there is a market, but everyone here is extremely tech savvy
i am semi interested because i need to back up some important files
i think the others are likely concerned about security
thank you for filling another niche. another service we can buy with btc is always welcomed
these forums are also kind of slow, don't be dissuaded
Thanks for the input! I thought this was an incredibly active forum so I did get a bit dissuaded when no one was responding.
Do you think there is a market for a bitcoin backup service?
Yes, of course
Would you personally be interested?
No, I don't need remote backups
What sort of features would you want to see in the service? (basic file backup, MS SQL backup, MySQL Backup, Oracle Backup, Ms Exchange backup, HyperV backup, ESx backup... ect)
The more the better but probably you should focus on maybe 5 services, do a bit of market research and offer it at a competitive price
What concerns would you want to see addressed?
1) Why people should trust you and your service. Can you prove it somehow? I mean, is the service stable? US/EU/AU? Speed? All this kind of information
2) Is the client multi-platform? Win,Linux,OSX,iphone,android,etc..
What sort of price point would you expect to see? (in USD)
3) Subscription or one off payment? At the moment there is no way to setup a subscription with bitcoin afaik
1) We are in the US, our service is quite stable and we have a 1 gigabit connection that is distributed over 7 carriers in our primary data center. But proving reliability is a bit of a tough nut. We can't use our existing name because of pricing and branding issues. I suppose we would just create a low enough price point to pull in early adopters and stand on the reputation we build.
2) Yes, our software runs on PC, MAC and linux. No mobile app though...
3) That's open at this point. Currently we bill based on usage. Really I think that's the fair way to do it. I don't think it's right to charge someone for 100GB of space if they are only using 50GB. But because I can't auto-debit like I normally do it leaves us in a sticky situation. Either I have to ask for payment every month or I have to charge a one time flat fee for a set quota. I'd really like to do the former, but I hate to bug my clients for money all the time... Ugh catch 22. I might offer both options.
Definitely a market, however I still can't use remote backups because they're too expensive.
My backup repository (I use SVN) is 100gb, mostly from photos. At current market rates that's something like $30/month+ AFAIK, so instead I just make hardcopy backups and store them offsite. If I could get 200gb for $10/month I'd sign up, that's still a few years away though.
And erm, I don't think you can "one way encrypt" something for a backup service, you need to be able to decrypt it (thus making it non-one way).
You'll need to promote why your service is better than say Google Drive or Dropbox.
I'm sorry I was trying to simplify the explanation. The password is one-way encrypted and stored our servers and this is the only record we have of our clients passwords. This password is used by default as their encryption key for their backup sets. Although, many clients opt to choose a different crypto-key and in that scenario we have no knowledge of their key. You are correct though, my original text implied that the data its self was one-way encrypted and that is obviously not possible. I've updated the text to be more accurate. Thanks for the eagle eye and the pricing feed back!
If you can do offer a free say 2 GB and then allow people to add on as they need from their for a low yearly(people don't like worrying about payments) price make it multi platform (3 major OS's plus mobile Apps) people would jump on the bandwagon.
And don't forget about security
Good luck man, hope to see something like this in the future.
Thanks a bunch for the pricing idea. I've been struggling with how to do this.
Do you think there is a market for a bitcoin backup service?
I use to use Wuala for this, but they seem to have now stopped accepting bitcoins. So there may be a void again to fill.
Would you personally be interested?
Maybe....
What sort of features would you want to see in the service? (basic file backup, MS SQL backup, MySQL Backup, Oracle Backup, Ms Exchange backup, HyperV backup, ESx backup... ect)
Mostly I want a mapped cached local drive like what Wuala has, and a decently flexable API.. with that I can then back up
what I want. I also would prefer to have more then just sync backup, and have more of a cloud drive with some sharing options.
What concerns would you want to see addressed?
Needs to be a Zero Knowledge system like Wuala.
What sort of price point would you expect to see? (in USD)
Cheaper then Wuala/SpiderOak hopefully.
By the way, one of my favourite things about our software is that the backups are cryptographically secure. Meaning that before your data leaves your computer, it is one-way encrypted using your password. (I can get into the gory algorithm details if you like)
If this is like Wuala/SpiderOak and zero knowledge, then it is a basic requirement for me for backup use. I only use dropbox/sugarsync for file sharing due to their lack of it.
Yes, give the details.
Thanks for the feature feedback. Our software does not support drive mounting or sharing features, sorry. We are focused on providing rock solid, private internet based (I hate the term cloud) backups. We have been asked about sharing and drive features before, but to do this we'd have to store your encryption key on our servers and I'm not comfortable with that. We can't claim Zero-Knowledge because your password is used by default for your crypto-key and we have a one-way hash of that on our servers for account authentication. Additionally we have indexes of files names so that our users can selectively restore data in a disaster scenario. But, our clients are able to specify a different crypto-key for their backup and in that scenario we only have knowledge of their file names. I haven't talked to anyone yet who cares that we have file names, but I like to be 100% transparent.
