Sorry, I totally caught the pun with the “Fire”wire, I forgot to acknowledge it in my post. It did make me chuckle when I read it.

With regards to hurricanes, the ioSafe Solo is designed to be bolted to the floor or locked to something. With HydroSafe technology, the drive stays dry even if completely submersed (10′ depth for 3 days) in saltwater or freshwater.

While no one technology will save you from every possible disaster, the ioSafe Solo was designed to be a very simple way to add disaster protection where previously it may have been impractical.

The interface, USB 2.0 was chosen for this product to keep it simple and as low cost as practical. We have other enterprise class NAS/RAID products that are more sophisticated and of course more expensive. The ioSafe 3.5 is also an internal hard drive that can be integrated anywhere a normal 3.5 disk is installed to add fire/flood protection.

Future interfaces like FireWire, NAS, eSATA, etc. are possible with the technology.

My personal home setup btw, is a Netgear NV+ NAS that backs up to an ioSafe system every night. Having over 1TB of pictures, video and music makes it impractical for me to backup online.

If you have a small amount of data, backing up online might be a great option. If you’d like to perform a baremetal restore of your main computer or server (post fire or flood), an online “restore” might be tough. Moving a 100 GB across the internet may be next to impossible. It might be faster to FedEx the data rather than trickle it across a T-1. Severed internet connections are common in big storms.

Again, no one solution solves for every possible disaster. Your best bet is to use a combination of strategies. The ioSafe Solo just happens to be the fastest, least expensive, most protection you can get per dollar spent.

Robb Moore
CEO
ioSafe, Inc.

But I thought the irony of the name would have been a good inside joke.

I know most of these sites are very secure, but I am sure all those government agencies who have had their data compromised thought they were pretty secure too.

As for the USB vs. FireWire. It may have been an economical decision. almost 100% of pcs have USB. Firewire is not as widely used (although most newer laptops have it and I am sure the number of PCs with it is increasing)

I’d like to see it with a network connection, but there are ways around that with wireless routers that have USB ports on the back.

1. Onsite storage (like this one) for automatic backups a handful of times an hour. This is so you can never lose more than 15 minutes of work.

2. Swapped physical drives at a nearby safe storage location (like a safety deposit box) for weekly drive swaps.

3. Online storage (like Carbonite or Amazon’s S3 or even gmail if your data collection is small) as a third line of defense in a facility in a different part of the country from where you live.

In the past, if you haven’t had all three systems, you run the risk of losing data. This system would reduce the need for #2 listed above. Currently, though, I use all three and have never been in a bind.