What customers are doing with their Basecamp Backups

When we first set out to build a backup product for online applications we were thinking purely of our own needs. As an organization that was dependent on some of the online applications that we were using we wanted to be sure that we maintained control of our data (much of it critical to the running of our business). It wasn’t long before we discovered that other people were interested in the same types of tools. The way that we used our own product and how we envisioned other people using our product was to get continuous backups of our data in case of a disaster, like us accidentally deleting something or some wider accident in the data center of our online apps. What has most surprised me with our Basecamp backup product has been the different reasons why our customers are using our product and the end result of what they do with their backups.

I’ll highlight some of the more interesting usage scenarios over a few posts. The one scenario that has been most interesting to me is that of larger companies that are using Basecamp. These are medium size companies with a few thousand employees that have their own IT departments. The IT groups run decent size data centers and manage the operations of lots of internal applications. Their business groups have begun playing around with online applications and many of them have embraced Basecamp and are using it extensively. Whether or not the IT department likes this move, they realize that it is inevitable and have decided to figure out how to make it work while still keeping business moving forward. These IT groups already have existing backup procedures, policies and tools. But none of these things work with online applications like Basecamp, but Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp provides a mechanism for them to integrate Basecamp backups into existing processes.

Once a company signs up for automatic scheduled backups of their Basecamp files , Writeboards and data with Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp they begin receiving their data. Their data is all delivered to them by Dropbox or FTP which gets their data into their network and onto one of their computers. From there they use their existing backup tools (CA ArcServe Backup, IBM Tivoli, Microsoft Systems Center) and processes to create a managed archive of that data that is stored to tape or whatever backup mechanism they are using. In the event of an accidentally deleted file they have the opportunity to check the backups that Centripetal Retrieve delivers to them and if their data is still available on their host computer they can use that file. But since they clear those backups off from time to time they may need to access the data from one of their archives that is on tape or something else. They can utilize their existing restore processes to retrieve the needed data and files and restore it back to their host machine from which they are able to re-upload the file back into Basecamp. I haven’t heard of anyone needing to do a restore yet, but I’m sure the IT managers have a little more peace of mind knowing that they have the ability to do so if the need should arise.