It's not often that I get excited about software these days but after the loss of a laptop drive over the holiday season, I was forced to reexamine my backup strategy which, up to that point, had been simply plugging in an external USB drive from time to time and using Apple's Time Machine to grab a snapshot of the contents of my drive.

Needless to say, I was caught out by a busy schedule and ended up losing about a week's worth of photos because I had forgotten to plug the drive in after a previous shooting session. As a result, I started to look for something to complement Time Machine and spent some time looking at the consumer offering from the folks at Crashplan.com.

I had been using their Crashplan Pro application and was quite satisfied with the level of technical support so I knew they would stand behind their consumer product. Installation was a breeze and within minutes of installing the application on my laptop and desktop, I was pushing gigabytes of data across my home network.

With a single registered account, you are able to install Crashplan on up to 10 computers with each computer able to serve as both a data source and backup destination for each other. The primary advantage of Crashplan over Time Machine is that it allows you to have multiple backup destinations; for example, you can back up locally to a folder on the same system, an externally attached USB drive, a computer running the Crashplan application on the same network, and a remote computer running Crashplan ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

If you invite a friend to participate in your backup network, you can back up to each other's computers as well. Data is encrypted before leaving your computer and stored in an encrypted format for data security.

Now that Crashplan has been released as a free product (Crashplan+ offers additional features for even more backup features), there really isn't an excuse to get started with better backup.

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