This product's first ISP customer says end users want a simple backup product that won't intrude on their work and play.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 8, 2004]

Founded as Acpana, and renamed Data Deposit Box, the Toronto-based company has a clear focus: selling its data backup software.

The data backup technology was acquired from Net Driven Solutions for $10,000 plus the forgiveness of undisclosed personal debts, if we read page three of this .pdf correctly.

"We re-focused the application to target ISPs," claims Peter Carroll, the company's CTO. "It's designed for ISPs, not the corporate market." That's particularly obvious, he says, in the backend, which is designed to support numerous SOHO and residential customers, each with their own policies and their own account.

The backend is flexible enough to work with several different billing systems, also a consideration for ISPs, using various APIs.

"Also, we collect different metrics so ISPs can bill as they wish," says Carroll. "Different ISPs have different rate plans. Some ISPs want to bill $x per 1 GB, others want to charge a flat fee, and other plans are also possible."

The tool is designed to be own-labeled by the ISP that sells it to its end user, but the company also offers its data backup as a service

Carroll says that ISPs should be looking for a product that updates as necessary, on the fly, instead of at a specific time, because a product that does scheduled backups risks overloading the system at specific times if widely distributed to the user base.

"Another efficiency for carriers," he says, "is the ability to throttle. Carriers can designate a maximum bandwidth use on each subnet. If usage goes over the limit, each client will be throttled. The limit can be dynamic throughout the day."

The product looks for less active moments to store backup data, stopping uploads, for example, if keyboard or mouse are active. Carroll says backup software that lacks this feature will affect the surfing experience of low bandwidth users, especially those on dialup.

Uploads can restart if the dialup connection fails, a key feature for someone uploading, say, a 500 MB MS Outlook file, Carroll says. After that, all updates are incremental, so the full 500 MB will not have to be re-uploaded each time the file changes.

The product runs on the Windows OS only, Windows 95 or newer, and is designed to be as simple as possible. "If we'd designed for the corporate environment, it would be more complex," says Carroll.

One satisfied seller and user is Matt Stein, director of technology and services planning at Primus Canada, the Canadian subsidiary of McLean, Va.-based Primus Telecommunications. Primus Canada is competitive ISP with over 80,000 subscribers.

Stein says he tested several backup suites, and that the provisioning tools and ease of use were key reasons why he chose Data Deposit Box. He also liked the team. "Working with them was great," he says.

As he's talking on the phone, he notes that the Data Deposit Box software icon is blinking—the software has seen he's not using the computer and is taking advantage of the opportunity to upload the latest file changes. "It's blinking, so it's doing something," he says.

For Stein, the key benefit of Data Deposit Box is that it does not ask users what data to backup. Instead, it makes reasonable assumptions, and then users can make changes if they wish to. That means that the ISP does not have to send out complex instructions to users about how to install the product. He says he likes to send out a piece of software that end users will actually use, as opposed to one they will uninstall or never turn on.

Primus sells the product as Primus Data Safe.

Pricing and availability
Pricing was not available at press time. The retail price of the product direct from Data Deposit Box is $5.49 per month.

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