Hello, Russia!

In the computer world, it is customary to begin with the mantra “Hello, world!”, But at our own risk and risk we decided to break this act of initiation due to valid reasons. A lot of all marketing material is written on this very world, and here we decided to tell only the Russian-speaking audience about the boiled set of technologies from which we collect our products and services.

Short story

Acronis was legally registered at the very beginning of 2001, although work on the code had been going on for seven years, that is, by the time the company was registered, the code could already go to school. By the way, this code is still included in our TrueImage 2014 and Acronis Backup & Recovery 11.5 products. During this time, he managed to visit our products OS Selector, Migrate Easy, Disk Director and Snap Deploy. The authors of this code, by the way, still work at Acronis, having managed to go along with their SWsoft code (later united with Parallels) Sergey Belousov, the founder and current CEO of Acronis. Loyalty to the traditions, however!
We are known in the world as the leader of disaster recovery, i.e. disaster recovery. What is interesting, we did not specifically plan it. We just had a good technology for removing and copying disk images, and it was in this niche that came in handy. Even the True Image brand, which many home users worldwide associate with Acronis, appeared by chance. Initially, the product was planned to be called Acronis System Saver, but, fortunately, there was a clever man who guessed to check what the abbreviation would look like.
Today Acronis is:

• 270,000 business clients in a wide range of industries
• Over 5 Million Sold Home User Licenses
• Over 160 OEM agreements
• 18 offices around the world
• 30,000 partners in more than 90 countries
• Products localized in 14 languages

And all this arose on the basis of a code written in the cozy walls of the Fiztekh by two Russian programmers by the efforts of the maestro in growing startups!
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What are we doing

Simply put, we copy the data. It sounds trivial, but there is nothing trivial about it. Vaughn, Windows Explorer for so many years has not learned to adequately assess the time remaining to complete when copying. So, not everything is so simple. In general, copying is something that continuously happens with data in the surrounding world. Only the data form and copying mechanisms vary, but the essence remains. A few examples.

DNA

DNA does nothing but replicate its genetic code from cell to cell. A multicellular organism is a monstrous accumulation of DNA backups. By the way, this is why unicellular organisms are united in multicellular organisms - this improved their disaster recovery plan. A plan that allows a person for five years to fully update all his cells and perfectly stay himself - the carrier of the same genetic code and configured neural network, which also stubbornly replicates itself.

Iliad

Initially, due to the ignorance of the ancient Greeks, the Iliad was spread in the oral tradition, as a result, by the way, it experienced mutations that we can observe in the modern text - artifacts of the lack of verification of backup copies. Being created by Homer in the ninth century BC, it passed through a gigantic line of copies through ancient Greek brains, before being recorded on a permanent carrier at the end of the fifth century AD.

Disco ball Myron

Strictly speaking, Myron's Disco-ball, which has come down to us, does not belong to Myron. Until we reached one of the many ancient Roman reproductions. And the original is lost. Thanks to the Romans for save-pastes and backups! By the way, it turns out that the ancient Romans were the first to make a disk backup. True, along with the disk manager - discobol.

Ancient Egyptian

Well, the most egregious example of the use of a copy is the ancient Egyptian language. The French Egyptologist Champollion was able to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs solely because the priests copied their message to Ptolemy V Epiphanes in the ancient Greek language and recorded them alongside on a permanent medium - the Rosetta Stone. This is a real backup recovery plan - backup in case all the native speakers disappear!

Data and technology

Data has been copied and will always be copied; only the form, volume and means of their copying change. If in the Middle Ages, copying a book was a week of a copyist, nowadays a whole electronic library can be copied in minutes.
In 2010, the amount of data created worldwide amounted to 1 zettabyte - about a billion full of 1 TB hard drives, which exceeds all the available storage space today. According to EMC, over the next 10 years, data volumes will increase another 44 times, creating a shortage of storage space of 60%.
This ever-accelerating data stream introduces new requirements and technologies. Deduplication, compression, encryption, snapshots, replication, cloud storage, virtualization, increments - this is just the tip of the iceberg of the technologies that Acronis deals with and will reveal in this blog.

Backup

One of the large areas of data copying today is the backup market or the more succinctly “backup”. Many create backup copies, because they are wise enough with bitter experience or not optimistic enough, others because they are forced by all sorts of legal acts. For example, after the terrorist attack of September 11th and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the SAS 70 service audit standard was adopted in the United States, requiring organizations to create and store backup copies outside offices. It could not be otherwise. The volume of losses is impressive:

• After September 11, 250 of the 450 business owners in the World Trade Center went bankrupt due to data loss. The total loss amounted to 40 billion dollars
• The damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, amounting to 100 million dollars a day due to the economic inactivity of business, cost the entire US economy 125 billion dollars, 60 of which paid insurance companies

Insurance business and backup copies - from one opera. Miser pays twice!

Not just backup

Backup for recovery after failures - this is what Acronis has always been the best of all. This area is very extensive. It communicates directly with cloud storage, virtualization, application database backup, and many diverse related technologies. We will talk about all these technologies, as well as the processes and people involved in the development of these technologies, on the pages of this blog. During the years of travels on world markets, we have accumulated a lot of things that we would like to share; subscribe - it will be interesting!