Feature Overview

Continuous Backup

Continuous Backup™ and Why It’s Smarter

Continuous Online Backup, the patented system only available with Zendal.net, is the best solution because it means we are always watching your files and looking for changes. Whenever a change is detected, our continuous online backup engine immediately extracts the changes, compresses them, encrypts them, and securely transfers them to our data center.

What’s Wrong with a Scheduled Backup?

Most online backup tools do scheduled backups. Scheduling means your PC has to be online and running when the backup happens at its scheduled time. For example, an administrator may set the backup to happen at 8:00pm every night. If your PC is shut down at that time, your online backup fails and you have to wait for the next schedule to kick in.

But that’s not the only problem.

If you’re busy working on your PC when the schedule kicks in, the backup will make your PC seem slow. Most people get frustrated and click “Cancel” – thus, another missed backup. Of course, you can always run the backup manually later. But that’s just one more thing you have to remember to do – and that defeats the purpose of automatic backup.

How Is Continuous Backup Different?

Instead of one big backup at a pre-scheduled time, we do many tiny backups throughout the day. Each little change you make = a little backup you’ll likely never notice, because those smaller backups happen faster. And since there is no schedule to miss, you will never miss an opportunity to have your files backed up, nor have to manually back them up.

Access Backed Up Data, Photos, Files, Music, Emails & Documents Anywhere Remote File Access from Anywhere

The Total Convenience of Anywhere Access to Your Backed Up Data

One of the most impressive—and convenient—features of Zendal.net is the unprecedented level of access you have to your data. Anywhere there’s a web browser, you can use our Secure Web Portal to access your protected data. In other words, if you can get online, you can get to your files.

Imagine no longer having to lug your laptop home for the weekend or away on a short trip, just to work on your files. You can instead use your home computer or one at your travel destination to retrieve your required files. Simply download your file from Zendal.net and work from anywhere.

Simple Rate Plan

Just €3/GB to Backup Your PC Data. And No License Fees for Additional PCs = More Savings

For example, if you have more than one PC to backup, most services tack on a ‘license fee’ per PC. Not us. With Zendal.net, you can install the online secure data backup software on as many PCs as you like—all under the same €3/GB monthly fee.

What Makes Our Simple Pricing Plan Better?

• Unlimited users
• Unlimited computers
• Unlimited 14 day trial
• Only €3/GB per month†

Aside from saving you money, what’s the biggest benefit of our simple, straightforward pricing plan? No unpleasant surprises for you when it comes to your bill.

Try Us Out for Free

Customers who sign up for our online backup software now will receive a special 14-day Unlimited Free Trial, during which you can back up as much data as you like for free. Once the trial is over, you will only pay for the online data storage space you use.

† All prices quoted are in $US.

Simple Rate Plan

Secure Bank-Grade Encryption (and Lots of Other Reasons to Feel Secure)

Let’s Start with Reason #1: Bank Grade Encryption

Your files are protected using 448 bit Blowfish Encryption before they leave your PC. This extremely secure “bank grade” encryption algorithm has never been cracked.

That’s right—we said never.

Your files are then stored in this encrypted state at our secure data center.

Further Protection with Individual Data Security

With Zendal.net, each user gets their own individual account and password. This is significant because it means that each user also gets a unique encryption key. This encryption key ensures that, while your data is securely stored at our data center, only you have access to your data. In fact, even our most privileged systems administrators do not have the ability to decrypt your data.

Password Security That is Second To None

Great lengths are taken in our system to ensure your password remains a secret. A few examples:

• your password security practices have been modeled after premier online banking web sites
• your password is encrypted before it is stored in our database. At no point is an administrator able to retrieve your password. Nor does an administrator have the ability to set your password to a known value
• when you activate your account, you are required to choose a password and set up a security question. If you forget your password, or repeatedly try to log in with an incorrect password, the system will lock you out after a few attempts. You may then reset your password by correctly answering your security question.
• if you incorrectly answer your security question, you are again locked out after a few attempts. In the unlikely event that you forget your password and the answer to your security question, you must contact Zendal.net directly for manual identity verification.

Our Secure Data Center

Your data is securely stored in our Carrier Grade data center. Our all Cisco based switched network employs redundant Internet providers, redundant routers, and redundant firewalls. We use BGP and HSRP protocols to implement fail-over and redundancy.

What does all that mean? Well, here’s one example:

Our data center was up and running throughout the big blackout of August 2003

Need more convincing?

We use only Carrier Grade computer hardware from major manufacturers to store your data. There are no “clones” in our data center. All systems operate on redundant power. Servers have dual power supplies fed from separate electrical panels. The facility includes triple redundant diesel generators, dual redundant UPSs, the latest fire suppression equipment, and 24 hour guards on-site.

When your data is stored on our servers, it is written to RAID 5 disk arrays (including hot spare drives). Each storage server is then replicated in real time to a second storage server for backup. Every precaution is taken to protect the integrity of your data.

In other words—words you can understand—there are two key things to know about our Data Center: your data is safe from crashes; your data is safe from hackers.

Still More Reasons to Trust Zendal.net

End-to-End Verification

As each file is transferred to our data center, we carefully verify its integrity against a known CRC signature. Files are re-verified each time they are written to disk. If any file fails verification, it is retransmitted from your PC or recovered from the replica server. This ensures that the data stored on our servers is the same data that was stored on your PC.

Secure Protocol

The Zendal.net client communicates with our servers over a proprietary protocol that was designed specifically for Internet backup. Other Internet backup products that use popular web protocols like HTTP, FTP, or WebDav can be vulnerable to hacker and virus attacks. The extreme popularity of these protocols makes them a target. It is extremely unlikely that a hacker is going to invest the time and effort to go after a proprietary protocol. Even if they did, the 448 bit Blowfish Encryption has never been broken.

Firewalls

To maximize compatibility with home and corporate firewalls, the protocol used by our Backup Client was designed to look to a firewall just like the SSL protocol used in web browsers. This means that if you are able to surf to our web site, you will be able to connect with our backup software.

Specifically, our backup client runs on port 443 and mimics SSL’s handshaking protocol. Almost all firewalls will pass our backup traffic without reconfiguration. We also support the use of proxy servers. Our web browser interface also uses generic HTTP and HTTPS on ports 80 and 443.

Corporate Remote Access Policy

Many organizations have a policy to control access to their data from outside of the organization. VPNs and Firewalls are generally used to control this, but become ineffective when the data is stored off-site. The same features that empower a laptop user to backup and restore his or her data while on the road may violate corporate information policy.

Zendal.net includes the ability to restrict data access to only specific IP addresses. A Corporate Administrator can define the IP address ranges of their firewalls and access points. Once the definitions are in place, users can only access the data from the allowed locations.

As We Said, Security That’s Second To None

In fact, if you consider the risks to which your data could be exposed on your computer—everything from hardware damage to hackers—it’s not hard to see that your valuable data is actually better protected by the multiple levels of security and safeguards listed above.

Open Files Driver

Finally, Protection for In-Use Files

With this new feature, Zendal has once again set itself apart from other backup services. Open Files is designed to backup files typically left open for long periods of time in open applications, such as Outlook, QuickBooks and Simply Accounting. It also provides added advantages for servers, allowing a “backup snapshot” of data every twelve hours.

Other services generally skip open and in-use files during the backup process, putting your most current data at risk. Open File secures your most current data, even if you haven’t pressed the ‘Save’ button yourself. If it’s open on your computer, we back it up.

It’s Free and It’s Easy To Add

This important feature is offered at no extra cost – it’s part of your standard Zendal.net package – and you can easily install the Open Files Driver by selecting the Open Files tab under “Options”.

It’s just another way Zendal.net backs up its exclusive claim of Continuous Backup. And it’s another way we back up our promise of being So Simple, So Smart.

Fast Data Recovery

Restore a Lost File or Data in a Few Short Clicks

It’s truly that easy to lose that sick feeling in your stomach.

You just right click the Zendal.net icon at the bottom of the screen, select ‘Restore’, find the file in the tree and right click ‘Restore’.

That’s it.

And retrieving a previous version of a file is just as easy. Just log in to the web site, select ‘My Data’ and find the file in the tree. Simply click on the file link, then click the “Download” button. That’s it.

Speeding Up The Process with Web Carts

Our Web Carts provide a simple way to speed up the entire process of recovering multiple files, folders and/or systems using the web portal. You can select multiple items into a single zip file – or web cart – and download them all at once. This means if you are restoring 20 files, you don’t have to go through the painstaking process of restoring them one at a time. This feature is also extremely helpful when doing your initial file download.

Web File Sharing and Folder Sharing

With our web-based file sharing system, you also have the ability to share selected files or folders with colleagues and friends. You can mark individual files or entire folders as sharable in the Web Portal. You can then assign a unique password to each file or folder share.

Giving colleagues access to individual files does not mean they have access to the other files in your Zendal.net web file sharing system. They can only see the files you have shared with them. You can choose not to share the files at any time.

Once shared, you can email the secure web based file sharing links to others. The other person simply clicks on a Web Link in the email and logs in to download the file. Using this feature, you can easily share large file attachments with people who have very limited inbox space.

Web Photo Albums Made Easy

It’s easy to use Zendal.net to create a web photo album you can share with anyone. There is no need to upload your photos to separate photo-sharing sites; once they are backed up, a sharable web photo album is only a click away.

File Versioning

Zendal.net Keeps Multiple Versions of Each File

Every time your files change, the new versions of each file will be backed up automatically. But that doesn’t mean we discard previous versions. In fact, the service will keep three previous versions by default, and can be set to keep up to 28.

It’s just a smarter solution for you and the way you work.

But Don’t Multiple Versions = Lots More Storage Memory?

No. These new versions are usually much smaller than the original file – a fraction of the size, in fact. This is because our backup engine compares each new file to the last version stored. It then extracts the changed data to created a “delta” file. This delta is stored on our servers as a separate version of the file. You can later recover the original file or any of the versions while only using a fraction of the storage space.

Faster Backups with Suspend and Resume Backups

‘Suspend & Resume’ Means No PC Slowdowns

What’s Suspend & Resume? It’s a feature that suspends the backup when the PC is in use. When you use the keyboard or mouse, Zendal.net pauses. When you take a break, backup continues. That means the backup never slows you down when you are working, because it waits for you to stop.

But what if that break you take is very short?

No problem. Since we backup the files as they change, the amount of data being sent through your Internet connection is kept to a minimum. If you break to make a quick phone call, your backup is likely done by the time you hang up.

What if the backup gets interrupted?

Again, backups stop and resume automatically. If you unplug your laptop halfway through backup of a large file, the backup continues where it left off when you plug it back in. This is especially useful during the initial backup, which may take some time to complete.

The Suspend & Resume is just one more example of how Zendal.net is determined to give you simpler—and smarter— solutions.

Easy-to-use Data Backup

Everybody Says ‘Easy to Use.’ We Mean It

We’re not kidding when we promise a backup solution that’s ‘so simple.’ Whether it’s getting started or ongoing use, you will not find a simpler online backup solution.

Why? Because We Do All the Work

Once installed, Zendal.net™ automatically selects some popular folders including: Windows Desktop; Windows Favourites; My Documents; Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. If you have data in other folders, you can easily add them to the folder list in the backup client. And, of course, you can delete the chosen folders as you choose.

And then our Continuous Backup™ takes over. Whenever you’re online, Zendal.net backs up your data automatically. There are no procedures to follow. No Schedules to set. You can never miss a backup window. (See Continuous Backup for more details.)

Even Accessing and Sharing Your Files Is Easy

Anywhere there’s a server you can access your files. (Or, if they’ve been lost, you can recover them.) With our smart search and recover options, it only takes seconds to find what you need. And sharing a file is as easy as emailing someone a link that allows them access to only the file(s) you want them to get.