Yesterday I had dinner with one of my mates from University:  Lukasz.  He's a very bright guy that's one heck of a programmer and we had a long chat about what each of us was working on and life in general since the disconnect (thanks to Facebook for the reconnect…damn you Facebooook!).  Anyhow, Lukasz co-founded a company by the name of ContingencyWorks.

CW claims to make backing up workstations incredibly easy.  I was skeptical of the claim and the business (I'll be honest here) as I thought to myself:  "Well, I rsync up data on my servers all the time, what's the big deal"?  I'll clarify that my servers are running some flavour of Linux and so backups are slightly easier there.  Is Windows backup such a big deal?  After a bit of research it turns out that it is.  Windows backup has no clean or simple solution.  One of the biggest concerns I have with doing backups is not using up an enourmous amount of space with the actual backup but also having incremental backups.  There simply aren't any good solutions out there because of the complexity.

Turns out that it's quite complex but CW has a solution.  As the demo progressed I could see more and more uses.  In addition to that the user side UI is quite simple to use and a user in a corporate environment doesn't have to worry about anything once an admin has setup their machine for backup.  The backup servers (EpochBox) are also incredibly easy to setup and that's what CW is really aiming for:  easy of use.

I was duly impressed as there are many usage scenearios for the backup servers and given how valuable data is these days in the corporate environment I think it's definitely something that can work out well for the founders of CW.

More details as I learn about them and am allowed to reveal them.  If you're a business owner/IT manager interested in a demo or a personal introduction please let me know and I'll set it up.