SOHO backup that works: why is it so hard?
Moving to a small town in northern Arizona from Silicon Valley has enriched my perspective on many things, including how the industry develops products. The consensus is that if we take datacenter technology and put in enough defaults it will be “simple” enough for consumers. Wrong.
Memo to developers: it is ALL consumer IT
The consumerization of IT is usually means the adoption by IT of high volume consumer technologies. The PCI bus, Microsoft Windows, USB, x86, SATA disks and Wi-Fi all started in the consumer space and displaced more sophisticated and expensive IT.
But consumerization also means taking tech first developed for IT and making it easy enough for consumers. Ethernet LANs, symmetric multi-processing, external disk systems (well, really only Drobo) and what we used to call “office automation” software are now usable by non-geeks.
Pro vs amateur
Amateurs like GUIs. Pro’s like CLIs. Why do we have both on “enterprise” products? Because we are all amateurs - at something.
The third shift guys are all amateurs. They may want to be “professional” but they aren’t now.
Backup: the highest failure rate in IT?
Who knows how good the numbers are. A 40% enterprise backup failure rate is frequently bandied about. Whatever the “real” number is, it isn’t good enough.
If “professionals” with “industrial strength” backup hardware and software can only achieve a 60% completion rate - a failing grade anywhere - why does it surprise us that only a tiny percentage of small office/home office people backup regularly?
And further, why do we assume that SOHOs will never backup? “Americans will never wear seatbelts.” “People will never recycle.” “SOHOs will never backup.”
Yet the record is clear. If you take an education and ease of use approach, people will change their behavior. They will wear seatbelts. They will recycle. They will even learn to deal with PITA child seats. And they will backup.
But not if it is presented as a “junior” enterprise backup. Make it easy and affordable. Mostly easy. And people will do it.
A couple of backup products that work
On ZDnet I reviewed a Windows backup product that I could recommend to any small business here in the red rock-strewn desert, Backupkey. Plug it in, hit “enter” twice, and all your valuable Windows data gets copied.
Did this simple, useful product come from Boston? Silicon Valley? Redmond? Denver? Nope. Charleston, South Carolina? Bingo!
I suspect Backupkey got built there because the developer actually knows small business people. Knows their frustration and their intolerance for stuff that doesn’t work as they think it should.
Most Windows backup software is simply dumbed-down “real” backup. Backup sets. Incrementals. Images. Bootable. Whatever. But non-IT folks don’t know those words or concepts. Why can’t it just work?
On a Mac both Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper work great and are almost easy enough for complete idiots to use. Partial idiots only, please. Apple’s Time Machine, which I finally set up last night on a new 500 GB USB/eSATA drive, is totally easy. Mindless bliss.
The StorageMojo take
I cringe every time I hear the big companies proclaim a new focus on the SMB market. Usually it is some shrunk-down enterprise product with incentives for the channel.
But what doesn’t change is the thinking behind the product. The assumptions about the consumer - “like us, only dumber” - and how the problem they are trying to solve rarely get the kind of re-think that went into Time Machine.
But the logic is inescapable: the more pervasive IT becomes, the more the technology must adapt to people. Backupkey does that for low-end Windows backup. Time Machine does that for Mac OS X. Who, and what, is next?
Comments welcome, as always.
on March 19th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Couple of things:
For really easy backups see JungleDisk(windows) and duplicity(linux); personal backups (even SOHO) to Amazon S3 make a lot of sense time & trouble-wise.
Also, you’re right about the SMB market - SMB shouldn’t be looked at as a scaled-down enterprise, but rather as what it more often is: a scaled up SOHO, with all the homogeneity, bailing wire, duct tape and general “uniqueness” that should be expected of a pile of people putting their SOHO setups all in one place now that they can afford real office space.
on March 20th, 2008 at 12:10 am
having been dealing with backup vendors for longer then i could have ever imagined, the SOHO market should be a free-bee. the prices they ask (and get)
for enterprise level backup solutions like legato, veritas (symantic), bakbone, etc
should easily cover the money lost on a 5 to 10TB license.
on March 20th, 2008 at 3:11 am
Bravo!
Your comments related to backup also apply to the way most IT support companies approach small business…with technical tools that force them to learn more and do more about it, rather than just getting the job done. You are right. Small businesses don’t always recognize the need (as with any insurance), but they are ready to take care of it if they don’t have to stop running their business to do it. What they are sold is something that doesn’t solve the problem unless they put a lot more effort into it.
on March 20th, 2008 at 7:52 am
I’m seeing SMB solutions coming up from the Consumer market for a change, rather than trickling down from Enterprise. For example, Maxtor One Touch is being used by a lot of SOHO users. It’s often about ease of use, as you point out.
on March 20th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Online backup for consumers has two uncertainty problems: Recovery and subscription. Will I be able to recover and how do I pay for (and stop) subscriptions. It sounds easy, but check your own thinking on this. How many online subscriptions have you had problems with on the billing end with things like credit card number changes, etc where your service was turned off? I’ve certainly had a few. Not sure that I want to pay for months and then find out that I can’t get my stuff back. I like Pete Steege’s solution, which is to buy a big brick with 1394 or USB 2 connectivity and copy my data files to it. I’ve lost systems before and this approach lets me get rid of all the worthless software I’ve installed and never used. I guess I just like brute force and I don’t get that brute force feelgood from an online service.
A final comment on product development. Enterprise products “dumbed down” don’t work, won’t work and generally suck. The approach at EqualLogic was to start from scratch - and it worked and is still working in the SMB space.
on March 20th, 2008 at 9:02 am
I absolutely agree. SOHO solutions, and pretty much all other backup solutions are completely unnecessarily complex. But, I am worried that people are relying on solutions that only solve half the problem. People need two things from backups, both of which need to be able to be done automatically:
1) Disaster recovery (with off-site data storage) - not just for natural disasters, but also for the day your backup hard drive decides it doesn’t want to work any more.
2) Archives for deleted/destroyed files that are reasonably accessible (meaning a person doesn’t need to feel “dumb” about having to ask the IT department to restore their file, and thus instead re-creates their work)
Although Time Machine like solutions solve the number two problem we have yet to see a SOHO solutions for extremely easy to setup automated disaster recovery (i.e. off-site backups). I use rsync and ssh and that is not nearly easy enough. We also need a device like the Time Capsule to automatically sync its files to the cloud (maybe through a .mac account) and somebody from the windows world to copy that functionality before we can say that these simple solutions are “enough” for SOHO users.
on March 23rd, 2008 at 10:55 am
good afternoon,
thank you for your always very interesting site.
Backing to an external disk has imho a number of drawbacks like the fact that a power issue / theft / virus could affect several / all of your disk devices.
Remote backup has the drawback to be slow, expecially for complete restore.
Just to mention that I am impressed with Mozy (now an EMC company) for remote backup, very simple. It offers web restore from anywhere (a computer where you have not installed any special sofware). It runs on both MacOSX and Windows (and I use both versions) and is very stable.
regards,
eric
PS: I am not linked in a way or another with Mozy or EMC, just a happy customer
on April 9th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
What a timely article! Though we support lots of server-based backups (mostly BEX, some BrightStor), we also have a number of SOHO and individual customers who have been using tape backup systems for years — DAT and TRAVAN. Now we have no affordable TB solutions to offer them. My concern about backups to USB drives is that there is a single point of failure for the single-drive solutions, and lots of expense for the drive-cartridge ones (e.g. REV). I suppose online backups are okay, but some have security concerns/connectivity issues/confidentiality — they like knowing they have a backup in their safety deposit box if disaster strikes. We are “angsting” with them over this…while tape backups are (yes yes yes) unreliable, subject to hard and soft failures, I miss ‘em. Maybe I’ve been around too long…
on April 24th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
There are many backup solutions targeted towards servers. Few target towards disaster recovery for personal PCs. Especially when VIPs of your organisation travels you might have a situation that your VIP is a thousand miles from your IT guy and his harddisk just crashed.
One product, that the company I work for is being picked up by the local government and DHL is a product called Exboot.
What it does it backups to an external USB drive. What so surprising you ask.
Well what it does is make it bootable. If your system’s Bios has an option for USB boot. You’ll find your entire OS is now bootable off the external drive. The VIP can take his time to return to the office and get the faulty drive in the laptop replaced. This means your entire system, applications data is still live an available to you. We’ve been told that some companies are beginning to change their notebook buying policy to ensure that the bios has full capability to boot even Vista off the Exboot drive.
Check out http://www.hantechnology.com.sg
Had one customer that uses it for their front desk machines. This is in case of a HD failure, they just plug it in boot up the Exboot and their queues don’t get longer, the same number of counters are still available. Their IT guys can come later in the day to fix it.
And yes it does do incrementals as well. No its only designed for PCs OS (XP/Vista) not server OS.