Your backup, 280 miles away. Safe in the fog. ∵ BSD is better.
The Secure Time Portal gives you a verified, point-in-time local backup of your business data. ZFS snapshots, hourly, thirty-day rolling window. That is correct backup architecture for the events that happen most often: a deleted file, a corrupted document, a machine that fails.
The events it cannot address are the ones that affect the premises itself: fire, flood, theft of hardware, or a ransomware event severe enough to affect equipment on the local network. These events are less frequent. When they occur, the distinction between on-premises backup and offsite backup is the distinction between recoverable and not.
The standard SMB disaster recovery conversation ends at "we sync to the cloud" or "we have a second site in Slough." Cloud sync is not backup. Slough is not a disaster recovery distance from London — it is twenty miles west on the M4, in the same regional infrastructure corridor, sharing Thames estuary power distribution.
Newcastle is 280 miles from central London. Different region. Different electricity grid. Connected to the internet via the NCL-IX exchange at Stellium Datacenters — the UK's largest carrier-neutral campus outside London, powered by REGO-certified renewable energy from North Sea offshore wind.
Newcastle is in England. It will remain in England under any plausible political scenario. The ICO has unambiguous remit. No adequacy decision required. No data transfer mechanism needed. The data is in the UK because it never left the UK.
If a drive ever needs physical replacement, Newcastle is three hours from King's Cross on LNER. An engineer can be on site and back in London the same day.
A dedicated FreeBSD appliance colocated in a Tier 3+ ISO-27001 certified facility. Single-tenant: your data is on your appliance, not in a shared pool.
Replication is via ZFS send over an encrypted SSH tunnel: incremental snapshot transfer. After the initial seed, only changed blocks are transmitted. The mechanism is standard BSD base system software — no vendor API, no third-party middleware, nothing that requires a vendor to remain solvent.
The last successfully replicated snapshot. Nightly replication means recovery point within twenty-four hours. Hourly replication available where your broadband connection supports it.
δivergent Byte ships a pre-seeded replacement appliance. You provide a location with power and a network connection. No dependency on the Newcastle facility for the restore.
Once per year, δivergent Byte performs a full documented restore of your most recent RDV snapshot to a test appliance, verifies the data is intact and accessible, and delivers a written report. A backup that has never been successfully restored is an untested assumption, not a recovery capability. The annual DR test is included in the standard service. It is not an optional extra.
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| RDV appliance hardware | ~£275–295 inc. VAT (supplied) or client-purchased to specification |
| Colocation — power, cooling, connectivity, physical security | Included in managed service fee |
| Software licensing | £0 — FreeBSD BSD licence, permanent |
| Annual DR test with written report | Included |
| Managed service fee | Quoted per site, monthly |
| Hardware replacement configuration | Included in managed service |
RDV appliance hardware, FreeBSD installation, ZFS vault pool configuration · Colocation at Stellium or Pulsant Newcastle · SSH tunnel configuration between STP and RDV · Replication schedule configuration (nightly default, hourly available) · Zero-delta replication monitoring · Appliance health monitoring · Monthly status report · Annual disaster recovery test with written report · OS errata patching.
Not included: the Secure Time Portal itself (prerequisite) · WAN connectivity at your site · Recovery hardware at your recovery location.
Available to Secure Time Portal clients. If you are not yet an STP client, the conversation starts there.