Monthly Archives: February 2012

Top Six Support Questions on Cloud Storage and Backup

As the head of technical support for Symform, I get the opportunity to help a wide variety of users successfully back up their data to the cloud. While every user is unique, many have common questions, which I thought would be helpful to share with everyone. You can break down those issues into two categories—questions from users who haven’t yet installed our software, and those from users who are on their way to syncing data to the cloud and contributing to the Symform Network.

Before Installation:

These are the most typical questions or topics that are covered as users get ready to start using the Symform Cloud Storage Network:

  1. How much bandwidth do I need?

    • When you’re sending files to and from the cloud, your bandwidth has to be appropriate for how much data is going through the pipes.  Just as you can’t pump an Olympic-size swimming pool through a drinking straw, you can’t send data to the cloud–or do much on the Internet, for that matter–with too little bandwidth. I recommend that clients have a minimum of about 256Kbps for download and 128Kbps for upload.  Anything less than this will make uploading data to the cloud difficult.  Most major cities now have plenty of bandwidth to use Symform successfully, but in rural and underdeveloped areas, insufficient bandwidth could be a problem.

  2. Does Symform handle both local and cloud backup?

    • Symform works best as a secondary, offsite backup. We’re here to improve your overall backup and disaster recovery plan and complement your local backup.  One of the first questions I always ask customers is what they are doing for local backup.  Oftentimes, they have nothing set up or they’re using a file-based backup such as Windows or BackupAssist.  I usually recommend getting a strong local backup process working, and I particularly like solutions that do image-based backup, such as StorageCraft. I also like network attach storage (NAS) devices, like QNAP, for local backup. These types of solutions provide reliable local backup with high security and low downtime.  And Symform easily extends these solutions to the cloud, giving you the ultimate data protection and fast data restore.

  3. How much data or which data should I store in the Symform cloud?

    • A lot of users who are about to register ask me what kind of data, or how much data, they can afford to back up with us. Typically, they’re coming from cloud services that charge by the gigabyte, so they’re familiar with picking and choosing what to back up. I first explain that Symform provides a flat fee for unlimited backup in the cloud with no per-gigabyte charges, so they don’t necessarily have to choose a select data set (which is why we recommend image-based backups).  However, if you want to use file-based solutions, focus on backing up mission or business critical files. The first step in any data management process is identifying and classifying your data, so you know what information you cannot afford to lose.

Before Installation:

Once a user gets signed up, it’s the questions about security and data recovery that I hear most often.

  1. How do I restore my data?

    • What’s important to know about restoring from cloud backup is that it only needs to be done in a disaster recovery scenario. Local backup is your first line of defense. If something happens to destroy your local backup—that’s when you restore from Symform. That being said, it’s a good idea to test your data restore on a regular basis, such as monthly.  Also, with our Instant Restore feature, you can keep a hot copy at a secondary location, which means that instead of having to wait for the data to be downloaded from the cloud, you can have your data ready for recovery in a matter of hours.

  2. Is my data safe?

    • Just as Symform is unique in its economics and contribution model, it also brings unique security measures that, in my opinion and based on our audits, makes your data safer than with traditional cloud storage approaches. I’m always prepared to run through Symform’s security measures, which include encryption for every block of data with a unique 256-bit key, fragmentation of each block, 50 percent added redundancy, and distribution of the fragments over 96 random devices across the global network. The distribution part usually leads to another question . . .

  3. You store other people’s data on my computer?

    • I hear this frequently from users concerned about dangerous or illegal content ending up on their devices. However, what gets distributed and then stored on devices on the Symform network is an encrypted fragment.  It is nothing that resembles information. Imagine if you blocked out all the words on a piece of a paper, then ran that paper through a shredder, then gave 96 different people each fragment. No one would have any piece that resembled information, nor could anyone reassemble the original content, and even if they could, they could not decrypt it. With our architecture and strong security measures, even dangerous files, such as viruses, would be rendered completely inoperable.

I hope these six questions help you better understand how Symform works.  If not, contact our support team, and let us help you.

Don’t wait until disaster strikes to get your data insurance

By Tom Poole, CEO, SMB Nation

When I was a kid, some of our close family friends moved to Fairbanks, Alaska.  At the time, fire protection was an “opt-in” affair.  Long story short, they did not opt-in, and their house caught fire.  The fire trucks showed up, but only to protect the neighbor’s houses who had opted in.  Our poor friends stood there and watched their house burn down to the foundation.

Recently, a company that I serve on the board of directors of had the high-tech equivalent of this.  We thought we were doing a good job of backing-up our data with a more traditional tape backup program.  Then disaster struck.  The HVAC in the server room broke, the room reached very high temperatures, and in simple terms, the servers melted. Initially, we were not too concerned as we knew most of the data had been backed up.  Or so we thought.

While the backups were showing as being successful, when we went to restore them, they were corrupt.  We are talking about a fairly data-intensive company that has been around for several decades.  We quickly sent the hard-drives to the recovery experts and waited for their assessment.  Several days later we got the word back.  They were able to recover about 60% of the data. The rest was lost.  Imagine if you lost 40% of your critical data.

Bottom-line is backup and disaster recovery have come so far in the last couple of years that there was simply no excuse for us being in this scenario.  While data has always been important to a company, in many cases today, your data IS the company. No data, no business. In this case, our business survived, but it was a painful and expensive few weeks. Many businesses do not survive such a data loss.

Needless to say I am a converted evangelist for a solid backup and data recovery plan.  If a catastrophe happens, and you have to ask about your data, it’s already too late.  The good news is implementing an enterprise quality backup and disaster recovery plan is now available and affordable for even the smallest companies.  With cloud based applications available now, it is as simple as set and forget.

Don’t wait until the fire truck shows up at your house to figure out you haven’t opted into the plan.  My good friends at Symform have a free plan that will get you started.  Their technology is simple, amazing and secure.  Give them a shot, your business could depend on it!

Symform Updates QNAP Performance & Contributes to Open Source Community

By Bassam Tabbara, Symform CTO

This week, we released an update to our software on Windows, Mac (Beta) and QNAP. The version includes a number of improvements and fixes. I want to highlight some improvements to our performance on QNAP NAS devices.  In a nutshell, this set of improvements means your data can be much more quickly encrypted and spread to the Symform network. The performance improvement is even greater for restoring your data.

As you probably know, every file uploaded to the Symform Cloud is divided into small blocks, each of which is encrypted and shredded into small fragments before being distributed across the network. To ensure the security and integrity of the data, Symform utilizes world-class hashing and cryptography algorithms including SHA1, SHA-256 and AES-256. These algorithms are highly optimized on modern platforms such as Intel-based or AMD-based devices.

However, NAS devices that use lower powered CPUs can struggle when processing hashing and cryptography operations. We’ve heard this from our QNAP customers (especially customers with SOHO models such as the TS-x10, TS-x12 and TS-x19).

The good news is that some of the Marvell-based QNAP models integrate a hardware-based cryptographic engine and security accelerator (CESA). This engine can reduce the utilization on the main CPU by offloading the time-consuming cryptographic and hashing operations. The end result is improved performance and fewer cycles on the main CPU.

Starting with Symform version 3.1 and QNAP firmware 3.6.0, Symform software will automatically detect and use hardware acceleration if available. Our results show up to 2-3x performance improvement on the ARM devices during upload, and up to 10x improvement during download. We’ve also improved our performance on Intel-based QNAP devices as part of this release. This was done by leveraging the cryptography and hashing support in the Linux kernel on these QNAP devices.

Symform is the first application to employ hardware acceleration on QNAP devices, and we worked closely with the QNAP team to complete this work. The work was also done with the help of the open source community (especially linux, cryptodev and mono). As part of our commitment to open source development, we have contributed this work back into the open source community.