Eternity is a concept with mystical overtones, but a company called No Magic is delivering its Eternity Virtual Secure Drive (EVSD) to ISPs with a guarantee that Epochs will secure data over time.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [October 12, 2001]

No Magic is based Golden, Colorado, with sales offices in Richardson, Texas, but does its software development in Lithuania and Thailand. Its newest product, the Eternity Virtual Secure Drive (EVSD) may sound Buddhist and other-worldly in nature, but is a practical, no-nonsense offering.

The company offers its client software for free, but sells its data backup and restore service for a price through its ISP partners, who supply the disk space, customer support, and bandwidth.

EVSD is a fat client JAVA application (not a browser-based applet) and because it is JAVA-based, it is compatible with most operating systems. The application offers options at every turn, allowing users to choose, for example, which files and folders are backed up, in what order, and at which level of encryption.

Although the application is free, it is only compatible with Eternity's backup websites, which charge for the backup service. Details include:

• History management: EVSD manages a client's backup history in the same way that many companies manage their own data history. EVSD keeps week-old, month-old, and year-old backup copies available in case a problem is discovered several days (or weeks) after it first occurred.
• Security: EVSD allows users to choose a level of security (the tradeoff—as in all software security—is that more security takes more time). EVSD allows users to choose one of three levels of security—none, normal, or high—and advanced features allow users to choose any of several algorithms or encryption systems. Furthermore, users can assign different security levels to different files. The security system relies on a key, which EVSD can save as a file or print as a barcode. The company notes, "paper cannot fail as an external device."
• Monitoring: EVSD's graphic user interface (GUI) displays the progress of the backup as it happens.
• Priority: EVSD allows users to choose the order in which files are backed up, so that if there's an emergency, the most important files are stored first. Users can even change data priorities while data is being backed up.
• Preparing backup: EVSD analyzes that extent to which each file has changed since the last backup. This change is called the "delta" because in mathematics "delta" is the Greek symbol used to signify "change." EVSD saves only the data that has changed, potentially saving significant bandwidth and time.
• Incremental transfer: EVSD saves data in small pieces. The transfer can be interrupted any number of times and will be resumed authomatically within 8K of where it was interrupted (when an Internet connection becomes available). Incremental transfer also lowers the price of the Web service because the software stores incremental "patches" to files instead of saving multiple copies of the same file.
• Offline backup: EVSD server administrators save server data to external media, and retain the external media for several years, ensuring that viruses—and administrator errors—cannot permanently delete anyone's data. EVSD calls the saved data an "Epoch" and one an "Epoch" is saved, it is "read-only." If a user requests (and for an additional charge) data can be read off the external media back onto the servers.
• Backup sets: EVSD understands that different kinds of data change at different rates. A single client can, for example, backup financial data daily, e-mail weekly, and other data monthly or as needed.

The No Magic company has other projects as well. They include an e-mail client that can synchronize data from MS Outlook and Netscape, a Secure Project Server (SPS) for software development project management, a Legal Secure Server (LSS) for law offices, a JAVA development and testing tool called MagicDraw (used in all Sun Microsystems training facilities worldwide), and an e-commerce system-in-a-box called eLink Business Linxera Servers.

No Magic's largest U.S. customer is Ericsson, Inc.

Pricing and availability
EVSD is available now. There are two pricing models. Customers can either pay a flat fee for a limited amount of data storage, or can pay a variable fee based on the amount of data they store. For details, contact nomagictexas@nomagic.com.

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