I’ve always been a guy who likes to back things up. The problem is, it’s always been difficult or costly or slow. I found a solution that fixes all three which makes me super happy. It’s called CrashPlan.
The concept is simple.. You want to have backups that are both nearby and far away. Nearby because restoring your backups from a local copy is super fast, and far away because a fire destroying both copies does nobody any good.
Well CrashPlan does this by allowing you to backup your computers against each other. So I’ve got my laptop and desktop copying backups to each other. If I’m out on the road and someone steals my desktop, I’ve still got everything on my laptop. And if my laptop gets lost, I’ve still got the desktop.
On top of that, they have a cloud backup, which has unlimited space and keeps a copy far far away from your house so fires aren’t a concern.
But what makes this really really cool is there is a friend code option. I can give you my friend code, and then you can send your backups to my computer. Fully encrypted so I can’t mess with your stuff, but storing it on my system which is free, and which has an added benefit: being close by.
So say Larry and I swap share codes. If his hard drive fails he can buy a new one and come over with an external drive to my house, I can then copy the backup to the external drive very quickly, and he can bring it home and be restored. No waiting for downloads. How cool is that?
This is the kind of system I’ve been wanting to setup with a few family members, but never did because it was too complicated. But they make it super simple.
Great idea Tim backing up to my wife’s computer makes sense, now it’s easy
remove me
That’s nice, Tim. Indeed something great.
The idea of having a hot site that is no where near your primary location is one that is used in banking. Yes, it’s expensive, but in the event of a mass catastrophe banks have certain apps that need to be up and running again within hours. It sounds like this system makes that same type of backup strategy available to each of us individually.
The friend code is a very clever and cool idea.
I like the idea of a 2 way strategy, one close by for convenience, and one far away for security.