Thanks to Rob Cosgrove of Remote Backup Systems for taking time out from his busy schedule to participate in this interview. His story is fascinating. If you have an interest in any of  the following you will love this. Cars, record breaking, world firsts, online backup , I.T. pioneers, flying, life, enthusiasm and predictions for the future.

Read the interview here.

Mercury Online Backup

I introduced my latest Online Backup project, codenamed “Mercury”, back on June 23. Since then I realized that if I wanted Mercury to be able to beat the likes of Mozy on both price and features, Mercury would have to do more, and do it better. It would also have to use a different business and technical model.

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Kickstart News (kickstartnews.com) recently completed in-depth testing of RBackup, and a review of its place in the Remote Backup business.

“Remote Backup Systems and the RBackup Remote Backup Software offer an easy and robust way to get into the remote data backup business using a set of products which are both highly configurable for the needs of many different target markets and which are also customizable enough to completely brand the product as your own. Very good product overall. Highly recommended.”

[Read the article here]

It took GE Money two months to reconstruct the missing tape and identify the people whose information was lost. Since December, the company has been notifying consumers in batches of several thousand and telling them to phone a call center set up to deal with the breach. The notification is expected to be completed next week.

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by Rob Cosgrove
CEO, Remote Backup Systems, Inc.

This morning I found the following press release in my news service. At first glance it looks like a standard news release published by a new Online Backup company just coming into the market.

This one was different, however, because it claims the company wrote its own backup software. I keep track of all online backup services, especially those who have come up with fresh software, so this release grabbed my attention…

The Inside Story of Secure Online Off-site Data Backup at OnlineBackupVault.com

2007-12-28 09:41:13 - OnlineBackupVault.com offers Online, Off-site - Backup, Designed in Israel - implementing top of the the line security!
OnlineBackupVault.com is an Internet based data backup solution that provides online, off-site, automatic, secure data backup for residential and small business accounts.

OnlineBackupVault.com was founded by Moti Mitteldorf, who has an IT consulting company based in New York, called Tech-Keys LLC which specializes in servicing small businesses (5-100 computers). Moti tried out multiple off-site backup solutions for his clients and could not find a solution that excelled both in product, security and support. Israel was chosen as the home base for development due to its rich ties, diligance and alertness to security issues in the IT field. OnlineBackupVault.com was initially created as a sturdy, reliable backup solution for Tech-Keys’ clients. After a year of success, with Tech-Keys’ clients being extremely happy with the product, the public version of OnlineBackupVault.com was born.

… The press release continues with more of the same.

I am disappointed to see this news release. It is misleading, and abuses the Remote Backup industry. In this release, Moti Mitteldorf spins a deceptive story of how he couldn’t find good online backup software, and so he wrote his own, founding a company called OnlineBackupVault.com.

He went on to say, “Israel was chosen as the home base for development due to its rich ties, diligence and alertness to security issues in the IT field.” Then he continues with a fairy tale description and a glowing account of his software’s development.

This all sounded good to me, so I went to his web site to see the new software. But what I found there was not the hyper-secure Israeli-born software Moti brags about in his article, but a fairly unimpressive and common bit of software made in China (not Israel, and not made by Moti), which has been customized (as the Chinese company allows) to add Mr. Mitteldorf’s company name to the screens.

Not one line of it was written by OnlineBackupVault.com.

Look, I WANT people to go into the Online Backup business. My own company offers software that can be customized for that purpose. Buy our software and customize it. However, please don’t mislead your end users, cheapen our industry, and damage all our reputations by making up stories about how you wrote it. Such claims can easily backfire, as this one has, and damge the company’s reputation far more than a press release can help it.

There’s plenty to brag about in a press release without lying. Talk about the features of the software, the value of online backup, the safety of having valuable files offsite, your amazing tech support, the solidity of your company, the security of your data center. Go ahead and say your service is better than everyone else’s.

But don’t make the mistake Moti made, claiming to have written software that you didn’t write. There are only a few companies who provide online backup software, and their software is easy to recognize, as I recognized the Chinese software that Moti claims he wrote.

An online backup company needs to be seen as trustworthy. A press release like the one from OnlineBackupVault can backfire and make a company seem dishonest, damaging its business.

Analysts see solid-state drives, online storage gaining steam.

December 24, 2007 (Computerworld) — IT managers looking to boost storage efficiency next year will embrace online storage services, push de-duplication in the data center and adopt solid-state disk drives to help fuel hardware consolidation strategies and green initiatives, according to IDC’s top 10 storage predictions for 2008.

[Read the Article]

The Tucson Police Department’s Web site, crippled nearly 2 weeks ago by a hacker, is expected to be back up and working within 48-hours, said the department’s webmaster.

The hacker, who goes by the handle “Hmei7,” cracked through the City’s firewall and the Police Department’s firewall to get into the Web site, said Pat Johnson, who maintains the department’s Web site.

[Read the article]

Here’s an informative white paper from LexisNexis to assist law firms with disaster planning. 

Storage features for server virtualization environments got a boost this week with the general availability of VMware’s Infrastructure 3.5. VMware rival Virtual Iron Software brought out version 4.2 of its virtual machine, which includes the ability to dynamically increase disk groups and virtual disks for storage on demand, multipathing features for high availability and disaster recovery, and hot snapshot capabilities. Meanwhile, storage vendors continued to rally around VMware. QLogic has N_Port_ID Virtualization (NPIV) ready to go for the newest release of VMware in its SANblade HBAs. Remote Backup Systems (RBS) announced that its RBackup remote backup software is now compatible with VMware ESX Server.

According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Storage Software Tracker, the worldwide storage software market experienced its 16th consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth in the third quarter of 2007 with revenues of $2.8 billion, a 9.8% increase over the same quarter one year ago. EMC was tops in market share with 27.6%. Symantec followed with a 16.6% share, followed by IBM with 11.7%, Network Appliance (NetApp) with 9.1%, Hewlett-Packard (HP) with 4.7% and CA with 4.5%.