Adelaide company to cash in with online backup solution

Said to use only one percent of storage memory now used in solutions

Adelaide company Sarugo has won a federal government grant to launch Memory Box, an online backup solution which is said to use only one percent of the storage memory used in solutions that are currently available.

Memory Box, which utilises a community network, has won a A$64,000 Comet (Commercializing Emerging Technologies) grant provided by AusIndustry.

Development of the solution began when five senior software engineers at Motorola's global software group in Adelaide's Technology Park discovered a common passion for creating innovative products.

Consequently, they formed Sarugo with a view to develop ground-breaking products. Within two years they created Memory Box, Australia's first community online backup solution.

Memory Box operates by creating a community for users to backup and store their data on other user's computers.

The technology behind the product ensures that data is encrypted even before it leaves the computer and then split into parts as directed by a network controller to other users on the network.

Sarugo director, Trevor Glen, said several mechanisms are employed to ensure that other users cannot access the files.

Glen said the security measures put in place are stronger than that used by many banks' Web sites.

He said Memory Box also ensures that other users are unable to infect the data with viruses or spyware.

"To retrieve the data, a message is sent out to each part of the original file. Once enough parts are collected, the data is decrypted and the original file is recovered," Glen said.

"Erasure encoding has been employed to ensure that backup can be recovered even if up to 50 percent of the backup's data is lost."


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