French backup startup Datashelter is fleshing out its product line as it seeks to add customers outside its home country. The company was founded in Toulouse in 2023 and has been selling products since March 2024.
Datashelter told the recent IT Press Tour in Istanbul, Turkey, that it currently has around 50 customers for its automated data backup system, mainly generated through CEO Malo Paletou’s connections from his previous job as a consultant for SMEs. Its customers’ index-based backups are end-to-end encrypted using AES-256 and TLS protocols, and stored in S3-compatible datacenters in France.
Paletou outlined the typical data management problems for companies employing less than 30 staff. How do you make sure your backups are performed, and how do you ensure your data is restorable? Also, where and how will you store your backups?
“As a DevOps consultant I have seen many different types of infrastructures, and deployed many backup solutions,” said Paletou. “Most SMEs without backups are facing two pain points: Unpredictable pricing, and a backup solutions market that is wide. We provide an easy response to these complexities.”
Backup automation covers both files and databases, and currently three main types of databases are supported: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and MySQL. It’s a fully integrated solution, from the web interface to the client servers, and alerting is included. The service is currently hosted on OVHcloud infrastructure, and further cloud support is being planned elsewhere, Paletou told us.
“It’s a super easy-to-use backup solution that opens the world of backups to a non-tech person. It relies on the S3 standard protocol for its communications,” he added.
The price of the SaaS service starts at €7 a month for 1 TB of backed-up data, with incremental backup, compression and decompression, and AES-256 encryption, for one backed-up server. You can find a backup cost calculator here.
Customers include the Klapp Agency, a web agency that rents VPS/dedicated servers to host the websites of its clients. They chose Datashelter to secure those websites for “just a few hundred euros per year.” Ten websites are backed up daily with 2 TB of storage.
Imajing, a mobile mapping company, serves millions of images and videos for its clients. It relies on a large PostgreSQL database, for which Datashelter can be applied. 500 TB of data is backed up across six servers.
The company says it is developing a reseller network mainly made up of small IT consulting agencies that deploy the product as part of wider customer projects. But it is also talking to “large” channel reseller partners as part of its evolving go-to-market.
Later this quarter, Datashelter will also offer Kubernetes backup support, and in the fourth quarter, the firm will offer serverless integration and Windows compatibility, said Paletou. In 2025, he said there will be “bring your own device,” whereby users are able to only pay a license price of about €8 a month and use their own S3 buckets.
A Paletou blog provides more information about Datashelter’s index-based backup approach.
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There is a separate and unconnected Data Shelter colocation and disaster recovery company based in Florida.
