OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive — these are synchronisation services. They mirror the current state of your files to a remote server. That is useful for access and collaboration. It is not backup, because it faithfully replicates whatever happens to your files: including deletions, corruptions, and ransomware encryption. The moment a ransomware event encrypts a folder, that encryption syncs.
A backup is a verified, independent copy of your data at a known point in time, held somewhere the event that damaged the original cannot reach. Those are different things, and the difference matters at the precise moment you need it to.
A staff member's OneDrive agent has been silently failing since her credit card was updated and the Microsoft 365 subscription lapsed on auto-renewal. She does not know. Her laptop contains the only current copy of an active client matter. The Secure Time Portal's zero-delta monitoring would have alerted the operator within three working days of backup activity ceasing — before any data was at risk, regardless of cloud subscription status.
A director boards the Eurostar. The presentation for tomorrow's pitch is on his laptop, which he assumed synced overnight. It did not — the hotel WiFi did not complete the upload before he left the office. With Time Machine to the Secure Time Portal, any machine on the office LAN can retrieve last night's version and forward it. No cloud dependency. No subscription to have lapsed. No agent to have failed quietly.
A single managed appliance — a fanless N150 mini PC, smaller than a hardback novel, sitting silently in your comms cupboard — whose primary purpose is verified, continuous, monitored backup of every Mac in your office.
Packet filtering on the LAN interface. DNSSEC-validated DNS. Hardened base system. No cloud relay. Client data is held on a device with no WAN interface and no direct internet exposure.
Native macOS backup to a fully supported SMB target with Apple vfs_fruit compatibility. ZFS snapshots every hour, thirty-day rolling window — 720 recovery points. Authoritative NTP to every machine on your network from the UK pool.
Runs FreeBSD 15 with ZFS — the same storage architecture at the heart of NetApp ONTAP, used by the majority of FTSE 500 data centres. Per-block checksumming, copy-on-write semantics, instant snapshots, drive-level redundancy.
Nothing is ever overwritten. Data is written to new space; the old version remains intact until explicitly released. A ransomware event encrypts new blocks — the snapshots from before the event are untouched.
Every read is verified against the checksum written at write time. Silent data corruption — bit rot — is detected and, where the ZFS mirror has a good copy, corrected automatically. Neither cloud sync nor a conventional filesystem detects this failure mode.
Instantaneous and space-efficient — they cost effectively nothing until data changes. Hourly snapshots across thirty days means 720 recovery points. Rolling back an accidentally deleted file takes seconds.
Two NVMe drives hold identical copies of your data. A single drive failure does not cause data loss. The device continues operating in degraded mode; the operator is alerted and a replacement drive sourced within one business day.
A daily automated check examines each client dataset and compares backup activity between the two most recent snapshots. If a machine stops backing up — for any reason — the operator is alerted within three working days. Working days are configured per client, matching your actual office attendance pattern.
The monitoring is outbound and proactive. The appliance reports to the operator. The operator contacts you if action is required. You do not need to log in to a dashboard or remember to look. It reports before you notice a problem — which is the only monitoring model that actually protects you.
GDPR, SRA guidance, ICO requirements, and professional indemnity considerations all bear on where client data lives and who controls access to it.
The Secure Time Portal holds client backup data on hardware at your physical premises. It runs software whose behaviour can be fully verified — the source code is public and auditable. δivergent Byte is a UK entity subject to UK law. There are no third-party cloud services in the backup path. No US-jurisdiction vendor terms. No adequacy decision required. The data stays where it is supposed to stay, because there is nowhere else it can go.
| Storage configuration | Indicative hardware cost (inc. VAT, supplied) |
|---|---|
| 2 × 2 TB NVMe data mirror — standard | ~£600–620 |
| 2 × 4 TB NVMe data mirror — extended | ~£750–800 |
| 2 × 8 TB NVMe data mirror — large | ~£950–1,050 |
| Software licensing | £0 — FreeBSD BSD licence, permanent |
| Installation | Quoted per site |
| Managed service fee | Quoted per site, monthly |
Hardware build, configuration, and on-site installation · FreeBSD 15 base system · ZFS mirror configuration · Samba with Apple vfs_fruit support · Per-client ZFS datasets with individual quotas · DNS content filtering via community blocklists · NTP service · SMART drive health monitoring · ZFS pool health with weekly scrub · Zero-delta backup monitoring · Monthly status report · Allowlist requests within one business day · Critical patches within 24 hours · Hardware replacement configuration included.
Not included: offsite backup (see Remote Data Vault) · endpoint security · client device troubleshooting · ISP connection.
A scoping conversation takes thirty minutes.
Also consider: Add the Remote Data Vault →