Over dinner one night, Matthew Dornquast, the CEO of CrashPlan, was running something by a few of us sitting around the table. Basically, giving access to files that are backed up in CrashPlan to other systems. I don’t think I fully understood what he was talking about (I mean, you can already restore data on any system you install CrashPlan on, right?) and didn’t pay much mind to it. Then, I heard about the CrashPlan app for iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch).
After downloading the app, I realized it wasn’t just showing me when my machines last backed up (which it does very nicely). It’s more than that. You can actually download files from your CrashPlan backup, view them and then use the clipboard to shuttle them to another program. For example, the keynote that I had been working on last night opened nicely in the Keynote app on my iPad and I was able to view it on my TV at home by mirroring my iPad to the TV.
This kind of innovation is what I’ve come to expect from these guys. Their deduplication tech far exceeds you getting what you pay for. Unlimited backup to their cloud for the home version is just awesome. Making the home version free for backing up to other computers is just a nice thing to do. And to top it all off, the PROe stuff far exceeds what anyone else can do in terms of edge, or client backups – and they have a nice mass deployment situation, making it easy to both integrate with LDAP and deploy via packages. You can even backup an Xsan with it (to disk of course), making it amongst the least expensive packages for doing so.
Overall, I think what I’m saying is that I think their tech deserves the badass award!
