User-Friendly Interface
The layout of the Graphical User Interface has been designed for the average user in mind. It strives to reduce complexity by incorporating as few components as possible and exposing only those that are relevant to the operation at hand. This approach has resulted in a user interface that is highly intuitive and easy to learn.

Designed For Remote Storage
The adoption of data encryption and the ability to operate over a wide area network makes the deployment of OBR especially well suited in situations where an organization wishes to store its data remotely, for instance, as part of its business continuity plan. By keeping data away from its source, the chance of complete data loss in the event of a disaster is reduced significantly.

Data Remains Encrypted At All Times
A principal design requirement for OBR is that users' data must remain encrypted at all times after leaving their PCs as this will ensure data confidentiality whilst on transit through a network and also when it is resting at the remote storage location. Furthermore, this requirement obviates the necessity for secure networks, such as Virtual Private Networks and the need to house the remote storage equipment at a secure data centre.

Block Level Incremental Backup
The OBR client employs incremental Delta Block backup, that is, only blocks of data within a file that have changed are sent to the server instead of the complete file. This saves a tremendous amount of time especially so for large files such as Microsoft Outlook. In view of the requirement that data remains encrypted at all times outside the PC, the developers have had to come up with a novel scheme (Singapore patent application no, 200406422-6) to accomplish this ground-breaking feature!

Ability to Function Behind Firewalls And Proxies
The communication between client and server utilizes the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and this can take place over local area networks, broadband Internet, leased lines, etc. With the adoption of HTTP, reconfiguration of existing firewalls and proxy servers are rarely needed in order to deploy OBR in the corporate environment.

Automatic Reconnection From Network Interruptions
In an environment where the network connection is not stable and subject to short outages, OBR is able to resume transferring data from the point it was last disrupted. This feature is especially useful while backing up or restoring large files.

Private/Public Key Management System
OBR employs a sophisticated key management system that utilizes symmetric and asymmetric encryption technologies. As a result, users and account administrators are able to change their passwords at any time. Every corporate account has a "Private" key that gives the holder absolute control over the organization's security, e.g. resetting lost passwords, deleting accounts. Note that encryption keys are not kept in the server unless they are themselves encrypted or are public keys.

Automatic Software Upgrading
Whenever the client software is updated with new features or patches, it is "pushed" down and installed in the user's PC at the time he/she logs in. This will therefore ensure that the user will always be using the latest copy of the software.

Flexible Backend Hardware Implementation
The OBR server software is packaged as a single web application archive (.war) file for rapid and convenient deployment in a suitable servlet container such as Apache Tomcat. The hardware architecture and requirements on the backend can vary greatly depending on the desired degree of scalability and reliability. For example, OBR can be deployed on a single server or in a multi-server clustered environment with a Network Attached Storage as the shared storage device.

Multi-Platform Operable
The complete client software has been developed in the Java programming language. As such, it will function on any platform that is able to support the Java 2 runtime environment. In addition to Microsoft Windows, OBR has been tested on the Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. Furthermore, the user interface has been designed to retain the same "look and feel" across all platforms.

Open File Backup
OBR is able to backup single files which are concurrently used by another application. Presently, this feature is only applicable to Microsoft's Windows XP operating system with NTFS file system.

Multi-lingual User Interface
The user interface is able to support other languages, which comply with the Unicode character encoding standard e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai etc. The conversion effort will mainly be directed to the translation process and mapping it to the corresponding Unicode with minimal changes to the program’s logic.