Backup or Move Forward?

Our product was recently reviewed by a computer magazine. We appreciate the coverage and would like to advance the conversation about backup services and how dataSentinel’s technology is significantly different.

dataSentinel is not a backup/restore product. We are not a backup service. We provide a unique storage platform for you or your business to protect unstructured data files, using a patented security algorithm that keeps your data hidden so that it is visible only by the key-holder.

Some background: The concept of the backup dates all the way back to the days of ENIAC when hardware was incredibly expensive and the long time required to boot up a computer and re-perform calculations could not be tolerated. Up until the 1990’s most people worked with only one shared computer and so a backup image of one machine would protect many users.

Today we have the Cloud. Cloud Storage is a reincarnation of the online backup service with a twist. dataSentinel has enabled the primary copy of your data (not a backup) to be dispersed across hundreds or thousands of computers and you merely bring down a temporary copy of a piece of your data to a particular computer while you work on it. That’s the future. Your personal data is stored privately in the Cloud and is completely independent of the many computers (or computing devices) with which you interact during the course of your day – even if you’re on the road. This is what dataSentinel offers: the technology of the 2020’s in your hands today in the form of a pre-configured USB stick that manages your own unique and private view of both personal and corporate data. You have complete access of every piece of data you store wherever you care to take that small stick. Your data is protected by the safety of numbers – stored as anonymous blocks amongst billions of others on thousands of machines.

The backup is an anachronism from the past that cannot cope with the proliferation of computing devices. There are two reasons for this. In the first case, it won’t be practical for you as the consumer to do backups. You will probably have accumulated over a terabyte (1000 gigabytes) of data by 2020 and it will be distributed over the hundred or so computing devices you interact with in your day. It just doesn’t make sense to manage hundreds of copies of overlapping datasets. The corporate world also demands a higher level of security than conventional centralized disk-to-disk and tape storage solutions can provide. You don’t want those kinds of solutions and you should never be forced to perform a restore operation. It’s just plain cruel, in fact here’s my prediction: “By 2020, the typical computer user will not be performing computer backups of any kind.”

Many of the computer magazine review’s criticisms are well founded. The process of distributing the data file into thousands of blocks randomly through the cloud does increase the upload time a bit. But it is a small trade-off for the security of the application, especially since you can let it happen in the background. There were weaknesses in our Graphical User Interface and we have addressed them. By the time you read this, our major version 3 will have been released to correct most of these issues. We listen hard to our users and their valuable feedback has already identified all of the problems raised by this review.

Join us as we re-invent the secure storage landscape. We don’t just make it better, we make it exciting! Keep an eye out for our radically new way to access and retrieve your private and confidential data. It’s like nothing you’ve seen before. Contact me personally at tom_chalker@dataSentinel.com to find out more about dataSentinel.

Tom Chalker
President and CTO


213 - 31 Peet Street
St. John's, NL Canada
A1B 3W8
Tel: (709) 738-7517
Fax: (709) 738-7541
http://www.datasentinel.com