And I’d say that even if I didn’t work for Lenovo.
Yes, Lenovo’s offering is a paid service, but your data is not the place where you want to go the cheap (read: free) route. Yes, you can hack your gmail account as a storage repository, but speaking from a security perspective, that’s unacceptable. Any company that puts customer data on a free service that indexes and uses that content for marketing purposes is being irresponsible. And you may not give a darn about whether pictures of grandma help sell more dish soap, but she might. (Yes, I know that you can encrypt your data before you store it, but that kind of defeats the purpose of why you put it there in the first place, doesn’t it?) Per some of the comments on my previous post, I did check out DropBox. It does look cool, and it does have some neat features, but it is also a pay service, incidentally, still in beta. I’m not willing to trust my data files to a beta application. Plus, there’s still one other big problem…
The Internet world seems fixated on the idea of cloud computing, but we’re still very far away from the realizing the dream of everything being stored in the cloud.
“Store it all in the cloud!”
“The cloud will make the end user device irrelevant. The PC is dead.”
“Even Jesus stores his iTunes library in the cloud!” (Okay, so I made that one up.)
I think they’re all wrong – at least for the foreseeable future. It’s not that I don’t believe in the idea. It’s just that all of these Pollyannas forget that cloud computing relies on the holy triangle of cheap devices, pervasive connectivity, and copious bandwidth. With the creation of the netbook category, we now have a lot of cheap devices. We still lack the other two pieces of the puzzle and won’t solve those issues for some time.
I look at my own personal work/non-work life. At the office, things are good. I mean, they’re really, really GOOD. We have a gigabit connection to everyone’s desk. Just last week I downloaded the latest Windows 7 beta build from Microsoft in about ten minutes. That’s wicked fast. Most importantly, I have a symmetric connection. My upload speed is as fast as my download speed. I can blast bits around almost like they’re on my local disk drive.
At home, things are okay. My download speed is fair. My ISP (cable modem) loves to tout how they’ve just increased from 6Mb/s to 8Mb/s. No offense to their marketing department, but that increase is about as useful as a left handed smoke shifter or a bucket of warm spit. (Worthless monopolistic communist money grubbing ##&$&^@ cable company) My upload speed – the speed at which I post my 5MB digital photos, the speed at which I send my 20MB YouTube clips, the speed at which I regularly email 10MB files – is barely usable. I cuss and scream at my worthless ISP every time I have to upload anything bigger than 1MB in size. I am jealous that my out of state in-laws have fiber optic Verizon FiOS. Even my grandmother, living in her house built in 1929 in a depressed Pittsburgh suburb has FiOS, but it’s wasted on her. (But boy do those 20kb emails she sends just FLY). I hate that we live in such a technologically advanced area in the Raleigh area yet are saddled with 3rd rate broadband service. Many of you are faced with the same issue I am
And it gets worse. When I’m on the road and try to connect, public Wi-Fi hotspots are spotty alternatives at best. First, you have to find one. Then, you have to spend 5 minutes putting in credit card information whilst praying that there aren’t 50 simultaneous users trying to share a measly 1.5Mb pipe. I’m lucky to get modem speeds, especially when uploading.
Worst of all is my WWAN broadband card. It takes forever to handshake and establish a connection. Latency is terrible. And again, I’d get better upload speeds with two tin cans and a spool of yarn.
In other words, connecting to the cloud, if it is ever going to be useful needs to be like instant on technologies – three seconds or less is about all I can take, and it cannot take forever to shuffle data to and fro.
There are certain members, even of this company, who like to crow that they want nothing stored locally. Then they can use their BlackPad/iBerry/ThinkPhone/whatever and switch at will. They claim massive productivity gains. What they don’t tell you is that for every hour of productivity they gain, they lose three in technical doodling in order to fix something that broke with the latest security update or policy change. They also don’t tell you that for every document that they have stored in the cloud, there are two more that they would like to have access to that they haven’t yet uploaded or sync’d.
I get it. I truly do. I want it to succeed, but we’re still nowhere close to it being a workable reality. Speaking from a PC vendor perspective though, I wonder if it is in our best interest for the idea of cloud computing to work? After all, if your Google Docs runs just as well in a browser on any old netbook on the market, why would you want to buy a Lenovo ThinkPad any longer? It’s a scary proposition for a PC vendor.
Having said all of this, I think our online backup service is a great step in the right direction and something that is viable immediately. It has user controllable bandwidth throttling so that it minimizes the impact on your day to day work. As it updates your backup set, it only copies the data blocks that have actually changed, so updating does not take much time at all.
No, it is not flashy, but it is reliable, which is exactly what we wanted it to be.
You get business grade performance. Your data is secure. And most importantly, your data is your own. Your corporate security department will not get heartburn. No fly-by-night company is going to change licensing terms on you and decide to delete your data after it closes up shop or cannot get venture capital funding. And you can sleep soundly at night knowing that in the worst case, your data is locked away in some mountain in the clouds surviving all but a direct nuclear hit or your failure to pay your bill. (And we’ve even built in a grace period for that too.) If that’s not peace of mind, I’m not sure what is. You can find out more about Lenovo’s Online Data Backup Service here.
Lenovo Meet the Modder Dean Liou
Lenovo Meet the modder- Chris Blarsky Dairy 2
Lenovo Meet the modder- Chris Blarsky Dairy 1
Lenovo H320 desktop
January 25th, 2009 12:06 pm
Trust the Chinese with my data? I think not.
January 25th, 2009 6:27 pm
Wow, Lenovo using EMC? It didn’t take Lenovo long to cut the cord with IBM.
I also have to agree with you that Raleigh needs FIOS. And in case anybody from VZ reads this, I’d gladly get out my shovel and help lay fiber.
January 26th, 2009 2:15 pm
PJ – the data is entrusted with EMC, not lenovo. if you opt to use your own AES key, no one can decode it — not even EMC.
http://www.lenovo.com/online_d.....faq.html#3
January 26th, 2009 2:36 pm
Matt, thanks for shedding some light on your new service. Both you and blogger Erik have been helpful, and I am seriously considering using this service as my “vault” for online permanent storage to accompany the service that I use for syncing computers (dropbox).
I find more solace in sticking my data under one ecosystem (Thinkpad/Lenovo) then a myriad of other services. Look forward to trying it out. -James
January 26th, 2009 7:28 pm
[...] Inside the Box » Blog Archive » Online Data Backup [...]
January 27th, 2009 4:56 pm
Perhaps Matt, You should spend more time around your In-laws and grandmother out-of-state with their Verizon FiOS. they might get to appreciate being able to see you and you get the opportunity to see just how great Lenovo’s backup solution with EMC really is.
January 28th, 2009 3:49 am
“After all, if your Google Docs runs just as well in a browser on any old netbook on the market, why would you want to buy a Lenovo ThinkPad any longer? It’s a scary proposition for a PC vendor.”
Good question. Here’s your answer: because you make better hardware.
Sure, Google stuff will run on almost any piece of junk but that doesn’t mean I want to use it. I’m a professional: keyboard quality, input devices (UltraPoint!) build quality, durability and display size/quality matter to me. I’m writing this on a desktop system where the keyboard alone cost almost as much as a netbook and I spend hours a day with my thinkpad. I value the keyboard, the three mouse buttons (very important for Linux), the UltraPoint and the trackpad (even though I’ve turned it into a scroll wheel with a software change). I don’t want some cheap thing where the keyboard feels like a box of Chicklets gum, there are only two mouse buttons and a touchpad, the display is SVGA and the battery runs down in half an hour.
My advice to you is to forget about the bottom end of the market. You never had that segment anyway: expensive good-quality gear, good support, no retail channel presence, forget it. Stick to the business and professional market. Your enemy isn’t the netbook, it’s the MacBook.
January 28th, 2009 11:28 am
If my internet service at home wasn’t awful I would be all over this (I’m stuck with 768/384 DSL). This pathetic upload speed has kept me from any form of cloud storage; I just use RAID, and hope I don’t have a fire or similar disaster. Like you G Went, I am ready shovel in hand to help Verizon lay fiber (I’d even accept UVerse, which has been available for months two doors down, but not at my house).
This does seem like a good value added service for the ThinkPad brand, but I agree the defining feature should be build quality. I buy ThinkPads because of the keyboard/Trackpoint, reliability, and to a lesser degree the matte screen option (high resolution and/or AFFS+ across the board would definitely be a plus).
January 28th, 2009 11:54 am
Matt or Tim,
1. The upload speed of “200-500 kbit/sec” is way, way too slow. Please ask your marketing folks, etc. to have this speeded up. People frequently do the initial backups from work where the uplink speed is typically very, very high.
2. Are the EMC servers replicated and distributed in different data centers in different regions in case of problems with the Internet?
Otherwise, it seems to work well enough. But fix the uplink speed!
January 28th, 2009 12:24 pm
deke, i couldn’t agree more. very well said.
January 29th, 2009 4:25 pm
Develop smooth, trouble free software like Apple If you intend to beat the Mac.
January 29th, 2009 5:53 pm
david – it sounds like your particular connection is the limitation. i get ~725 kb/sec on average — nearly the limit of my current DSL connection.
also check to make sure you have the OLDB configuration software set to maximum upload speed with connection throttling turned off.
January 29th, 2009 8:44 pm
i have the lenovo thinkpad z61t series. how do i go about enabling the webcam? thanks
January 30th, 2009 2:02 am
I guess there’s something to be said for the Lenovo name, but given that ODB uses EMC at the backend and EMC runs the Mozy online backup solution for half the price of a personal ODB subscription ($50 instead of $100), what’s the advantage for purchasing an online backup solution through Lenovo? Also, will ODB work with external drives that are semi-fixed (that is reported as fixed but get unplugged every once in a while – say an external drive attached to a laptop)? I believe Mozy allows you to keep backup that data with the stipulation that you need to return the drive to the laptop within 30 days or lose the backed up copies. Anyways, thanks for the blog. It’s definitely a lot of fun reading about Lenovo products and seeing all the quality that goes in to making those products.
January 30th, 2009 12:04 pm
bob – lenovo uses mozypro, not mozy. mozy’s home version does not support network shares or mapped drives, SQL or exchange files, server 2003/2008, HTTPS proxy support, or have 24/7 tech support. to me, that’s a huge grocery list of improvements for the $40 difference in price. mozy home is $59.40 annually ($4.95/month) where lenovo OLDB is $99 annually.
to answer your other question, lenovo OLDB will work with external hard drives. i just plugged in my thinkpad USB secure HDD and it showed up in the OLDB configuration right away with full backup options. an eSATA or firewire drive should be no different. if it can be seen in windows explorer then it can be backed up.
January 30th, 2009 4:51 pm
Hi,
it took some time until i realized what caused the funny feeling, when thinking of uploading all my data for backup to some enterprise as lenovo, EMC etc.
Not that i suspect any of these companies to do so, but if i want to backup really sensitive data, patent related etc., i have to make sure that they keep the promise not to look into my data. And i mean more than just saying: ‘It’s written here! See? We do not look into it!’ I want the companies to convince me that even if they wanted, they were not able to!
First i was thinking: Hey, they design the encryption application, even if the user encrypts his data with 14 rounds on a 256 bit key AES scheme, it’s fairly easy to run a chosen-plaintext attack on your data, if you are able to design the app, such that it uses certain headers and the like.
OK, even then the 14 rounds are currently unbeaten, but then i thought: Why should they not just send something? Who knows whether these bits are really the AES encrypted versions of your files? With your very own key? Oh, sure, you had to type it, and the app said, it is very important to keep it somewhere safe…
The problem i am referring to is very fundamental to real encryption security:
The only way to make it really secure is to publish the sources of your security app.
Yes, i still do remember the cries when linux-friendly thinpadders asked for an API (way less then some source code) for the switchable graphics… But in this case it is more than necessary to remain trusted.
And don’t say ‘But if we publish the sources, someone evil can take them to crack the encryption to read your data’ this will point against you:-)
curious about your comments
Hecke
January 30th, 2009 7:58 pm
hecke – i would suggest reading the following links:
- http://www.lenovo.com/online_d.....faq.html#4
- http://lenovo.mozypro.com/privacy.html
unless you’re doing something that you should legally be worried about, storing your data with EMC is safe. if you’re issued a court order to surrender your data, chances are that it won’t matter where it’s stored.
January 31st, 2009 3:40 pm
I’m also shocked that Lenovo went with EMC not IBM hopefully Lenovo won’t distance it self from IBM I still think of my ThinkPad as an IBM! an ill always will!!!
January 31st, 2009 4:42 pm
eric, do you really think i did not before making the post?
btw. why is the document in the latter link written twice?
I already wrote that i would not trust any written policy, in the two documents is nothing additional.
Your point with legacy is sweet. If i had to store something illegal, than my first thing to do is to remove any connection of this computer to the outside. Thinking of storing it in an online backup service makes me smile;-)
At least in Germany many small companies that apply to the profile of customers you look for is afraid of economical espionage. There are quite loud rumors that email for example is highly filtered for such purposes. OK, your service is not plain text email, but when some people say that even federal agencies help in such filtering, why shouldn’t a big company?
next round
Hecke
January 31st, 2009 7:20 pm
hecke – i’m not sure why the privacy doc is written twice. perhaps someone just wanted to make sure people read it… twice.
online backup services are geared toward average businesses with nothing to hide. my rule is that if it’s not something you want put out in public then don’t risk putting it out in public, no matter how secure the facility — even if it’s in an underground bunker with armed guards.
for the other 99.9% of the populous, online data backup services like this are an excellent way to store data securely with 100% availability and recovery.
February 1st, 2009 9:28 am
hey eric, thanks for your honesty.
February 2nd, 2009 1:49 pm
brett: your question is totally offtopic here, but have a look at http://groups.google.com/group/microdia
Those drivers worked on my z61t, and I believe they’re in process of being merged into gspca in mainline kernel.
February 2nd, 2009 11:05 pm
Hecke, if you’re that concerned, why not just encrypt your data using PGP before storing it online? You’d be double encrypting, but you’d know that your data was secured using your own means.
February 3rd, 2009 6:34 pm
Dear Matt, it’s not that i have a couple of nearly patented ideas to backup (and if i had to, i already had the fascilities in my institute with enough redundancy, high availability etc.).
It is just that i worked some time on cryptography and was goaded by the buzzphrase that if i chose my own AES key, no one but me will ever be able to read it.
An additional encryption with PGP would surely do the job, even if you want to make the cloudy data accessible to your entire company. But than again a hacked gmail account would be sufficient
February 8th, 2009 1:18 am
Not a terrorist you say? Never break the law? Everyone, including businesses, have something to hide, whether it’s marketing strategy for the next year, client contacts and info, or sex talk with your wife, mistress, or boyfriend, credit card and password info, …..
With governments increasingly intruding on personal privacy (viz: Echelon), the only way to (somewhat) secure one’s private information is to encode it using a personal key you keep physically secure, using software which is open source on the client side.
Who are the threats? Aside from any personal vendettas, criminals mine info for profit, and governments use commercial & private info to benefit their big businesses – like France.
What are the threats? Credit card fraud, identity theft, industrial espionage and sabotage, thievery, blackmail, divorce, …….
tOM
February 8th, 2009 7:38 pm
tom,
those are all typical scenarios. in fact, all of them are risks from inside a company regardless of whether or not said information is stored on the cloud. most corporate espionage happens internally, not externally. if a company finds itself under any of your examples above then having data on the cloud isn’t any more or less safe.
by saying “nothing to hide” above, i was referring to illegal or illicit activities, not the day-to-day stuff.
May 18th, 2009 11:35 am
Online data backup is convenient. I attempted to use it as my major data backup channel for few times in past couple of years. But they still could not make it. Upload/download speed is the major barrier. It is tedious to backup data set with a few GB files.
November 11th, 2009 4:04 pm
By the way, the statistic sited in this article from the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington DC doesn’t exist. It’s a bogus statistic. I called the National Archives and spoke with a research specialist there because I wanted a copy of the original article. Turns out they get about 3-4 requests for this article each year. Nobody there has ever been able to find any evidence that the study sited actually exists. What has apparently happened is that someone made up this statistic, and everyone is quoting every one else. So I suggest the author check his sources before posting.
Never the less, it’s obviously important to backup your computer. And companies are obviously losing a lot of money because they don’t do it right.