If you ask the towkays of many small and medium enterprises in Singapore if they had some of their most important data backed up, chances are they would give a blank look (“what’s backup?”) or say they have a network drive that they save everything in.

The reason why they haven’t put their customer contacts, invoices and blueprints – the very lifeblood of their businesses – in more secure places is often cost, or the lack of know-how. In particular, small companies often don’t have the manpower to plan for business continuity, should a fire or flood hit the office, or even if a user accidentally erases data on a server.

This is where Singapore backup firm Kronicles is proposing to come in with its backup service, which offers both local and remote backup of customers’ most important data.

Unveiled today, this “backup as a service” is offered from S$5,000 a month (down to under S$2,000 after Singapore government tax rebates for using innovation) and uses Quantum tapes to keep up to three copies of the most recent data. …

Some 100,000 to 150,000 Gmail users had their messages, chat logs and other personal settings wiped clean early today, due to a serious glitch that would likely cast doubt about the reliability of similar cloud-based services.

Google acknowledged the issue at 4:09am local Singapore time and started investigations into one of the most serious outages to hit the Web mail provider so far. More than 7 hours later, the service was said to have been restored for some users, while others can expect a resolution “in the near future”. …