Have you seen CrashPlan yet? It looks pretty cool (I haven’t used it yet). It’s offsite backup for personal computers. Install their software (Windows, OS X, Linux coming soon), pay a monthly fee, and you have offsite backups to their data center (nothing novel there, I know).

OR

Use it to back up to another computer. Buy a license key ($20 is very reasonable compared to what I paid for my existing software) and install the software on another computer and back up to that instead (nothing novel there, either).

OR (and this is the cool part)

Back up in a peer-to-peer kind of way. Buy a license, find a buddy, and instead of using your buddy’s data center, you can back up to each other’s hard drive. If you’re really paranoid, you can be “back up buddies” with more than one person. I know what you’re thinking — it’s the first thing I thought of too - - yes, they encrypt the data.

To me, this looks like a killer application for small business people. Offsite to a data center for a fee (presumably in Minneapolis), or offsite to a buddy for free.

Now If I were in a hurricane or earthquake prone city or had a house in a flood zone, I’d be all over finding a back up friend somewhere far away to be my back up partner.

It’s got a very nice interface, and they seem to have thought of most everything. Worth checking out if you don’t have a personal business continuity plan.

Note: I have no business ties with these folks, I just like a well thought out product.

 

Posted on January 16