Symantec Online Backup

» see spn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In February 2008 Symantec put a backup service on the Symantec Protection Network, its platform for selling software to small and mid-sized businesses as a subscription rather than a box. The proposition was uncomplicated: your files went over the internet to somebody else's disks, and when the office machine died you got them back. It had a vanity domain, spn.com, which pointed at a Symantec page whose title tag listed online backup and remote backup in a row, the way everything was titled in 2008.

Four months after launch Symantec went shopping for the underlying business. On 10 June 2008 it announced it was buying SwapDrive, a privately held online storage company, for $123 million in cash. SwapDrive had been running consumer file storage since the late nineties and had been quietly powering Norton's backup offering already. The acquisition was framed around managing data across devices, which was the phrase everyone used in the eighteen months before anyone said cloud.

It did not last. Sales of Symantec Online Backup were discontinued in January 2010, under two years after the service launched and nineteen months after Symantec wrote the check for SwapDrive.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the only date on the stone ~

There is no press release for this. Symantec announced the launch and announced the acquisition, and then said nothing whatsoever about the ending, which is why the only sentence anyone can write about its death carries no citation. The archive settles it instead. symantec.com/business/online-backup was serving a normal 10,451-byte product page on 15 December 2009. The next capture, on 16 January 2010, is a 404. It stays a 404 through 2010 and eventually becomes a redirect.

One month in the Wayback Machine is the whole obituary. A company that had just spent $123 million on a capability stopped selling it inside two years and did not write a word about why.

~ upload was the whole problem ~

I was in Turkey on TTNet ADSL through these exact years, and this product was not something I could have used even if Symantec had sold it here. ADSL gave you a download pipe and a very much smaller upload one, and a backup service is the rare thing that runs entirely in the wrong direction. Pushing an initial copy of a few tens of gigabytes up a line like that was a multi-day operation that you had to leave the machine on for, assuming the connection held, which it did not always do. Online backup needed infrastructure that most of the world did not have yet.

That is a fair part of why this category kept producing corpses. The idea was correct and the pipe was not ready, and companies kept buying their way into it at acquisition prices that assumed the pipe already existed.

~ the part that kept selling ~

SwapDrive itself was not wasted. The technology stayed inside Symantec on the consumer side, where Norton kept selling online backup for years after the business-facing version had gone. Symantec Protection Network, the platform it launched on, is also gone. Symantec's own corporate remains ended up at Broadcom, and the surviving documentation links from the old Wikipedia citations now land on techdocs.broadcom.com, which is its own small piece of evidence about how this ended.

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