News

posted on 23 April 2008 11:35

Venture capital-backed Italian engineers have launched Memopal, an online backup service offering 250GB capacity for $99 (69 euros)/year.

It is a fully automatic service, transmitting changes when made to selected files and folders to its remote data centre using 128-bit encryption. The company says it is gaining more than 1,000 new customers a day.

It saves versions of files so you can restore previous versions if you wish. The service is intended for both small businesses and consumers.

The company's technology detects file contents common to different users and doesn't store them, but only pointers to them, calling this multi-user compression technology. Backed up data is stored in the Memopal Global File System (MGFS) which has a checksum-based structure. Memopal has instituted RAID 5 technology and triple-copy storage in data centres in three separate Eiropean counties to provide reliable storage.

Users have access to a semantic search engine. They can also nominate files to be shared and their contacts will be sent an e-mail. containing a URL for the files concerned.

It is available in consumer and business versions with the business version having a network usage balancing component.

(See also SquirrelSave.)

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}