For an upcoming article in InformIT on the new breed of online backup solutions, I interviewed Fabrice Grinda of Allmydata. To be honest, I’m taken with both Allmydata and Carbonite’s upcoming offering (it’s about to enter beta). Both take a fantastic “keep it simple” approach to backups.
Background on Allmydata
French, came to the US for college (Princeton). Did consulting at McKinsey and Company. 1998, right time, right place and right skills. Realized my goal in life was not to write the perfect PowerPoint presentation.
I realized that I lacked a certain amount of creativity. After 6 months of looking for a new idea, I decided to evaluate the current business ideas in the US at the time and see if anything could be brought to another part of the world.
I looked at all the big companies like eBay, Amazon and whatever. I built international clones, sold the companies and realized that being an entrepreneur was for me.
I decided to try the same strategy of internationalizing a successful product. This time I took from Europe and created Zingy, which became the leading mobile multimedia company in America. I also sold the company, and that’s where this story begins.
I have lost so much data in my life through hard drive crashes, computers dying, etc. I didn’t not backup because I didn’t want to, but it was too complicated. Given that there are billions of computers in the world, if you can just grab a few percentage points, you can build a great business.
So I started wondering why nobody was doing this. I realized the offline backup solutions and realized they were expensive, not that portable and not that easy. While the online backup solutions were historically overly expensive, they weren’t that easy to use.
So I asked what the components of the perfect online backup system would be, and it would be very cheap, it would look and act like a disk drive. You’d drag and drop a file there and you’d forget about it.
As we looked at how best to accomplish that, a friend of mine put me onto a company called Hivecache. They were trying to sell their product to corporations.
What is Allmydata?
Late 2004, we started working on creating an easy backup solution that was a virtual drive that allowed you to drag and drop files and they’d be backed up forever.
We are at version 1.3. It works fairly well. The free version is currently available, but the paid version is coming out soon and it will be much, much better. The free version allowed the ‘grid’ to be built, the paid version will give the speed and optimization and features users are looking for.
What sets you apart?
The fundamental difference is we create a virtual drive that looks, feels and acts exactly like another disk drive on your computer, so that everyone who is familiar with how drives work find it very easy to understand.
Number 2 is that we give you two options. We can either back it up forever, or just back it up once (ie: no updates).
What makes the difference fundamentally is that for cost and security reasons, we use our data servers on top of a peer to peer system. And what we do is that each time a file is uploaded, we put it on tonnes of different computers, kind of like bittorrent.
This way, when you restore a file it is extremely fast. Also, the file is on thousands of computers, so that if one is down there is no issue.
Unlike “Google Drive”, you don’t need to trust us. No single computer out there has your file, they only have a few bytes of it. With Allmydata, you don’t need to trust ‘anyone’, you are trusting ‘everyone’. Nobody can find your entire file, nobody could open it if they could find it, and you don’t need to trust even us, because we don’t even maintain the complete file.
It also adds redundancy, reduces storage and bandwidth costs.
Don’t trust anyone, trust everyone.
Is there a way to easily backup the whole drive?
We usually recommend that you backup all of My Documents or Documents and Settings. In fact, during installation, if you’re a new user, we pre-select the core areas that are of use to normal users. You could backup everything, but the reality is that the important files are the ones that need to be backed up.
How do you feel the online storage market has changed since its inception?
In the late 90s, with the likes of Xdrive, it was a novelty that didn’t work really well. Not enough people had broadband. It wasn’t backup, it was online storage, or file sharing or whatnot. It really never took off. That’s why Xdrive and their competitors burnt through so, so much money.
Now, more recently, the market started taking off. First in the SoHo space like Connected that are helping to increase consumer awareness that they need to backup due to viruses and such. Still, it’s a very nascent market. There is probably less than 1M people on a global level paying for backup.
The good news is that awareness if up. What is required to make this work (broadband) is in place, but the market is still smaller than it should or will be. But it is up to people like me to promote it. This is something fundamental that everyone should be doing it.
How applicable would Allmydata be for businesses or IT departments, as a means of secondary or primary backup?
We’re going after SoHo more than any other business category. To be honest, we haven’t done a survey of our users yet. We haven’t really been pushing the product, because we want to make sure we improve performance and such before we start marketing it more aggressively. So we don’t know how many of our customers are businesses.
Where do you feel the industry is heading?
Allmydata already offers a terabyte of storage. We offer you a terabyte for 9.99$ per month, 100GB for 4.99$/month, 10Gb for $2.99 or you can backup for free if you do it based on share (1GB per 10GB of shared data).
The reason storage demand is going up is because users are creating more data between digital cameras, music files and videos. People are simply creating vast amounts more data than ever before. The underlying size of backups is increasing dramatically. We are already seeing a doubling of size in backups per user in the last 4 months, and we see that continuing.
What’s really going to make this popular going forward is increasing broadband speeds coupled with increasing storage demands from users. The fact that we see increasing speeds and penetration in broadband, coupled with increasing storage needs for users means this business will simply continue to grow.
Closing thoughts
This is a market that is set to explode because nobody is doing it, everybody should be backing up. For the price of a daily cup of coffee per month at Starbucks, you get peace of mind. We are going to be pushing this concept aggressively in the years to come. You have millions of users and this is going to be a multi-billion dollar market.
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