AltDrive Blog

Iron Mountain and your new backup home

admin — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 22:59:15 +0000

It’s happened again. This time Iron Mountain is exiting the online backup business.

Iron Mountain is a well respected name, so why did it shut down the cloud storage business and sell off its Iron Mountain Digital business? Various analyses show that it cannot keep pace with emerging technologies whose cost structures are very competitive. Companies like AltDrive which offer unlimited backup for a small fee are out competing the biggies and their entrenched technologies. We expect more to fail in the coming years.

Iron Mountain was charging $0.50/GB/month. Compare that to AltDrive’s charge of $0.15/GB/month — more than three times the cost. Plus AltDrive has a better overall offering.

If Iron Mountain is serving your online backup and you are concerned about where the service is headed and are interested in a more cost-efficient offering:

AltDrive can help with your business online backup. Two month free trial and support.

Think twice about giving your files to Amazon

admin — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:38:46 +0000

Wow!

Amazon Cloud: All Your Files Are Belong to Us

At AltDrive, we securely store your file data after it has been encrypted and transferred to our servers. And, no, we don’t own your files. You do.

Since you can control your own encryption key, we cannot access the data if we wanted to so you have complete security. Please be aware of third parties that use Amazon S3 ad the backend storage.

AltDrive Fiber Everywhere

admin — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 07:32:40 +0000

AltDrive’s Seattle area primary data center was built in a very strategic location. The Seattle Metro Area Fiber Ring runs north and south around lake Washington. The data center is located on the path of the north end of the ring. Literally every piece of fiber that hits the Westin building traverses this ring.

On the map below our location is represented by the Red spot near the AltDrive logo.

As a consequence, AltDrive has a truly redundant fiber high-throughput network for high availability managed online backups.

You can sign up for a free two month trial at: https://altdrive.com/signup

AltDrive Referral Partnership Program

admin — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:02:40 +0000

Coming Very Soon… a new opportunity…

Earn a whopping 25% of gross revenue generated!

Using the AltDrive referral partnership program is very simple for you and your customer.

We provide you a URL specifically for your clients to access into the AltDrive backup service. Your client can sign up for a free 60-day service trial. We use the URL to identify your clients.

Of the revenues collected monthly from this client, we set aside 25% of the gross revenue generated and pay it to you as commission for the referral, every quarter, for the entire life of the account. This payment is only from the funds actually received.

AltDrive will provide the accounting, customer service and back-office structure and you sign up new customers and collect the revenue.

Partnership Overview:

Partner refers their customers to the AltDrive Backup Service.
AltDrive provides the partner a specific URL to identify their clients’ referrals.
Partner utilizes AltDrive’s pricing schedule depending on service plan.
AltDrive provides all accounting, customer service and back office operations.
Partner receives 25% of revenue generated by their customers, paid quarterly, for the entire life of the account.

Some Online Backup Services Insecure

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 09:47:22 +0000

This is an interesting article.

http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Some-online-backup-services-insecure-736179.html

Apparently some online backup providers do not sufficiently verify the authenticity of the remote server’s certificates allowing for the possibility of man-in-the-middle (MITM) impersonation attacks. In this scenario, the impersonator can access your credentials and ultimately gain access to all of your data.

At AltDrive, we always check the remote servers certificates for the proper credentials so your data can be secure.

AltDrive – Secure, Managed Online Backup for Home and Business

Some Quick Online Backup Economics

admin — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:57:30 +0000

A noteworthy online backup service offers unlimited backup at $50/year/machine for business users. Sounds like a good deal… right?

At AltDrive, we charge business users with utility style pricing.

The charge is $0.15/GB/mo plus $0.12/GB data transfer in plus $3.25 per installed seat for the compressed and encrypted data.

So, for example, you have a business with a file server, MS Exchange and 18 desktop and notebooks. Twenty machines total.

The flat model charge is: $50/machine/year x 20 machines = $1000/year.

In a typical scenario, say these machines have 10GB of data for backup, and two servers each have 25GB and it all grows 20% this year.

So what is the cost with AltDrive’s utility plan?

12 months x ($0.15/GB/month x 1.20 x (25GB + 10GB)) +

$0.12/GB transfer x 1.20 x (25GB + 10GB) +

$3.25/seat x 20 machines x 12 months

= $861/yr [$139 less]

Note that the noteworthy online backup service does not support servers such as MS Exchange, SQL Server, Oracle, Active Directory.

We believe utility style pricing is the better way to go and models real business costs better.

Welcome Mozy Users!

admin — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:59:01 +0000

AltDrive provides unlimited and secure backups with no bandwidth limits so your backups go fast. Please consider our service, we would love to have your business.

It’s easy! Get started backing up with the two month free trial.

A note on AltDrive Security…

admin — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 10:03:04 +0000

This is a great post explaining the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html

AltDrive uses AES encryption in CTR (EAX) mode to encrypt customer’s files. All file data is AES-256 encrypted before it leaves your computer in transit over the public internet to AltDrive servers. All control communications utilize 2048-bit SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption. This implementation results in a backup of your file data where no one but you has any idea of what has been exchanged.

You can choose to manage your own encryption key so that no one, including AltDrive personnel can access your data.

Lastly, our security implementation has been independently audited with success.

Note that we do not call it “Military Grade Encryption” since there is no such standard and it would not be honest to do so. Regardless, it is economically unfeasible and would require a massive supercomputer years to decrypt the data… assuming you choose a non-trivial pass phrase to generate an encryption key.

New Feature: De-duplication

admin — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 10:01:01 +0000

At AltDrive, we strive to be the best managed online backup offering available. As such, we noticed that many customers have duplicate copies of files, photos, videos, office documents, etc. AltDrive’s response: Client Side De-duplication

With every backup, AltDrive now detects duplicate files so that your backups happen faster and upstream storage is reduced.

The is a win-win for everyone. It is faster, utility costs are smaller, and it is greener.

AltDrive – Backup For The Paranoid

admin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:09:17 +0000

Here is a bit of information on what sets Managed Online Backup apart from the rest.

With AltDrive Managed Online Backup, you control your encryption key. It is never transmitted to AltDrive. This means that once your encrypted data leaves your computer where it is stored on the AltDrive servers, no one, including AltDrive personnel, can decrypt it. Most other similar services might say they use SSL and encrypted file systems, but in the end they CAN access your sensitive data. It’s not that we do not trust our personnel; with AltDrive, we prefer to not have to. So your tax records, financial documents and other sensitive data is secure and recoverable 24x7x365.

This means that there is a bit more responsibility for our customers. They need to safeguard their encryption pass phrase somewhere secure, e.g. safe deposit box, encrypted file online somewhere, etc. That said, Altrive Home users can elect to have AltDrive manage their key. AltDrive Biz customers do not have that option and must retain their passphrase or encryption key.

For a free two month trial, sign up here.