Why Your Data is Safe and Secure With Us
Your files are protected using 448 bit Blowfish Encryption before they leave your PC. This extremely secure “bank grade” encryption algorithm has never been cracked.
Your files are then stored in this encrypted state at our secure data center.
With Nerds Backup, each user gets their own individual account and password. This means that each user also gets a unique encryption key.
This encryption key ensures that while your data is securely stored at our data center, only you have access to your data.
In fact, even our most privileged systems administrators do not have the ability to decrypt your data.
Great lengths are taken in our system to ensure your password remains a secret. Our password security practices have been modeled after premier online banking web sites.
Your password is encrypted before it is stored in our database. At no point is an administrator able to retrieve your password. Nor does an administrator have the ability to set your password to a known value.
Your data is securely stored in our Carrier Grade data center. Our all Cisco based switched network employs redundant Internet providers, redundant routers, and redundant firewalls. We use BGP and HSRP protocols to implement failover and redundancy. Our data center was up and running throughout the big blackout of August 2003.
As each file is transferred to our data center, we carefully verify its integrity against a known CRC signature. Files are reverified each time they are written to disk. If any file fails verification, it is retransmitted from your PC or recovered from the replica server. This ensures that the data stored on our servers is the same data that was stored on your PC.
The Nerds Backup client communicates with our servers over a proprietary protocol that was designed specifically for Internet backup. Other Internet backup products that use popular web protocols like HTTP, FTP, or WebDav can be vulnerable to hacker and virus attacks. The extreme popularity of these protocols makes them a target. It is extremely unlikely that a hacker is going to invest the time and effort to go after a proprietary protocol. Even if they did, the 448 bit Blowfish Encryption has never been broken.
To maximize compatibility with home and corporate firewalls, the protocol used by our Backup Client was designed to look to a firewall just like the SSL protocol used in web browsers. This means that if you are able to surf to our web site, you will be able to connect with our backup software.