CrashPlan 3 – Backup of Awesomeness

Having come from the Mac side of the computer world, I was never very worried about backing things up. Time Machine did a fine job and I had seen it save people’s digital lives repeatedly. It’s a set-it-and-forget application that is beautiful in its minimalist and nearly invisible approach. Life was good.

Unfortunately there comes a time when a user of modern technology has to grow up and face facts. I knew from previous careers that a backup means more than keeping local copies of files on hand. When backups go wrong, it’s generally because they were all kept in one place. A fire, a burglary, an accidental format, an electrical failure – all of these can wipe out a user’s data no matter how many backups you have stacked around the house or apartment.

There’s hope that the emerging “Cloud” will have us covered when such dreadful events occur. In some ways it does, but what about all of those photos you’ve taken over the last decade or three since your children have been born? Such collections can easily amount to tens of gigabytes (sometimes hundreds), however most cloud services only offer you a meager 5gb to store your entire life.

I’ve seen a lot of different methods for preserving backups in my time: burning data to optical media and distributing it to family (which are often lost or misplaced), hard drives placed in fireproof safes (which aren’t heat proof by the way), or even the infamous safety deposit box (which is expensive and really inconvenient). How would you feel if there was an application that let you digitally mimic all of these for free?

Let me introduce you to CrashPlan…

Read more…