Backup

BitCalm – Hosted DevOps Backup & Configuration Management for Cloud Services

Pitch your Startup, , , , , ,

Ed: Backing up servers is and always has been a pain in the ass, so this team has found a real problem with a seemingly simple solution.

Although cloud storage systems are usually redundant with multiple copies of data, this will only protect you from outright failure of a VM or instance.

It won’t save you from yourself and the many screw-ups that can happen running infrastructure.

Full or partial data corruption can happen for a variety of reasons not just hardware.

You could accidentally delete an instance yourself, or a malicious or incompetent team member could delete or corrupt data or an instance, you could have a problem with your newly deployed code, virus or hacker either accidentally or intentionally deleting or corrupting your data.

As a guy who in another life spent 24 hrs in a noisy ice cold data centre trying to recover a crashed server I can tell you this happens everyday and yet none of the cloud service providers provide a good solution for this.

Most cloud services don’t automatically provide a proper versioning backup method for each instance, in fact quite the opposite, the Cloud is still a bit of a DYI self service when it comes to backups.

I would go so far to say that backup is considered optional and the existing solutions seem to do a pretty poor job of syncing cloud backups away from the server.

DevOps tools are the latest hot sector, managing remote cloud resources is a real pain, looks like these guys might be onto a good point solution for a market that is willing to pay.

 

Startup Name BitCalm
What problem are you solving? Backup configuration and management for multiple Linux servers is complex and takes a lot of developers’ time.
What is your solution? Bitcalm – SaaS for the super simple server files and DBs backup configuration and management.
Target Market Web-developers
How will you make money? Subscription
Tell us about the market & founders, why is this a great opportunity? We target web-developers as our target market. Currently they have 3 opportunities to solve this problem:
1. Use backup solution, which is provided by hosting
pro: built-in solution, easy to use
con: can’t manage backups for multiple servers, hosted on multiple providers, can’t migrate, keeping backups, just snapshots
2. Find or self-code scripts.
pro: seems like a cheap solution
con: need specific skills, time to set up, time to validate, time to manage, time to support and results in non-convenient and not reliable results.
3. Use enterprise solutions.
pro: –
con: expensive, solves other problems (for big companies)Comparing to these three ways, BitCalm is really life-saving service.
Eugene (CEO) faced this problem himself when he was running his own web agency; at the end of each project Eugene and his team faced the same pain in the ass – backup configuration and its maintenance.As a result he decided to build saas solution to solve his own problem and the same time, solve the problem for millions of indie developers, freelancers and small and medium-sized web-development companies.
Founders Names Eugene Morozov (CEO), Boris Dus (Business developer), Yury Andreykovich (CPO)
What type of funding has the company received? Angel
Website https://bitcalm.com
Twitter Handle @bitcalm
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Upsafe – Google Apps Backup and Data Security Service

Apps, Pitch your Startup, ,

Ed: This is actually a pretty good idea. Most of the world is just terrible at backup. Phones, Notebooks, Small Business Servers. Corporates have laptops running around that are never on the network at backup time, the IT Admins response is everything should be stored on the server and it will be backed up, but thats not how people work, they like their documents local. I ran a business for 8 years where one of our key and constant issues was ensuring customers had functioning backups.

But not many people talk about backup in the day of Cloud Computing, its almost forgotten and while you are far less likely to lose data in Googles multi server cloud farm with redundant copies of your data and documents everywhere there still is the possibility it could happen.

Likewise you might not lose it to software or hardware failure but it is possible that a malicious staff member could delete or corrupt your docs/data and without a long term archive strategy you will never get it back.

So Upsafe is a good idea, the question is whether businesses who use Google Apps will see the value and take it up, would have thought there are compliance requirements which would see this used as well.

 

Startup Name Upsafe
What problem are you solving? Google Apps data backup and security
What is your solution? Back up your data with our app and never lose a bit of information again.
Target Market Google apps’ users
How will you make money? Charge for licences
Founders Names Denis
What type of funding has the company received? Self Funded
Website http://www.upsafe.com/google-apps-backup/
Twitter Handle @upsafebackup
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Bvckup 2 | Simple fast backup

Apps, ,

Full disclosure I haven’t tested this on my own machine yet, but it seems to be absolutely intent on only doing one thing really well. Backing up one directory to another.

 

Bvckup2-screenshotIn a past life we sold truckloads of backup software to business customers and its mostly not simple to install and use, mostly not inexpensive and mostly needing an external tape drive or library, but I can see this being replaced with arrays of cheap drives and a product like this being used.

Given some of the software solutions would run to 10s of $1000s, at $20 for a personal version and $40 for a professional license, this seems like a lot of bang for your buck.

This is not going to solve the offsite problem or provide you cloud backups, (though you potentially could back it to a Google Drive or Dropbox folder and have it sync afterwards) but you probably aren’t doing that properly either anyway as its almost impossible to get a business grade backup across DSL upload speeds.

What it will do is provide extremely fast differential backup from one directory/drive to another.

Select a pair of folders and Bvckup 2 will make sure that one stays an exact copy of the other. If you were to make one of the folders on disk array somewhere on the other end of the office, whilst this doesn’t negate having some form of offsite backup it does mitigate some of the risk.

I think the minimalist approach is a great selling point, they really have cut it down to a simplistic but highly effective app.

Real-time backups

Continuously monitor for changes and back them up as soon as they happen.

Scheduled and manual

Run backups at fixed time intervals or only when started manually.

Asynchronous I/O

Eliminate idling during data transfers by having multiple read and write requests running in parallel.

Delta copying

Reduce the amount of data being moved around by copying modified parts of files only. This speeds things up, in many cases
dramatically.

Multi-core processing

Speed things up by running computationally intensive tasks such as data hashing on all CPU cores, but scale back when computer is
under load.

Move/rename detection

Detect files and folders being moved at source and replicate this as a single quick
operation on the backup side.

Destination snapshots

Avoid re-scanning backup location on every run by scanning it once and saving its file index locally.

Device tracking

Pin a backup to a specific removable device so that it will be run only when this device is present.

Backup of locked files

Use Windows shadow copying to backup files that are locked for exclusive use by running programs such as web browser or email clients.

System service mode

Switch program to run as a system service to allow backups to continue running even when there’s no one logged in.

Archiving of deleted items

Move backup copies of deleted items into a special archive directory and delete them from there after a grace period.

Very large backups

Bvckup 2 has been tested with multi-million item backups and, while they naturally require more memory for processing, they can still be handled with ease.

Concurrent or serialized

The app can run backups one by one, forming a queue, or it can run them as soon as they are due, all at once. And, of course, a backup may also be started manually at any time.

Backup planner

When running a backup, Bvckup 2 always compiles a formal backup plan that can be inspected without being executed if a “dry
run” is required.

Native 64-bit support

Installation package includes both 32- and 64-bit versions of the program, selecting an appropriate one to install automatically.

Minimal dependencies

The app works with low-level Windows API and has no dependencies on WMI, COM or system services outside of shadow copying.
It also stores all its configuration on disk, in a single directory.

Software update reminders

In addition to being able to check for updates automatically, Bvckup 2 has an option to remind you to check for updates
by hand.

The website sold me, if their product is anything as simple and effective I think they will sell a busload. You can get it here bvckup2.com