The dropping costs for disk-based storage hardware, however, have enabled technology company Righteous Software (r1soft.com) to develop a more affordable solution for automated backup.

David Wartell, CEO of Righteous Software, started off operating a Web hosting provider. He noticed that tape backup, the most common means for data protection in 1997, was too expensive and time consuming for Web hosts like his.

By 2003, a market had emerged for low-priced self-managed dedicated servers, but these plans typically didn't include any form of backup, so Wartell sold his Web hosting company and decided to develop the disk-based backup solution he had envisioned.

"There are some tremendous challenges out there for Web servers, especially people that have a worldwide audience. Downtime isn't tolerated," says Wartell. "If they lose data it could be the loss of their business, so all these kind of things have motivated us to do something about it."

Righteous Software says its product is a fully-automated solution that leaves Web servers fully operational during incremental backups, rather than taking them offline for several hours and denying customers their service. The company says because of the low overhead and short backup window, it's possible to perform nearly continuous backups. Wartell says EV1Servers, the company's first customer, is able to perform backups every 10 minutes with no downtime.

Righteous Backup captures consistent point-in-time images, even on open files, and data is encrypted during the backup process and while in storage. Restores can be performed directly from backup, with no need for an OS reinstall on the replacement hard drive. 

Wartell says being involved in Web hosting in the past led him to see the frustrations and challenges facing server administrators and their needs for data storage and backup. He wanted to create a solution that was a "no-brainer in terms of both cost and convenience."

"I've always been fascinated with the Web hosting industry in general. I kind of see it as this proving ground for new technology," says Wartell. "When we founded the company 80GB drives were kind of the norm. But today we have 750GB drives; we've had a tenfold increase in storage capacity. At the same time data needs are growing just as fast, so everybody has a tenfold increase in how much data they need to store. However, transfer speed has only increased twofold. Three or four years ago, an 80 GB drive would've taken four to five hours to back up, but now with the 750 GB drive, even with the twofold increase in performance, it's going to take almost 26 hours to back that drive up."

Wartell believes that kind of time is unacceptable, as well as inefficient. He explains that Web-based businesses are starting to realize that they need a new approach to backup and restore and that the only answer is more efficient backup software. Typical servers only see a small fraction of their total storage changed or written to in the space of an hour or even a day. His answer is to track changes to the disk and only read changed hard disk sectors during a backup.

"Industry studies will tell you that on average 10 percent of a server's data will change daily. For most people this is closer to 5 percent or less. And the more frequently you back up the less changed data there is to copy," says Wartell. "So if we use the 10 percent number, that means daily you need to backup 75 GB of data. With a product like Righteous Backup that 750 GB disk that took 26 hours to backup, now only takes four or five hours to back up. And if you back up that same drive hourly, that means you have only 3GB of changed data, and now you are looking at something closer to a 10 or 15 minute backup window."

Wartell says the cost of disk backup software typically ranges from $400 to $1000 per server, but Righteous Software says no server should be without nearly continuous backups or bare-metal disaster recovery, so for most customers the company has been able to get the cost of backup software down to around $50 to $100 per server.

"I think people already know that they have some serious challenges with their backup and restore and so they're kind of out there looking for something better and it's kind of our job to let them know that they've got some choices and there are some new technologies out there," says Wartell. "With the technology we invented at Righteous, when you do a backup, you only read that 75GB of data that has changed. That difference is significant."