Tier I Support triages basic questions in the Syncplicity support queue. In this role, you’ll get to work directly with users to ease their frustration, solve their problems, share their excitement, and spread the word about Syncplicity. You’ll work closely with the Syncplicity engineering team to resolve issues (which means you may get earliest peeks at new features!) and help decide the direction of the product.

If you’re serious about helping users with Syncplicity and you’re ready to join a great team, please email rachel@syncplicity.com with a cover letter, resume, and availability.

One of the common requests we often hear is for us to implement delta sync. Since beginning our implementation, we’ve found that it really doesn’t help as much as many are expecting. Many people expect that delta sync has a large impact on syncing speeds, often times because others in the sync space have heavily advertised this feature. Many have seen demo videos like Dropbox’s where a large image is edited and only the small change made needs to be uploaded. The video says that because of delta sync, over 80% of the bandwidth was saved because of delta sync.

Claims like these are just plain misleading. As the example below shows, the savings a normal user would see is actually 0%. Looking at the types of data we see users synchronizing, the fact is most people won’t see much benefit from delta sync.

What is Delta Sync?

For those unfamiliar with delta sync, it is a technology designed to detect and send only the parts of a file that have changed. If you have a large two megabyte file and change only two bytes in it,  rather than re-upload the entire two million byte file, delta sync allows you to send just the two bytes that changed. While not as useful for most small files (the bookkeeping and header information for chunk tracking starts to eat into any benefit), it appears at first glance that delta sync would seem to provide a huge benefit for large files.

A Small Example

The reason delta sync doesn’t help as much with large files is that almost all large file types are stored compressed. Videos, music, digital photos, photoshop files, PDFs, you name it — the files you deal with day-to-day are all stored compressed. Unfortunately, compression negates any benefit from delta sync. When a file is stored compressed, in the process of saving the file, the file is run through a special process that finds duplicate data and removes it. This means any change to the file, no matter how minor, changes the entire file.

So how do we get these claims of bandwidth savings for large files? With a bit of slight of hand and a some contrived circumstances. To use a concrete example, I’ll use the Dropbox demo itself. In it, a picture of a platypus is drawn over with a white X and we see the claim of 80% bandwidth savings due to delta sync. A detail that is somewhat glossed over is the fact that while a file being shown before the edit happens is a JPEG (.JPG – digital image format used by almost all digital cameras), the file actually edited is a bitmap (.BMP – an uncompressed and uncommonly used type).

I took an almost identical graphic and made a similar edit. Using the rsync tool, which is the same rsync algorithm Dropbox uses, I measured the bandwidth savings between edits made on the compressed JPG and uncompressed BMP files. The difference is striking.

For the uncompressed bitmap file, a 65K difference was generated for a 476K file, a 86.4% savings — inline with the demo.

For the compressed JPEG file, a 0K difference was generated for the 76K file, a 0% savings. There were no bytes saved versus uploading the entire file.

While the Dropbox demo doesn’t lie, it also is quite misleading. While the 86.4% savings is nice, it neglects to mention that no normal end-user uses bitmaps to store their images and the bandwidth of 65K required to send just the changes is almost as large as the entire file of 76K when it’s stored in a proper file format.

Try this with a music file, a video, photoshop files, or any other large files and you’ll find that almost none of large files commonly benefit from delta sync.

What Delta Sync is Good For

While delta sync doesn’t help much for most people’s common day to day files, it is incredibly useful for cases in which large files are stored uncompressed. The most typical case is log files for system administrators. These gargantuan text files of things like web server accesses are often hundreds of megs to many gigabytes in size. Data is just appended onto the end as additional activity is logged. This is a perfect case for delta sync.

Relative to the normal user however, use cases like these are the exception rather than the rule. Next time you see delta sync marketed about as a way to save gobs of bandwidth,  definitely take those claims with a grain of salt.

How I Tested

If you’d like to try repeating the results for yourself, you can download the files I used here.

I used rsync version 2.6.9 with the following commandline to force a delta sync:

foreach f (*Edited*)

rsync –stats -e ’ssh’ $f localhost:tmp/`echo $f | sed ’s/_Edited//’`

How many people does your company employ?
Two thirds of respondents told us they worked in companies of 1-10 employees. Syncplicity is aiming to provide a solid, reliable syncing and collaboration tool for small and medium-sized companies. We’re happy to help small and medium sized team users work more closely together

What would you likely use as an alternative if Syncplicity was no longer available?
This survey result made it very clear who are competitors are. When you know who the competition is, it’s very easy to know where you need to do to be better than the other guys. As Syncplicity’s Support Guru, I’m here to promise you that while other companies have great products, my personal goal is to blow them out of the water with Syncplicity’s customer support. Customer support is just one of the areas we plan to amaze you in, and next week we’ll talk more about how we plan to compete with other companies.

How easy is it to set up and use the Syncplicity service?
Only a third of respondents told us that setting up Syncplicity was extremely easy. While an additional half of respondents told us it was still easy, our goal is to improve these responses – A new online user manual (look for it next week!) is one of our first steps towards better documentation and instructions.

Please indicate the importance you place on the following Syncplicity offerings:
Three items received a “High” ranking in response to this question, and we are happy to see that our user requests are in line with our product roadmap.

• Ability to add extra storage: If you’re using extra storage, we take this as a sign of success – you’re using our product a lot, and we should make it easy for you to continue doing that! We are currently investigating ways to make it unbelievable easy to expand your storage space with just a few clicks.
• Large file support (>2GB): Most files fall well under the 2GB size limitation, but that doesn’t mean we’re giving up on stretching those limits. We are investigating the synchronization of even larger files to make working with Syncplicity appropriate for all your files.
• Centralized user management and administration: I’m pleased to say that the last item is already something we are actively working on. If you are a business user, we’d love to have you join our beta team and give us feedback. You’ll get early access to the new tools, the chance to help us develop this new product, and free service in exchange for your feedback. To join in, email sales@syncplicity.com and tell us a bit about your business and how you might use this tool in your organization.

What would you like to receive from Syncplicity on a regular basis?
Our users let us know that announcements about the product – service messages, new features, and company updates – were important. We’ll improve our blogging and Twittering schedule to keep our users up to date.

Listening to our users is a critical and intentional act in everything we do at Syncplicity. Based on this survey, 75% of respondents would recommend Syncplicity to a friend, so hopefully that means you like what we’re doing. Thank you for everyone who completed the survey!

Syncplicity was founded to provide a rich and reliable synchronization, sharing, collaboration, and backup service. One of the key cornerstones we aim for is an exceptional client experience.

One of the main purposes for a Beta is to help perform full testing and validation in real world scenarios. What has become clear to us is while the Mac Beta Client can run well in many scenarios and computer configurations, there are also many for which it doesn’t work well. Over the past few months we’ve been taking a close look at the unexpected issues that some of you have experienced. Unfortunately what we found is that the fixes entail almost a rewrite in many cases — a process that would take many months to a year.

We want everything we release to be outstanding and something we’re extremely proud to offer our users. It’s clear now the Mac Beta Client isn’t there yet, so we will be withdrawing it for reengineering. We will reassess our schedule for redevelopment next year.

For those of you who have signed up for a yearly account, you will be able to cancel and receive a full refund of your $99 subscription fee. For those who have signed up for a monthly account, you will be able to cancel and receive a refund for the most recent month. Details on how to do so will be e-mailed directly to you in the coming days.

If you have any questions, we’ve set up a dedicated e-mail for you: macbeta@syncplicity.com.

Obviously like all companies, our intention is for Beta software to always become Final Release software. But it’s just as important to recognize and admit when software doesn’t meet our high quality bar.  Our decision to withdraw the Mac Beta Client will allow us to step back to do things much better in the future. While it isn’t an easy decision for us, it is the right decision.  We do want to express our apologies for any and all inconveniences this may have caused each of you.  We do hope that you give us another chance to deliver future products that meet the level of excellence reflective our existing ones.

Sincerely,

Leonard

–
Leonard Chung, CEO

What are your first steps?
One of the questions asked in my interview was “What will you change here in your first 30 days?” My answer? “Nothing.” I plan on spending my first 30 days with Syncplicity learning about our users, investigating the product, and learning about support patterns and current support tools. After that 30 days, I will be able to start moving support in a direction that is in line with the Syncplicity user base and company direction – but I know the learning doesn’t stop at 30 days. It is critical to have a constant presence with the support queue and user base to make sure that we continue to grow with our user base and their needs.

What is your hypothesis for how support will grow?

• Support Ticket Tracking
  Support ticketing volume is fairly low at Syncplicity – about 20 tickets a day. However, we do have an active forum and Twitter account. Because the nature of our support interactions require more one-on-one communication, it’s time to move support into a standard tracking system rather than a public forum. To do this, we will use a highly customized version of Salesforce to handle support interactions. We will also have a dedicated support Twitter account to help troubleshoot and announce status updates to our user base.
• Support  Business Hours
  The support team should remain relatively stable for the next few months and 8×5 support should cover our bases. However, after assessing the user base, we may want to offer first 8×7 support (covering international users and east coast users), and then finally offer 24×7 support as our product becomes mission critical in an organization.
• Professional Services
  Syncplicity’s current user base is very much an early adopter group – which means they like figuring things out themselves, or turning to a community-based support model for assistance. As we acquire more customers, we may offer training, customization, and engagement services to serve the entire breadth of technological knowledge and ability of our users.
• Documentation
  One of my first tasks at Syncplicity will be to centralize our FAQs and documentation into one user manual that is easy to search, update, and collaborate on with the Syncplicity team.

So, stay tuned as I start my new role at Syncplicity. Watch the company grow along with the support and services team!

As someone who uses Cloud-based services each day, I follow these discussions with interest. How much safety do I expect from using the Cloud? I expect to have full access to every bit of data I have at all times. No not having access to some of my data and not the rest, requesting a restore and waiting for an email when it’s ready, no waiting for a DVD in the mail. In a nutshell, complete and instant access. But is this a reasonable expectation for all data managed through Cloud Computing?

In my view, no. “Cloud Computing” is a type of technology, just as a “car” is a type of vehicle. While a Volvo and a Pinto are both cars, few would argue that they can expect the same level of safety. Before I buy a car, I ask basic questions to find out how many airbags there are or whether there is traction control because I know each car is different.

Cloud Computing is exactly the same. Problems that affect one Cloud Computing solution may not affect another. I reasonably expected complete and instant access because I did my homework.

Below is a basic set of questions I use to determine how safe my data is. I’ve included answers for Syncplicity as well for those curious.

1. How is the data stored?

You want at least three geo-replicated copies. If you have three copies, if something fails, during the time it takes an automated system or a human person to fix the problem, you still have multiple copies elsewhere for safety. A secondary failure happening after a first is surprisingly likely. Geo-replication means the data is stored in multiple data centers. Natural disasters, power outages, and network failures can all disable a data center. These types of problems, while rare, also typically take days to resolve.

What Syncplicity does: For a higher level of data safety, Syncplicity keeps four geo-replicated copies of all data.

2. Are verifications being done on the data?

Storing data is easy. It’s making sure you can get it back, one month, one year, or one decade later that’s hard. If you’ve ever burned a CD and found you couldn’t read it back later, you’ve experienced bit rot. You want to find out how your provider verifies your data hasn’t suffered bit rot and is still accessible.

What Syncplicity does: Syncplicity works with active data so our systems are constantly writing and reading the data stored. On each read, a verification test is performed to ensure that the data is accessible and the same as what was stored so you can be assured that your data is always available to you when you need it.

3. How is the data managed?

You want to make sure that your data is encrypted, there is strong security and access controls, and a strong privacy policy. One thing to look out for is that the privacy and data disclosure policies of many companies cover contact information, but specifically exclude your actual data. Thus, while they aren’t allowed to give your home address to anyone, they could give them your tax return. This is just plain wrong, but something to watch for.

What Syncplicity does: Data stored in Syncplicity is transferred and stored fully encrypted with the same technologies used by banks and the military for classified information. Specifically, data is transferred over 128bit SSL and stored using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Syncplicity’s Privacy Policy is also one of the strongest in the industry. We make it a point to explicitly extend our privacy policy to cover all stored data. Viral Tarpara and I discussed what this all means in more detail in Understanding Privacy in Cloud Computing.

4. What happens if the company disappears tomorrow?You’ll want to make sure they have a good story as to how to get your data if they go out of business or the service fails in a prolonged manner.

What Syncplicity does: Syncplicity provides data management rather than pure data storage. In the case that Syncplicity disappears tomorrow, you still have full access to your data on each computer, device, or web application that you use. What you lose is the accessibility and management functions such as access to previous versions and revision history, access to your data from your cell phone, and simple sharing.

As luck would have it, my own laptop died a horrible death this week and my faith in the clouds and Syncplicity got put to the test. I’m happy to report that all of the cloud-based services I used, from hosted e-mail to online code repositories to Syncplicity, passed with flying colors.

If you don’t already have a Syncplicity account, browse over to http://www.syncplicity.com/promo and create one now. If you already do, but you’d like to take advantage of this offer and upgrade to an annual plan, just visit https://my.syncplicity.com/promo. This promotion ends July 2009.

Did you know Syncplicity is on Twitter? If you’d like to be the first to hear about announcements like this in the future and stay up-to-date on what’s happening with the Syncplicity team, follow us @ http://twitter.com/syncplicity.

Thanks for your support!
The Syncplicity Team

Today we are excited to announce the publicly available Syncplicity Mac Beta Client!  With this release, Syncplicity users can share files between their Windows and Mac computers with ease. Any file changes made on one computer will sync to the other computer.

For those of you coming from backup products, there is no schedule option for Syncplicity.  The client watches your files for changes and uploads the new versions immediately, it doesn’t wait a minimum of 4 hours like you may be used to.  And for those using other ‘one folder’ sync products, you do not have to move all your documents to a new folder.  Syncplicity will sync them wherever they are now.

Just like with the Windows version, any Mac folder can become a Syncplicity folder by right clicking the folder and adding it to Syncplicity.  Once it’s a Syncplicity folder, the Syncplicity client will watch the folder for changes and immediately synchronize the changes to your other computers.  New and updated files will be securely backed up by Syncplicity, past revisions will be available on the Syncplicity website, and the latest versions will be sync’ed to your other computers.

Our Windows users will immediately recognize the Syncplicity icon sitting pretty in the menu bar.  Syncplicity communicates its status through the menu icon and the grayed lines in the pop-down menu.  For the geekier users, you can find out what Syncplicity is up to by watching the trace window.

If you have a Mac, give the new beta a whirl.  As this is a beta, please send us feedback!

Happy Sync’ing!

Isaac