With Vembu Home Synchronization feature, you can seamlessly work on a document from your office PC or your home PC without having to copy files back and forth. Once you add a document to be synchronized with Vembu Home, the document will be automatically synchronized to any number of devices you want the document to be available.

Configuring Vembu Home to sync your data

After installing Vembu Home in your computer, register for free Vembu Home account by accessing Vembu Home Agent console,

Once you complete with the registration process, login to Vembu Home Agent Console.

Once logged in, you don’t have to use the Vembu Home Agent Console to synchronize your files. You can simply sync your data right from your Windows explorer as you browse files.

Right-click on a file or folder from your Windows Explorer, select Sync with Vembu Home and then choose either one of the following option to synchronize your data across multiple devices.

Copy to sync folder – Choosing this option will copy the selected file or folder for synchronization to the Vembu Sync folder. You need to manually do this every time you change the file in the original location so that the changes would be synchronized to the Vembu Home Cloud and subsequently to other devices you have configured.

Sync from current location – Choosing this option will include the selected file or folder for Synchronization from its current location – without copying to the Vembu Sync folder. If you modify the file, the synchronization process will be automatically synchronize the modified content to the Vembu Home Cloud and subsequently to other devices you have configured.

Sharing files Online through Vembu Home

If you need to share some of your files with your friends or colleagues online, Vembu Home is a simple and secure tool to achieve this. You can upload and share files online from your desktop with a single click.

Right-click a file or folder in Windows Explorer, select “Sync with Vembu Home” and then choose “Upload and Share” option to share files online.

Upload and share – Choosing this option will upload the selected file to Vembu Home Cloud and provide you with a link you could share with others.

For more details on Vembu Home’s File Synchronization & File Sharing features, please refer this document http://home.vembu.com/features.php

If you haven’t installed the Vembu Home yet, now is the time to do it. We will be adding more and more exciting features in the near future. If you are an existing user, please find the instructions to upgrade to the latest version of Vembu Home from here.

The above post was written by Arul Prabhu of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

Yes, you heard it right! Much awaited Vembu Pro Online Backup Service hosted on Amazon Web Services infrastructure comes out of beta to production and with this release; Resellers and Service Providers can now offer brandable online backup service to their business customers without worrying about the investments for storage and backend infrastructure. Vembu Pro is powered by Vembu’s flagship product StoreGrid which is currently trusted by over 2000 Service Providers worldwide and is exclusively offered through Resellers and Channel Partners.

Start your own branded Online Backup Service with Vembu Pro in just three simple steps

1)      Sign up for a Vembu Pro reseller account
2)      Generate a customized branded client agent right from Vembu Pro console
3)      Start backing up your client’s data to the Vembu Pro servers running on the Amazon Web Services Cloud infrastructure.

Details on Vembu Pro pricing can be viewed here.

Due to the strong demand from Resellers and Service Providers from European region, Vembu Pro is also launched in European Region Clusters which will now enable European Resellers to offer brandable online backup service to businesses with the data being backed up to an Amazon Web Services Datacenter located in Europe.

Doesn’t that sound great?

Here’s one more reason to check out Vembu Pro. Marking the successful production launch of Vembu Pro Online Backup Service, we have extended a Special Introductory Offer.

Email us at pro-partner@vembu.com to learn more about the Special Introductory offer.

What are you still waiting for?
Check out Vembu Pro now and take your first step towards offering profitable online backup service to your business customers.

The above post was written by Lenin Srinivasan of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.

Vembu Home is the only FREE consumer backup solution for free local backups and optional Amazon Cloud backups. Get your FREE COPY now.

Backup to the cloud

The typical use case and the premise on which we started our Cloud AMI, this deployment  has service providers running the StoreGrid Cloud AMI as a backup server in Amazon EC2 by provisioning their own Amazon EBS storage. Thereafter, they install the StoreGrid Client in their customer PCs & Servers and configure it to backup to the StoreGrid Cloud AMI. This deployment is very compelling for service providers who do not want to host their customers’ backup data in their own data center. Compelling as it is, it is worth mentioning a few disadvantages with this approach…

One of the advantages a local service provider enjoys is her proximity to the customer. This is especially important when a customer has large amount of data, say 100 GB or more, to be backed up. The initial seed backup for that kind of data over the internet is going to take a long time. To circumvent this problem, StoreGrid supports a feature called “Local to Remote Server Migration (L2R)” which allows the service provider to go on-premise and do a local backup of the first full backup to an external drive. The service provider then manually copies the data from the external drive to the StoreGrid backup server deployed in her data center and then runs the “L2R” module in StoreGrid. This will ensure that the subsequent backups are done incrementally, i.e. only changed blocks are sent over the wire on subsequent backups. With an Amazon deployment, using this L2R feature would not be possible simply because one does not have physical access to the Amazon cloud. Hence, the first full backup has to be done over the internet, regardless of however long that will take. The same is the case when you have to do large restores. A StoreGrid online backup Service Provider with her own data center can do a quick server side restore to an external disk and deliver it to her customer. With the Amazon deployment, the restores have to be done only over the internet even if it is 100s of GB of data.

By no means am I trying to discourage service providers from using the Amazon cloud as the data center for their online backup service business. But it is best to take decisions after analyzing all pros and cons along with what exactly the customers’ needs are. It is also best to set the expectations of the end customer upfront so that the customer is fully aware of, and educated on what she is signing up to. That way you won’t have a “but I thought you’d ship me my data in 1 hour” kind of situation.

A hybrid approach – backup locally and to the cloud

In light of the above discussion, service providers who want to leverage the Amazon Cloud but have the benefit of quick on-site restores could explore a hybrid option wherein the StoreGrid backup server is deployed locally in a customer site and the StoreGrid Cloud AMI is run as a replication server in Amazon EC2. In this deployment model, the on-premise backup servers would be replicating the backup data to the replication server in the Amazon Cloud. A single replication server can receive data from multiple backup servers running across multiple customer sites. We have many service provider partners using the hybrid approach already with the StoreGrid replication server deployed in their own data center.

Backup within the cloud – backing up data from custom applications running in Amazon EC2

Very interestingly, there are also a few service providers and some end users who are deploying the StoreGrid Client in Amazon EC2 along with their custom applications (which are already running in EC2). We did not think about this use case initially but in retrospect its a fairly obvious opportunity…

Considering that many businesses are looking at running their custom applications in Amazon EC2, backing up application data (which is typically stored in the Amazon EBS volumes) from these custom applications are extremely important too! Even though Amazon supports backing up the EBS storage to Amazon S3 as a snapshot, this is not always sufficient. The reason being the snapshot backup of a whole EBS volume does not provide the granularity required for a partial data restore. With snapshot backup, you can only restore the whole volume data into a new EBS volume. However, with a StoreGrid client deployed in an Amazon EC2 instance running a custom application, businesses and IT solution providers, now have the option of configuring file level backups of the EBS volumes. This also applies to backing up data from any application which uses a relational database back end like MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server – since these database backups are supported by StoreGrid!

Where would these clients backup to? Typically, to a StoreGrid Cloud AMI deployed as a backup server – ideally, running in a different availability zone in the Amazon Cloud. The backing up of EBS volume at a granular file level would give enormous flexibility while trying to restore data partially. No wonder we are already generating some interest with this deployment option.

A reversal of roles – backup from the cloud to on-premise storage

Honestly, we didn’t see this coming…

An end user mentioned that they wanted to backup all their data in Amazon EBS to their on-premise storage. Read that again – from Amazon to their office!!! I was initially not convinced and wondered why someone would want to do that? Here’s why! Though he (the customer) liked running his applications in Amazon EC2 because of the benefits it offered, he was not wholly comfortable with all his customer data present only in the Amazon Cloud.

“What if the Amazon Cloud goes down or what if Amazon itself loses my application data because of some bug or an issue?”, he said. He asked me if he could deploy StoreGrid Client along with his application in Amazon EC2, have a StoreGrid backup server on-premise in his office, and simply backup the application data (stored in Amazon EBS) to the on-premise StoreGrid backup server. “Why Not?”, I thought to myself, and asked him to try it out – there’s no reason StoreGrid shouldn’t work for this kind of a deployment!

On top of this he also told me he would backup the backed up data to tape periodically and ship it for off-site storage. While I personally believe (and have told him so) him to have ‘data paranoia’, I fully understand that this is the nature of the beast! It all depends on the value you attribute to your data!

Needless to say, we are excited about all these possibilities. We are especially excited with the challenge of enhancing StoreGrid to seamlessly support such possibilities. We are gearing ourselves to explore these new frontiers!

I’d love to hear from our (current and prospective) partners and customers about their views and experiences. Got an Amazon story of your own? Do let us know.

The above post was written by Sekar Vembu of Vembu Technologies. Vembu Technologies is a backup software vendor whose product, StoreGrid, powers the online backup services of a large number of service providers across the globe. Besides remote backup, StoreGrid is also used for on premise backups of workstations and servers at various companies & universities.