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Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Datto Drive: SMB desktop data protection at a hard to refuse price!

By Rich Ptak


Datto provides enterprise-grade backup, restore and recovery services in its privately-owned 200+ Petabyte cloud. Founded in 2007, its 600+ employees build products and support customers from nine (9) data centers and seven (7) offices located around the world. It performs over one million backups every day protecting millions of endpoints. In addition to their private cloud, all devices they use and provide are Datto’s own products.

Datto is all about Business Continuity and Data Recovery (BCDR) for SMB. Their success to date had been built on their use of a private hybrid, Datto Cloud, for backup/restore, advanced storage, instant virtualization (locally and remote), screenshot verification (to remotely verify backup data integrity) and on-prem file sync-and-share (FSS). All delivered through an international network of thousands of Managed Service Providers (MSP).

They expect their next big step forward, Datto Drive, to carry them deeper into the SMB market with in-cloud FSS and BCDR. Before we provide more details on the product, why should you want to know those details?

In its introductory year, Datto is making available:
·         One million Datto Drive accounts for free to:
o   SMB’s (business accounts only, no personal users)
o   For one year
o   With one terabyte of data storage (all managed by Datto in the Datto Cloud).
·         After one year, the offering changes to:
o   $10 per month per domain (NOT per user, the price holds no matter how many users)
o   Service delivered through a Datto MSP partner (which they’ll help you find, if necessary)
o   Premium versions for larger storage volumes and services are available. Premium services are available (for a fee) during the first year.   

Given that competitors price is higher on a per user basis, let’s see what Datto functionality includes.

Datto Drive

Datto Drive brings highly affordable sync-and-share and full backup/restore and disaster recovery for desktop and mobile devices to SMB’s. They are targeting the less than one third of the SMB market not currently working with MSPs today, who are sorely in need of comprehensive, enterprise-grade FSS and BDCR services.

For the price, Datto Drive offers enterprise-grade FSS built on ownCloud open-source technology. They provide the superior security of Datto’s hybrid cloud with advanced capabilities and functionality in permission management, tracking and tracing. There has been no proven data loss since its founding in 2007.

Datto Drive supports virtually every type of file (video, image, audio, text, etc.). File sharing, control and management can be done from any supported device (desktop, deskside, mobile). It permits real-time collaboration for sharing, exchange, editing, etc. across domain users.  Sync and share capabilities are already available for most existing operating systems, i.e. iPhone, Android, iPad, Windows, Linux and Mac. The ownCloud technology means that thousands of value-add apps are available. Finally, it also includes backup for Microsoft 365, OneDrive and SharePoint files.

Final Word


There’s a lot more functionality and things to like about Datto Drive and the rest of the product portfolio. We suggest a visit to Datto.com to see all that is available. When competitors, such as Dropbox and box are charging $15/user/month for similar services, this offer appears to us to be hard to resist. SMB owners should also move quickly to snag one of the 1 million domain accounts. It’s our opinion that they’ll disappear quickly. 

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