Backup can be thought of as a great grudge purchase, which often appears to be like money down the drain, but today it is back on the agenda after news of the Sidekick data losses, which have been bouncing around the internet all week.
In that instance the device stored ALL data in one place, not on the device, but on a central server. A new service announced this week from Vodafone for launch all over its European operations, will mean that it will offer a backup to PC users to use broadband, including wireless broadband, to back up PCs.
But we don’t really thing it means that wireless broadband can be sued for the backup process, though it would be neat if it could. The statement is carefully worded to obscure whether or not broadband wireless is used, and what we think it actually means is that the PC will use fixed line broadband or Wi-Fi to create backups once or twice a day, but that these can then be accessed by any kind of broadband, including mobile broadband. So you can see what’s on your desktop or laptop from your Netbook or phone.
In the end this is going to give way to a whole host of services and Vodafone’s partner in this is Decho Corp, a subsidiary of storage specialist EMC. Decho stands for Digital Echo and it already looks after backups and has over 900,000 consumer accounts for its Mozy backup service in the US, which amounts to around 10 petabytes of data.
Decho and Vodafone will use this simply as their first service and then try to develop more services of this type, which rely on a remote server. (What about a remote DVR service for mobile and PC held video, messages and photos ‘ Oh no, that would be Facebook?)
The thing about backup is that if it involves human intervention then it never happens. It should be set up once, and even then it should be plug and play to install, and it should then happen reliably without your involvement, and the only evidence should be an emailed note saying ‘You have been backed up successfully. Have a nice day’
Of course once you offer backup, you have to offer access to the backed up data from anywhere, and a corporate version for IT departments to cluster the data and store a copy on their own data centers.
As devices get smaller, the more likely they are to fall out of your pocket and go down the toilet, into the bath, get buried by the dog, smash on concrete or get run over by a truck, meaning that fast data services would always be used one day to create the best of both worlds, with centralized and device stored data. Portals like Nokia’s Ovi already do something similar, but none of them, probably including this new Vodafone service, use broadband wireless for the actual backup, although we think that would be inevitable one day, using time when the network is not busy to elect to send data changes.