The Death of Zoogmo – Will More Online Backup Companies with “grid” in Their Names Follow?
I do not like to see any company fail. But I’ve said it before – peer-to-peer online backup is just a bad idea. OK, I’ll qualify that – it’s a bad idea from a marketing perspective. The general public is just now comfortable sending their data to a reputable and well-protected data center. They will never be as comfortable storing their data on their friends’ computers.
Rob Cosgrove, CEO Remote Backup Systems
Zoogmo, started in 2006, announced yesterday that they are closing their doors. Now, there are many reasons why an online backup company fails, and I have written about it before.
Zoogmo hasn’t given a reason for their closure, so we can’t be sure. I’d bet it’s because of one or more of the reasons I gave in this blog article. However, I’ll also bet that customers just weren’t comfortable storing their data in the spare drive space of other people’s computers – often people they didn’t even know. And that’s why I say peer-to-peer storage (sometimes called grid storage) is a bad idea.
Computer geeks LOVE anything with the word “grid” in it, though. It’s a really interesting technology that sort of spreads the workload around different computers. Grid Storage shares the extra drive space of dozens or thousands of internet-connected computers among all users. For an individual user, pieces of his backup could be scattered all over the world with no control, no SLA, no guarantee a restore can be done, and very poor security.
It was a cool project for some grad student, but in the real world it’s just a toy. (I’m going to get comments about that statement, but so be it.)
It’s a difficult concept for the average Joe to understand. As far as he’s concerned, his valuable data files are being sent to people he doesn’t know, and there are a lot of risks associated with that. And what happens when Joe wants to restore one of his files that was stored on Mahmud’s computer over in Turkey, and Mahmud (and his computer) just aren’t around?
In a world where secure, reliable, marketable online backup services based on great solid-as-a-rock client/server software like RBackup or Mercury are selling like hotcakes, I expect to see more companies with “grid” in their names follow Zoogmo into the abyss.
Rob Cosgrove is the CEO of Remote Backup Systems at http://remote-backup.com. He founded the Online Backup industry in 1987.
