Campbell McCracken, Technical Director of Calico UK, was ‘beside himself’ with excitement as the Cromarty-based ISP launched its new service for PC users.
“People are becoming increasingly reliant on computers in the workplace and at home,” said Campbell (shown here on the left), “but are often ignorant of the dangers of not taking adequate precautions to backup their data. They need to be educated and protected.”
“Surveys have shown that up to 80% of a company’s critical information is stored on PCs,” agreed Campbell (on the right). “This data can take the form of emails, documents, spreadsheets and presentations. However, most PCs are not normally backed up adequately and so critical information is in danger of being lost either through hardware failure, viruses, fire, theft or simply human error.”
It has also been reckoned that 90% of companies that suffer a major IT problem go out of business within two years. “Quite simply, their customers will go elsewhere,” Campbell pointed out. “They won’t do business with companies that let them down.”
To help combat this problem, Calico UK has launched the new service. Known as CRITICali, the service allows subscribers to backup their critical PC data over the Internet to secure, mirrored, servers, separated by hundreds of miles. “The use of mirrored servers provides an extra safeguard against hardware failure,” explained Campbell. “Data sent to one server is automatically copied to the other so that it forms a duplicate of the original server. So you have double the protection. In the unlikely event that there is a problem with one server, the second will still hold a copy of the data.”
Files are compressed before sending them to the servers to save transmission time, and to save space. “Documents compress particularly well,” said Campbell, “so you can typically store twice your allowance on the servers.” Data is also encrypted using 128-bit data encryption, for security, before being sent to the backup servers. “Only you will know the encryption key, so no-one can look at your files except you.”
Customers can choose the backup storage space that suits them best from a selection of allowances, ranging from 0.5GB to 100GB, so the service is suited not only to businesses but to home users too. “Hardly a week goes by without us receiving a plea for help from a customer because their PC has crashed and they’ve lost important emails or documents,” revealed Campbell. “But of course they’re always too late. You need to take precautions now, not wait for a disaster to happen.”
Backups can be scheduled to take place at the same time each day or night, or can be triggered manually. The saved files can be accessed later if needed, by the same PC or by another PC, either by the backup client software or by an Internet browser.
Calico UK also offers a free trial for those who want to try the service first before subscribing. “We’re so confident that users will like the service and the security that it gives them,” said Campbell, “that we’re willing to give them a 50MB trial allowance. We’re sure that at the end of the trial period they’ll want to subscribe to the full service so that they can start backing up all their critical files.”
“The service is called ‘CRITICali’, but maybe we should have called it ‘Cocoa’,” joked Campbell, “because if you use it to back up your critical files, you’ll sleep better at night.”
