Curious about how backup started? We sat down with backup enthusiast and lead developer behind Comet, Mason Giles

Back in the 60s, computers were called "mainframes" and typically took up most of the space in a room - and even back then, data backup was an issue. Information was stored up on tapes, and the process of backing up and retrieving data was laborious. This was even highlighted in the show "Some Mothers do 'Ave Em" with accident-prone Frank Spencer destroying tapes and eventually the computer itself:

Tape backup was a plausible option for many businesses right through until the mid ‘90s, and magnetic "tape drives" were commercially available for your computers and servers. The usual approach was to buy 5 tapes (one for each day of the working week); and every day you'd bring in last week's tape and record the day's work over it.

But despite a reasonable per-tape cost, it quickly became expensive to scale the concept beyond more than a few days of history – and when you needed something back, you'd have to "play back" the entire tape onto your computer - a long process if you only need to recover a single file!

It was a simple enough solution at the time. Tape drives offered high storage capacity and LTO tapes continue this tradition today. But the era of tape backup will be remembered mostly as being inconvenient to restore data, cumbersome to verify, and - easy to forget!

It was time for a change..​

Fast forward (pardon the pun) a few decades to the arrival of something called incremental backup. Instead of taking a full copy of each file, it became possible to determine exactly what had changed since yesterday, and only back up the difference. This reduced the amount of data needed to store each successive backup, making it feasible to send your data to hard drives and network accounts instead of tape - and with a trend of increasing internet speeds worldwide, online backup was born.

This process of backing up to a device or the cloud was certainly more efficient than using tapes. The largest benefit was in automation - no longer did someone have to remember to change the tapes every day. But critically, it became complicated to restore your data. Right when you need it most, recovery now involves restoring the very original file and then applying every modification on top of it. This could require lots of overhead, processing, figuring which pieces fit where - and if one modification is lost or damaged, then the whole system falls down.

Many vendors attempted to paper over some flaws in this basic concept, each taking a step forward but two steps back – don’t get us started on the serious drawbacks of differential backup, in-file diffs, consolidated images, hardlink backup, synthetic full images, or reverse / fast-forward chains...

Comet is the next generation in backup strategy. In fact, you might say that it's a fundamental change in how backup works. Instead of looking at the differences between one day and the next, Comet looks deep into file contents to identify time-invariant chunks.

What's the benefit? Our technology dramatically reduces processing overhead. It minimizes the amount of data transfer and storage for both initial and successive jobs, intelligently handling already-stored content within files, across renames, and variable-length insertions simply as a matter of course. It offers equally fast access to both your latest version and the oldest historical data, without ever needing roll-up operations, meaning encryption and cloud storage work correctly - even with an arbitrary history length.

So, if it's speed you're after, then why not give Comet a try. The only thing restricting you is the speed of your computer and your internet connection. We're really proud of the quick time it takes to install the server and the super-fast time it takes create a backup.

We sat down with Peter Thomas, CEO of Comet to understand the internal culture he has established within Comet and his decision why to undertake this new venture.

What if you had the chance to build something that helped other SMEs grow? would you do it? Would you take the entrepreneurial risk and start again from scratch?

That’s exactly what we’ve done here at Comet. This company is a bit different from other companies I’ve built in that Comet is about letting others drive the business. I’m letting it grow organically and although I’m sitting in the big chair, I’m listening to the team and letting them drive the ship.

In order to “let go” and let others contribute, we here at Comet work in a culture of sharing ideas. This usually involves lots of debate, which is a good thing. When people hear the word debate, their first thought is that of arguing.

Some people don’t like to debate; they feel it’s too confrontational and they don’t want to offend anyone.

The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. With debate comes the proactive discussion of ideas … and every time we do it we end up in a better place for it.

I have a saying that I encourage the team to adopt: “Fight your corner”. If you believe something needs to be done, for goodness sake say something. If you disagree with a particular direction we’re heading, then speak up. This open culture of allowing everyone from developers to customers service staff contribute, has done wonders. It’d be fair to say that we wouldn’t have made the progress we have without operating in this style of environment.

It’s given us new ideas, it’s helped change the direction a few times and refocused some of our priorities. And it’s nice to be able to listen to the team, and let them have their say. They feel like they’re making a contribution and they are effectively steering the ship.

This concept of listening is something that we’re pretty passionate about here at Comet. Comet started because in the backup space we felt as if many SMEs had been let down by some of their service providers. They weren’t being listened to. Some of the backup companies had bypassed the MSPs they’d dealt with and decided to go straight to the end user; a betrayal of the people who had helped build the backup companies.

Witnessing this first hand, through our involvement with MyClient Global, we listened and we decided that action needed to be taken. It seems like a lifetime ago but now here we are with Comet - a backup solution that will help MSPs and SMEs get what they need. It seems pretty simple: Listen to your customer and don’t try bypass them and sell to their customers!

In building Comet I basically want to give back to the SMEs what they had - the ability to sell a service under their own brand without competing with their own supplier, on their own terms.

This is very significant, especially if you’ve ever been involved in an SME. We all know that SMEs are the lifeblood of any community or economy, and that SMEs can often deliver a service far superior to any corporate. So it only makes sense to give back and help.

So to that end, if you’ve any ideas, thoughts, or you simply want to have your say, follow us on Twitter, and get involved in the conversations. We need your help to shape Comet.

Welcome aboard to the Comet Blog!

This is our brand new platform where we will be sharing our ideas, thoughts and other tid-bits on everything backup, MSP and Comet related.

Communication and keeping the conversation flowing is paramount to what we do here at Comet, so get involved - the comment section will always be open on our articles so let us know what you think.

It’s also the platform where we can go into a bit more depth about Comet, and be slightly more opinionated :)

If it’s Comet updates you’re after, head on over to the Changelog.

But we're looking forward to having a more flexible medium to share and engage with you on.

Cheers

Comet Crew