Why are data companies not targetting the Data Backup Market??
Every user has a huge need for seamless user friendly data backup system. Any such system should have:
- A very easy interface (maybe something like Picasa ), where I just choose the drive where the data will be backup upto
- A version control system to see what has changed and what has not changed.
- An certifiable encryption mechanism
- Maybe an access control mechanism (for shared folder etc.)
Unfortunately, among all the big companies, only Apple has come out with a convincing product (TimeMachine ). Microsoft's OneCare effort is lame.
Personally (maybe I am parochial in my view), this data should be very important to any company for whom the business model is based on data and digital advertizing.
So, to me, companies like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. should be really going after this market. Let the user choose the storage device. The user may choose a USB device or internet storage. Provide a basic internet storage and then for the rest ask the user to pay up. As a part of the terms of use, the "digital advertizing business model based company" (DABMBC) can stipulate if the user chooses to use the internet storage then the company has the right to index the data but this data will never be shared with anybody and will be used only to redirect more relevant advertizing when they use any of the DABMBC application.
On the laptop that I am using, I have to backup around 25GB of data. I was just evaluating what is security level for the data. The amount of company (my employer relevant) data is around 30%, personal secured data would be around 20% data. And for the rest 50% data I dont care if it reaches somebody else. Using this information, let the user choose what folders should not be indexed. By default all the folders are indexable.
Drawing up another business scale that is the "type of data". In my 25GB of data, I have around 4.5GB of video data, around 4GB of image data, 3GB of PDFs (research papers), 4GB of office docs, 3GB of mails, and the rest is miscellaneaous.
The major chunk of the data, that is Video & image, is already being indexed by Google & Yahoo.
Another business sense is, just from looking at my 25 GB backable data, is that a large chunk of it is downloaded from internet. Let us say, if there is a search engine which can give me identify this duplication then the company can save on indexing and storage cost. Something of a larger significance of such a search would be that it will spawn a completely new business and could be easily sold to enterprise customers where each document is duplicated 100 times at arcane places!!
Similar to Google Pack apps, I would really love to see a Google Backup application. This application lets me choose what I want to backup and it gets backed-up automatically!! I loose this fear of loosing all my data.
Just thinking about it, until I am totally off or I dont understand the complexity of the problem, I can easily imagine a market consolidation in terms of data backup companies. In coming years the big-wig companies will acquire small data backup application companies. I wish I had some money to invest :-(.
would not just let me login. Whenever, I would try to login then it would tell me that "Credential Manager Server could not be found. Please check if the Credential Manager Server is installed on the target server". And it would not let me login under my credentials, or local admin credentials, or network admin credentials. So firstly, how can one even do anything if one cannot just login under any credentials. After a while, I was able to login under the Safe Mode under the local admin credentials. Okay so what next. BACKUP DATA BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING!!. After doing that, I remembered that HP has a Credential manager. I never did like any of HP softwares. That company is good in Hardware, and please keep yourself to that vertical!!.
