The largest manufacturer of hard drives on the planet, Seagate, has agreed to acquire online storage provider EVault for some $185 million in cash — subject to various standard closing conditions, including applicable regulatory approvals, of course. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter of Seagate’s fiscal year 2007.
EVault is a privately-held company in Emeryville, California, which offers automatic backup and data recovery services for small and medium sized businesses. It was founded in 1997 and has about 8,500 customers worldwide and a staff of about 250 people. The EVault acquisition marks Seagate’s third recent foray into online data storage and recovery: in 2005, it acquired Mirra, Inc. (a storage company that developed backup servers for individuals and businesses) and ActionFront Data Recovery Labs (which does pretty much exactly what the name suggest: pull people’s fannies out of the fire). Both those companies continue to operate as wholly-owned subsidiaries.
Seagate plans to let EVault keep doing its thing as a subsidiary, but plans to organize both EVault and ActionFront Data Recovery Las under a new Seagate Services business unit.
“Today’s announcement highlights a strategic next step into services, which is a natural extension of Seagate’s core business and will leverage our brand leadership and channel expertise to deliver solutions to the SMB market,” said Bill Watkins, Seagate CEO, in a statement. “Over the past three years, Seagate has been executing a strategy designed to broaden its customer base and increase growth opportunities by expanding beyond its core hard disc drive business into the broader storage solutions category.”
Overall, the move is seen as a way for Seagate to diversify its revenue and business model, which should please management and investors as the hard drive business is a game of constant R&D to create smaller, faster, higher-capacity drives and sell them at ever-thinner profit margins. “With Seagate Services, the Company is interested in pursuing underserved markets where it can leverage leading technology and market expertise, and provide unique value propositions to address growing customer needs,” the company said. At the same time, those drives create an ever-growing market of individuals and businesses which need to back up substantial amounts of data—and the widening availability of broadband Internet connections makes such services increasingly practical.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.