ReadWriteWeb

Every year since 2004, ReadWriteWeb has selected a best "little company." These are small companies (loosely defined as less than 100 employees) that have had a big effect on the Web over the calendar year. Last year we chose Tumblr, which experienced extraordinary growth during 2010. In prior years we've given this honor to Aardvark (2009), Zoho ('08), Twitter ('07), YouTube ('06), 37Signals ('05) and Flickr ('04). Many of those companies went onto much bigger things, either through acquisition (Flickr, YouTube) or by ramping up independently (Twitter, Zoho).

This year there were a number of worthy contenders for Best LittleCo. Square, Evernote, Flipboard, BetaWorks, SoundCloud and Tumblr (again) have all had cracker years. So our winner must be something pretty special, right?

With the onset of Apple's iCloud (see our article here on how to get started) and a series of other announcements and enhancements this week from Box, Mozy, SOSonline and others, it is time to re-examine what you can get from storing your files in the cloud.

I have used dozens of cloud storage services over the past several years, and I keep hoping that someone will put all my favorite features together in a single service. While vendors are making improvements, no one has the perfect cloud drive, at least not yet.

Acronis is trying to make things easier for SMBs to make backups of their VMs, announcing v6.0 of their vmProtect, which is actually a new product. In our story on VM backup technologies earlier this summer, we mentioned several different vendors and their solutions. Despite this collection of products, more than 40 percent of SMBs in the US are NOT backing up their virtual servers, according to the Acronis Disaster Recovery Index.

Altaro Software announced this week its Hyper-V Backup for SMBs. It comes with a free version that can backup two VMs. While there are numerous backup products that support Microsoft's Hyper-V, this one is geared for smaller enterprises and aims at simplicity. It takes advantage of Microsoft's Volume Shadow Copy technology so that you can perform hot backups, meaning that the VMs can keep running smoothly even during the actual backup process.

Last week Arkeia Software announced it has improved its backup support for virtual environments, adding additional Hyper-V functionality to its existing protection that spans a wide collection of virtual platforms, operating systems, and applications. The new features support large change block tracking, and enable better performance for Hyper-V-based backups, making it on par with what the company offers for VMware and the ability to perform incremental backups.

This announcement is an example of how the evolving state of the backup world is moving to embrace the virtual one, and as enterprises bring up more VMs in their data centers and in the cloud, we definitely need better and more capable backup tools.

Apparently March 31 was World Backup Day - a term I initially misunderstood, and took to be impressively but impossibly ambitious. Their message is well worth repeating: your hard drive will fail, and when it does, you'll be a lot happier if you've backed it up.

Everyone I've asked has a data-loss story to share. Here are two of mine, tales of wrenching heartbreak worthy of the full IMAX treatment:

Cloud-to-cloud social media and webmail backup provider Backupify is announcing this morning the imminent availability of a new service called CloudSight. CloudSight will render a customer's entire archive searchable and available for restoration with a single click.

"The [CloudSite] service gives social media and compliance professionals an automated audit trail of customer- facing corporate online communications across all major social media and cloud platforms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Gmail," Backupify says. A number of different companies are providing similar services now, but Backupify's appears unique in some important ways. Update: Unfortunately, it looks like the day of this announcement Backupify has experienced some down time.

A new service announced today gives companies and other organizations the ability to create a searchable, fully functional archive of their Websites, blogs, social media accounts and RSS feeds.

Reed Technology Web Archiving Services, promises to create an interactive archive of a company's entire Web presence, something that is often recommend for legal purposes.

As someone without a technical background, I'm often skeptical of promises like "one-button setup" and "installs in 2 minutes." Just because it's easy or obvious for the developer, doesn't mean it's easy for the end-user. "Turnkey" isn't always "turnkey."

But TurnKey Linux promise that the new backup and migration tool it's built - aptly titled TKLBAM - isn't hyperbole. Here's the pitch: "We designed "TurnKey Backup and Migration" (which we're open sourcing BTW), to be our ideal backup system. Imagine a fully automated backup and restore system with no pain. That you wouldn't need to configure. That just magically knows what to backup and, just as importantly, what NOT to backup, to create super efficient, encrypted backups of changes to files, databases, package management state, even users and groups."

Users of desktop-to-cloud synchronization service Nomadesk can now edit files in the cloud with Zoho. Nomadesk users can right-click on a document, spreadsheet or presentation on the web-based Nomadesk dashboard and click "edit" to open the file in Zoho. Changes are then synchronized to the user's desktop.