During the last IT Press Tour #57, I’ve got the opportunity to learn about a new (for me) company: Datashelter presented by Malo Paletou (CEO).
Datashelter is a small company, with base in Toulose (France) and with a bootstrapped business with
already more than 50 customers, “made by techs, for techs”.
They have an interesting backup solution focused on the Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) segment with the scope to solve two main painpoints specific in the SMB market:
- Unpredictable pricing
- Backup solutions market is wide
Datashelter offers a Backup as a Service (BaaS) solution to protect files (at this time only on Linux machines) and some database (actually only MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB) with a simple and fast solution: back up your servers in just a few minutes, thanks to their simple, intuitive interface. Just enter a few details, and you’re on your way.
Pricing use the Pay as you go model and is quite simple: 5€/TB + 2€/backed up servers/months!
There is also a 30 days free trial if you want to test this solution.
The cloud part is the management and control panel of this solution and actually is hosted on OVH and the backup data are stored on the S3 of OVH. But in the future there can be other providers and also the possibility to “bring your own subscription” and choose where you want to store your data.
The backups are end-to-end encrypted using AES-256 and TLS algorithms. They are then sent to S3-compatible storage, protected against data corruption, and stored on OVHcloud’s certified infrastructure (ISO 27001 & HDS). The encryption key is only on the customer side.
The cloud part has a very nice and simple interface and on-prem there is no infrastucture or “backup server”: each client has the whose needed software to perform the backup to cloud operation.
The workflow is little different (at the beginning) between file or database backup, but finally the backup files are send on the cloud part with a push only mode, where the only port needed is the S3 port (TCP 443) outgoing. There is no need to open ports going inside your company!
As you can notice, backup of database are always full (considering that a whole dump is performed each time).
Actually only Linux clients a supported and there isn’t a GUI interface for the client: the installation is performed from the command line (the command syntax is diplayed when you add a new client from the control panel).
For this reason, and considering the actual limits (only Linux platforms, few workloads), I don’t consider this solution valid for ALL the SMB companies, but for sure a good and interesting solution for SOME SMB and for all type of startups.
There is no native VM backup support, but on Q3 2024 Kubernetes compatibility will be added (supporting volume snapshots) and, probably on Q4 2024 also Windows client support will be added.
