Backup Anytime

Who’s who in the data industry? This weeks interview is with Brian R.Bondy of VisionWorks.

Brian’s story is very exciting and shows how innovation can utterly change the vertical markets of a business. Initially Brian set out to offer online backup to business and after identifying an opening in open file management (pun intended) he focused on that area and VisionWorks was founded to provide affordable, quality open file management for online backup software companies. Now let me hand you over to the man himself.

1. Name
Brian R. Bondy

2. Company.
VisionWorks Solutions Inc.
ROBOdrs, LLC.

3. Position.
VisionWorks Solutions Inc. Co-Founder and CTO
ROBOdrs, LLC. Co-Founder and CTO

4. Marital status, family members.
Recently married with twins on the way. 2 cats and a red tri-colored border collie dog named Leia (yes, named after Star Wars)

5. Education
Bachelors of Mathematics with Honours Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in Ontario Canada. Mostly otherwise self taught, and taught from working with others.

6. Pastimes / Hobbies
Programming (mainly in C++), reading technical books, spending time with my wife.  I take Karate for exercise.

7. How is VisionWorks Solutions taking part in the backup industry?
VisionWorks was founded in early 2003 and started out with a product named Vision Backup.  This product is not aimed at managed service providers (MSPs) nor very large companies.  It works as a traditional backup software with several features and output medium.

We quickly learnt our #1 support question within the first year of business: People complaining that they were receiving the message “The file could not be backed up because it was in use or locked”. After several weeks of searching for a solution to get around this problem, we could only find one company that licensed a file system filter driver for accessing exclusively opened and locked files.  This solution however was much too expensive for us.  They simply only wanted business from large backup software companies.

While looking into *how* other backup software companies our size handled this problem, we also learnt that none of them had adequate support for the backup open file problem.  So this gave rise to our product File Access Manager (FAM).  The plan was to develop an open file plug-in that was flexible enough to work with every backup software, and then to license this product to as many backup software companies as possible.

Today FAM is used by over 40 different backup software companies who distribute it to several, or all of their clients and customers.

8. What is open file backup?  Why should it be important to companies?
When a file is opened by a program, it can be opened in several different ways.
Mainly:
i) Share access of this file with other programs
ii) Deny access of this file with other programs
Several programs open files with the first option, and in this case no backup software has trouble backing them up. For the second case however, it is impossible for any backup software solution to backup files like this. A good example is the Outlook .PST files that Outlook opens exclusively, or the ntuser.dat file that Windows exclusively opens on start-up.

The reason backing up these files is important to companies, is because files that are exclusively open, are the files that you are modifying by definition, and hence probably the most important.

9. How long has VisionWorks Solutions been developing File Access Manager (FAM)?
Around 5 years actively, and we will continue to improve and add features for several years to come.

10. What were the hurdles in developing FAM?
FAM was a very experimental and research intensive project for us, we went through several complete re-design iterations and improvements.

For example, the very first commercial version of FAM would copy a file at the time the file was being exclusively opened. The copied file would remain in the same directory.  So a file Outlook.pst, when it was opened by outlook would show up as ~Outlook.pst.bak~.  This design however did not work due to i) The file copy operation was too long for large files, and ii) Some programs kept a file open much too long, and the backup copy was not fresh enough.

We went through several completely different re-designs like this over time, and finally have landed on a great solution to the exclusively opened file and locked file problem.

The current solution allows:
i) Corruption protection: The backup software sees the file as it was when the backup of the file started.  While still allowing the program that locked the file to see it as it really is.
ii) Backup of exclusively opened and locked files over the network
iii) No extra temporary space needed on open file backups
iv) An extensive SDK to tie into more advanced functionality
v) Backup Software products can use FAM without code modification

11. Is there any competition to FAM? Who uses FAM?
No competition that I know of, the company we first tried to contact for open file access had their product purchased by a much larger online backup software and service provider.

Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is in the same domain, but its design simply has too many limitations such as no support or programs that don’t support VSS.

Several small and large backup software companies include FAM in their backup software installation.
Several MSPs have special licensing agreements with VisionWorks Solutions.

12. What advice would you give to business people who have data backup concerns?
- Identify the data you would not like to lose.  Make sure it is selected in one of your backup sets.
- Identify an acceptable time of recovery on your data.  How long can you go without your critical data?  Make sure you can restore within this time range.
- Identify how much data loss you can go without.  Example, you might need to perform daily backups, or perhaps weekly backups.
- Make sure your storage media is large enough, or hire an offsite backup managed service provider.
- Do not perform tape backups, use a disk based backup solution.
- Does your offsite backup provider use deduplication? If so, do they pass this benefit onto you?  If not, does their price justify it?
- Does your offsite backup provider use compression? If so, do they pass this benefit onto you?  If not, does their price justify it?
- Are your backups encrypted before they leave your computer?  Can they only be restored by entering an encryption key that never reaches the backup server?
- Review your backup logs and reports, or pay someone to do it for you.
- Have an archive policy in place.
- Find a software that fits all of these needs.

13. What other products does VisionWorks Solutions develop?
VisionWorks Solutions develops:

Vision Backup: A backup software for home users and SMB
Cryptex: A hidden hard drive that stores and encrypts your important data
File Access Manager: An open file plug-in for any and all backup software
Null FTP Client: An extremely powerful, full featured, and free FTP client
Null FTP Server: An extremely powerful, full featured, and free FTP server
Several other products and technologies.

14. From where do you get your inspiration?
Mainly from several cups of coffee.

But I guess also because…

I love to learn and I love my job.  I know that I work with some of the smartest people on the planet.  This is inspiration enough.

15. Where do you see yourself in five years time?
I see myself in the same role as I’m in now, but perhaps on a bigger scale. I also see myself with a head full of gray hair from the twins

Ed. Thanks Brian for making yourself available and giving us so much of your valuable time. We also appreciate the introduction to us by you of another potential interviewee.

Visitors, want to see more who’s who in data? Then watch next weeks who’s who in data.