Frequently Answered Questions

Vembu Home is an online backup service that also allows you to backup to a local disk, drive or to a mapped drive - for FREE. Simply speaking, it helps you keep a backup copy of your data at a safe location so that you can access it whenever you need to restore your data. For the (optional) online backup service, we use Amazon's robust & proven infrastructure to safeguard your data.

Vembu Home realizes that one approach doesn't fit all data! With some data, a local backup is more than enough. With irreplaceable & important data, you need an online backup as well.

Have it your way with Vembu Home - with Free local backup & 'Amazon powered' online backup - in one nifty package

Vembu Home uses industry leading encryption techniques to encrypt your data before it sends it over the wire to Amazon's (S3) servers. Your data is secure in Amazon's servers and can be decrypted only with the secret password that was used to encrypt it, in the first place. Data inside Amazon's servers are replicated across geographies. What this means is that, even in case of a catastrophe at one location you will be able to retrieve your data from another location. Please note that if you lose your encryption password, we will be unable to help you restore data.

There are two ways in which you can restore files using Vembu Home:

a) Using Vembu Home Console: If you want to restore the files on the same system from which the file was backed up, you can go to the Restore Tab in the Vembu Home Console and easily select the version of the file and restore it.You can use this method to restore files that you backed up locally (to a mapped drive or disk) and files that you backed up online

b) Using the Vembu Home Website: If you are away from your system and would like to retrieve a backed up file, you can restore it from any internet browser by visiting the Vembu Home website. This restore option is available only for files that were previously backed up online to Vembu Home's servers (in the Amazon cloud)!

Each group of files/folders that needs to be backed up is called a Backup Set. Each Backup Set can have its own password, schedule and other settings.

This provides a great deal of flexibility to your backup needs. For instance, some files like your email and important documents might need to be backed up on a regular basis - perhaps every few hours. Whereas, other data like videos and photos may not need to be backed up every few hours; they could be backed up less frequently - perhaps once a week. 'Backup sets' allow you this flexibility! Of course, you could choose to have one set of backup settings for all your data if you so prefer.

Pre-Configured Backup Sets are groups of files/folders that have been identified and selected by Vembu Home to be part of the Backup Set. typically, these are well known groups and application related data. Vembu Home simply spares you the effort of manually going through your file explorer and selecting all required files. For instance, one of the Pre-Configured Backup Set is "Internet Explorer Settings". In this case, you needn't figure out what files constitute his IE favorites and settings, where they are located etc. Vembu Home has figured this out and has created a Pre-Configured Backup Set. All you need to do is schedule this Backup Set. Other common pre-configured backup sets include Outlook, Outlook Express, Firefox favorites, My Documents, etc.

The DropBox is an easy to use interface to let you add new files/folders to already existing Backup Sets. The DropBox icon gets automatically added to your desktop when Vembu Home is installed. You can just drag and drop files/folders into the DropBox and they will automatically get backed up. Think of it as a shortcut!

After you signup for a Vembu Home account an email will be sent to you with instructions about downloading and getting started with Vembu Home. If you don't see it, please check your spam folder - those spam filters can get over-enthusiastic at times. If you do see it in your spam folder, make sure you notify your email provider that it isn't spam (usually by clicking on a button that says 'Not Spam'). This ensures that future emails from Vembu Home are routed to your inbox.

If you do not see any email in your inbox or in the spam folder, please contact us at help@vembu.com.

Most online backup companies will try and tell you that you should backup your entire life online! But let's get real. The average amount of data generated by the average person cannot all be backed up over the average broadband connection! That's why Vembu Home lets you choose!

Simply backup everything locally (on premise) & backup important stuff to the Amazon Cloud for double the protection!

For example, that photo of Britney Spears doesn't really need to be backed up online (sorry fans) and a local backup is more than enough! But you'd probably want to backup your sepia toned graduation pics online!

Get the picture?

Yes! If you've backed up your Microsoft Office files to the Amazon Cloud, they can be accessed by visiting the Vembu Home website even if the computer you are using doesn't have Microsoft Office loaded on to it. Just select the "Open This File in Zoho" option.

The following file types are supported by Zoho:
'doc','docx','xls','xlsx','ppt','pptx','pps','ods','odp','odt','sxc','sxw','sxi','html','pdf',,'rtf','txt','csv', 'as','ini','xml','java','conf','css'

We will be adding support soon for accessing music and video files on the web.

Yes! You can backup multiple computers using a single Vembu Home account. If you backup the files to the Amazon Cloud all the data will be stored under the same account. You will pay only for the disk space used.

Vembu Home backs up only changes in files and not the entire file every time. This helps reduce the bandwidth used and also results in faster backups. Additionally, Vembu Home automatically detects changes in files and backs up accordingly. Files are backed up even if they are open while the backup is running.

Yes. From the Vembu Home website you can email files to anyone. You don't need to download it before they are sent. The recipient of the email receives a link from which they can download the file/folder. Honestly, it doesn't get easier than this!

No. Although we store the data in Amazon's S3 servers you do not need to sign up for Amazon S3.We take care of all that for you!

If you've been copying data manually to an external hard drive and that has been your backup solution so far, Vembu Home provides a better option for free. With Vembu Home, you don't have to worry about remembering to manually copy over data from time to time. You can just choose your external hard drive as the backup location and set a schedule for the backup to occur.

We will be supporting mapped drives so that you can backup your data to other computers that are within the same network. It is not supported in the current Private-Beta release, but will be available soon.

Vembu Home currently supports Windows XP and Windows Vista machines. We have plans to support Macintosh and Linux machines in the future.