Last week while we were in Pasadena visiting family members (mine), the Ur-Guru and I drove out to Palm Desert to the corporate offices of Spare Backup, Inc. Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I covered Spare’s online backup service/software about a year ago, and also (DISCLOSURE) that they’re a client of mine. (They weren’t a client yet at the time I wrote the review.) The reason for the trek across the desert was to talk about future projects. Naturally I can’t discuss those on the blog, but I’m happy to talk about the part of the visit that wasn’t confidential.

First, as you might guess from its name, Palm Desert is hot. I’m told that it’s actually bearable several months out of the year, but July is not one of those months. It was 110°F, and I learned something new about my car: the clutch squeaks at high temperatures. This of course made for added peace of mind when attempting to locate an essentially unmarked building on a street with an unusual numbering system.

We arrived on the same day BackupReview.info gave Spare Backup’s flagship product 4.5 out of 5 stars, which meant everyone was in a good mood, but also on the same day as the first investor conference call, which meant the CEO was distracted.

While we were there admiring the artistic silver-toned lighting fixtures and the slick blue broken-glass table in the executive conference room, however, we got to see some demonstrations, including a look at the back end of Spare’s enterprise backup product (the one I wrote the white paper about last year); a preview of Spare Room, the file synchronization, sharing, and collaboration suite that’s available in beta for Spare Backup’s current online backup customers; and some early tests of Spare Mobile on Android and Windows Mobile phones. (Though I’m not a smartphone user myself, I found the mobile application fascinating.)

After the initial demos in the QA lab, CTO Darryl Adams showed us his special demo in the working conference room, involving two laptops, a camera, and a wireless printer. He took a photo and sent it to the first laptop, where it was automatically backed up. Photos backed up to “the cloud” as part of Spare Backup’s system become part of Spare Room. Previously set commands synced that photo to the second laptop, which also set it as the desktop wallpaper. (Looking at the photo below, would you want it for your wallpaper?) Finally, the photo was sent to the printer.

It was a pretty neat demonstration, and the only hitch seemed to be getting the wi-fi to work in order to get started. Darryl says that his wife uses that sync feature to send him photos of their two-year-old on a daily basis—though without the added command to print.

It will be interesting to see how the final version of Spare Room stacks up against its assorted competitors. Spare’s great claim to fame has always been ease of use , and both Spare Mobile and Spare Room seem likely to carry through on that promise. (This is the backup service for people who don’t know what files are, and where someone once called the help desk to say “Your software broke my toaster.”)

We enjoyed the trip up the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway while waiting for the rush-hour traffic to lighten up so we could return to Pasadena (CEO Cery Perle recommends it to all Spare Backup’s visitors), but it’s good to be back in a more forgiving climate—one where the clutch doesn’t squeak.

First, the just-to-be-totally-clear full disclosure part: Spare Backup is a client of mine. They hired me to write a white paper after I interviewed CEO Cery Perle for this blog back in July. I am not, however, an affiliate, or partner, or whatever you call it—I don’t get any money if you sign up with them. I only get paid for writing the sales copy, which is what I spent all weekend doing.

If you run a small business, you can expect a clean-cut, highly-motivated young salesperson to come knocking on your door quite soon bearing one of the Spare Backup Enterprise brochures explaining why online backup is so important to business continuity. (And yes, I can give you sources for all those statistics; there just wasn’t room to put them on the brochure.)

If you don’t run a business, you can probably expect one of the salesperson’s colleagues to ring your doorbell with a Family Pack Brochure in hand.

Both packages are aimed at protecting groups of computers (up to 5 for the Family Pack and up to 100 for the Enterprise) and can be ordered from My Spare Backup. (Which I did not write, but may, at some point, rewrite, or add onto.)

I labored hard to get the copy for these two documents done in time to have the designer format them and get them to the printer and into the hands of the salespeople. I am, naturally, seized with the desire to show them off. In retrospect, and with input from some people who were not involved in the project, I can see possible improvements, but I still think they’re worth posting here.

Now then—while I have not actually signed a contract to that effect, I think it would be in poor taste for me to do paid work for any of Spare’s direct competitors, to wit, other online backup companies. But the blog itself is meant to be independent and neutral, so I’m absolutely going to continue to cover anything that readers are interested in and that I can manage to fit in.

(Just as an aside, though—there’s this huge discussion in my blog comments about Dell Datasafe, and really, folks, it’s probably better if you talk to Dell about it, because I have no influence with them.)

When I got the invitation to interview the CEO and CTO of “online data manager” SpiderOak, my first thought was “Another one!” Everyone and his brother seems to be starting an online backup service these days, and I’ve written about quite a few of them already. I agreed to the interview with Ethan and Alan with some skepticism. Would there really be anything new here?

Actually, yes. SpiderOak bills itself as five services in one, though the fifth, sync, isn’t finished yet. Ethan and Alan told me that they actually focus their marketing on the file-sharing features, because backup is just not sexy enough. (Don’t I know it.)

But there are a lot of file-sharing services out there, too. That wasn’t going to do it for me. Fortunately for all of us (they’re likeable guys and I’d hate to diss their product), there’s more.

If you’re a multi-platform family (for a while I had both a Mac and a PC, and these days Linux-based UMPCs are becoming popular), SpiderOak has a definite advantage over Windows-only services, because it lets you share files between your Mac, your PC, and your Linux machine. It also lets you connect multiple machines to the same account. They bill by the amount of storage space you use, not the number of computers you connect. If you’ve ever contended  with the need to license multiple “seats” of the same program, you’re sure to appreciate that.

You can also subscribe to a SpiderOak “share room” via RSS feed. Like most bloggers, I’m an RSS fan, and I hadn’t encountered that in relation to a backup service before.

What really caught my attention, however, was the claim to be “zero-knowledge backup.” That means that SpiderOak has no idea what you’re backing up or sharing. Alan explained it this way:

We know absolutely nothing about the content of a user’s data. Most storage companies when they do encryption, if they do encryption at all, maybe they just do it during the transmission, but the files are still stored in plain text. With Mozy, for example, you have to choose a different option to use your own key, and if you don’t choose that option, then Mozy can decrypt your files at any time, so it’s sort of like they’re not really encrypted. Even if you do choose your own keys, they still know all of your file names, and your file sizes, and the time the file was stored, which is a tremendous amount of information to know about somebody’s data.

At SpiderOak we only see sequentially-numbered encrypted data blocks. We have some idea of how much space you’re using after it’s been compressed and de-duplicated, but that’s really about all we know.

The Ur-Guru insists that if SpiderOak built the software, they could crack the encryption. (The exact quote was “If they really wanted to know the names of files, details, or even copy and extract they could do that. They designed the system so saying things like ‘even we can’t look at it’ is more or less a statement that is aimed at inspiring confidence but in reality means nothing at all.”) I’m not in a position to dispute the ways and means of software with him, yet I found what Alan told me compelling. It still sounds more secure than the alternatives, except possibly in cases like Spare Backup where they use a third-party escrow service to hold your encryption key.

The password-creation screen in SpiderOak explains their zero-knowledge policy this way:

SPIDEROAK WILL NEVER KNOW YOUR PASSWORD AND, THEREFORE, WILL NEVER HAVE ACCESS TO YOUR DATA. ALL OF THE DIGITAL POSSESSIONS STORED ON YOUR SPIDEROAK NETWORK WILL BE IN AN UNREADABLE CRYPTOGRAPHICALLY SECURE FORMAT FROM THE MOMENT THE DATA LEAVES YOUR COMPUTER, THOUGH THE ENTIRE STORAGE PROCESS, UNTIL IT ARRIVES SAFELY BACK ON THE DEVICE OF YOUR CHOOSING. TO RETRIEVE THE DATA YOU HAVE STORED ON SPIDEROAK, YOUR PASSWORD IS ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED. PLEASE MAKE A RECORD OF THE PASSWORD THAT YOU HAVE SELECTED. SHOULD YOU FORGET YOUR PASSWORD, SPIDEROAK WILL STORE A ‘PASSWORD HINT’ TO HELP YOU RECOVER YOUR PASSWORD. THE ‘PASSWORD HINT’ CAN BE RETRIEVED ON THE SPIDEROAK WEB PAGE ANYTIME.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO E-MAIL US ANYTIME AT: PASSWORD@SPIDEROAK.COM.

Given that I’m already taking my chances with Mozy, and haven’t had any problem there, I didn’t hesitate to download an install SpiderOak. Setup is simple, and the program has an attractive interface. SpiderOak recognized my network drives and external hard drives immediately. One curiosity: it doesn’t seem to see the !Author-izer, !FileSlinger, and !Podcast Asylum folders on my C drive, though it can see them just fine on the D drive. Those are the folders with all my business data in them (barring the Quicken data and Outlook data, which live elsewhere), so not being able to see them is a bit of an issue, but since I have everything in those files backed up to the D drive, it’s only a minor issue for me. And it probably wouldn’t be an issue for ordinary users, who probably don’t name their folders with ! or keep them outside “My Documents.”

There are several handy video tutorials for the different features on the SpiderOak website, and even screenshots from all three supported operating systems. These helped explain to me that when the backup was finished, the status would say “built” instead of showing a number representing percentage complete. Not that the explanation does much to speed up the initial upload time for the videos I recorded yesterday at the BACN Board holiday party, but that’s a bandwidth problem as much as anything. Perhaps when Comcast finally rolls out its 50-megabit cable service, the Ur-Guru and I can split the bill.

Meanwhile, I’m going to experiment with SpiderOak a bit. If you still don’t have a backup system, maybe you should, too. One thing they do have in common with Mozy is a free service with 2 GB of storage.

When I put out my request for backup stories on HARO, two of the first respondents were eager to tell me about Spare Backup. Maria-Christina Zajac of Avalanche Strategic Communications offered to set up an interview with Spare Backup CEO Cery Perle, and Heather Schroeder at Corporate Advocates wrote to me about the new Spare Mobile service.

Spare just announced last week its Spare Mobile service that may be of particular interest to your readers. The new service provides users with the benefits of real-time mobile access to their content without the risk of lost data due to a malfunctioning device. In addition, Spare users can remotely access photos, music and podcasts from their home computers anytime, anywhere from their mobile device.

Just in case I wasn’t sufficiently convinced of Spare Backup’s wonderfulness, she added:

Spare Backup doesn’t just back up your data, it can actually help you transfer all of your data from your old computer to your new one in 3 easy steps. I switched from a desktop to a notebook about a year ago and I still have things on CD because I didn’t know how else to transfer my files! It’s so easy my mom can do it. :-)

“Easy,” as I discovered when I interviewed Cery Perle on July 15th, has always been a priority for Spare Backup. Cery was motivated to get into the backup business after experiencing a data loss catastrophe. The company he worked for at the time did have a backup system, but someone had forgotten to insert the backup tape for the day he needed. (Shades of the Institute for Backup Trauma’s 2005 video with John Cleese, except that Spare Backup has actually went public in 2003.) Cery wanted a product easy enough for him to use, and the options available at the time didn’t fit that description.

The product I downloaded definitely does. Spare Backup has an attractive interface, dominated by a big green “Click here to Backup” button. (Pedant’s point of contention: “back up” as a verb should be two words.) A sidebar on the right offers tips for changing what to back up and where to store your backup. The default location is online, where you get 50 GB of storage space, but Spare Backup will also work with CDs and DVDs, external drives, and network drives.

The user interface is fairly self-explanatory, but there are detailed user guides with screenshots available, too. I did notice a few slightly odd things. Under “Settings,” you have the following options:

• Select files for online backup
• Online backup schedule
• Select Files for local backup
• Manually include/exclude files
• Account Information
• Advanced

Having the “manually include/exclude” separate from both the offline and online backup options seemed strange to me. Isn’t that part of selecting files for backup?

The default option for either online or offline backup is to back up everything. Since I didn’t want to wait all day for files to transfer, I instead opted to back up just my Microsoft Publisher files online. I then discovered that unlike many backup programs, which back up only your C drive unless you tell them otherwise (and are sometimes configured only to back up one internal drive no matter how many you have), Spare Backup automatically backs up all your internal and external drives, though not your network drives. So it went searching through my C drive, then the D drive where I keep fairly-recent data that isn’t part of current projects, then the F drive (my Free Agent Go). It didn’t copy anything from the M or P drive, but then again, the P drive wasn’t connected properly and the M drive only has a Safety Drill image on it right now, and no individual Publisher files.

Because I back up data from the C drive to both the D drive and the F drive automatically, there are now several duplicates in my Spare Backup storage area. (I’m not too worried: I’ve only used 1.26% of my online storage capacity.) If I adjusted this backup job to exclude the D and F drives (or at least one of them), then I could solve the duplication problem.

Spare Backup automatically pauses when it detects mouse or keyboard activity. The idea is to keep from slowing down your computer, but that can slow down your backup job instead. If your priority is finishing the backup job, you can adjust this under the advanced settings.

One feature Cery mentioned to me, which I haven’t tested, is the ability to restore individual e-mail messages to Outlook, and not just the whole PST file. I meant to test it, but since all my PST files are large, and you can’t back up individual e-mail messages (at least, I didn’t see that option), I decided to do the Outlook backup onto one of my external hard drives.

And so I discovered that while recovering files from online backups is fairly intuitive and done right through the regular Spare Backup interface, recovering from offline backups requires you to run a program called Local Launcher that gets put into the same location as your offline backup.

On the one hand, this makes sense. It means you can restore the data from the external drive even if all you have is the drive, and not the computer you installed Spare Backup on. But it’s a pretty crude interface by comparison with the main program, and it doesn’t let you restore individual messages.

Spare Backup’s best features are clearly reserved for the online backup service. And speaking of online backup, Cery told me that the Spare Key you get when you download the program (and which you need in order to recover your data; I had to enter it in Local Launcher) Is housed at a third company. That means none of Spare Backup’s employees can get to your data, and neither can anyone at the company holding the keys, because the only person with all the pieces is you.

Spare Backup does a private label business for bigger brands. For instance, if you buy a new Sony Vaio, the backup program you’ll find pre-installed on the machine is really Spare Backup. Offering online backup services helps hardware companies retain customers. If you have the customer’s data, you keep the customer. (Spare Backup has a 93% retention rate.) This is why the big enterprise backup companies like EMC and Symantec are buying small online backup companies like Mozy right and left.

Spare Backup is also working on an enterprise product for up to 500 users. (Disclosure: I may be writing a white paper about this for them, which would make them a client, which would at least potentially bias my opinion.)

Next week we’ll have another guest columnist for you.