F-Secure offers backup over broadband

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 14 October 2008 03:59

Business IT - Technology

Here's a useful service that could soon be offered by your ISP: online backup for your files over your broadband connection.

It has been developed by Finnish Internet security company, F-Secure, and will be resold by ISPs, possibly co-branded or under their own brand. To use it you download an application onto your PC (sorry, Macs not supported).

The service is pretty secure: all the files are compressed before back up, reducing bandwidth usage and are encrypted using 3DES encryption algorithm. Communication with the storage is secured using SSL.

According to F-Secure there is no limited to the storage capacity available to individual users, but that is not so generous as it might seem. Any files you delete from your PC will automatically be deleted from the backup after 15 days, or 45 days on request. So the capacity you have available is essentially the capacity of the hard drive on your PC.

According to F-Secure, the software works automatically and transparently on the user's computer and "will identify the most important files on the PC and start to backup them immediately." (it does not say how these files are chosen).
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Once the selected files are uploaded, the service continues to watch for changes in the files or for new files matching the selection criteria. "Every time such a file is modified or added to the PC, F-Secure Online Backup Service will find it and automatically add it to the backup, without the need for the user to take any action."

According to F-Secure, the services uses its patent pending SmartBackup technology that "intelligently builds the backup selection, assigning specific priorities to each file and folder." It "uses a rules engine that studies the file usage patterns, the structure of the data, the configuration of the PC, the speed of the Internet connection and other criteria." SmartBackup also "takes into consideration external conditions, for example the availability of the backup server and any automatic updates to the rules on the server-side." The claimed result is a "very efficient backup queue, prioritising the files that are most important to the user."

You can restore any file or the entire backup to the same computer or to another PC, by first downloading the application, enter and entering your user name and password and licence key. Backed-up files can be accessed from any machine with a browser.

F-Secure has yet to sign up any ISPs in Australia to offer the service, so we don't know what it will cost. Whatever it is, to be attractive backup up traffic would have to be outside the download quota of the users broadband plan.

For ISPs the service has the potential to increase ARPU and customer stickiness (stop paying for the service and say good bye to your backed-up data.)

For consumers it means not having to buy backup storage, and not having to rigorously adhere to a backup regime. And for those who are really serious about backups there's the peace of mind that comes from knowing that if your home or office is consumed by conflagration, ransacked or otherwise destroyed your precious data is still safe.