Safe Shepherd: Startup chaos, and Crashing our way into 500 Startups
I’ve been asked to write this blog post by many, many friends over the past few months; here it is.
Everything changed when Dave McClure checked-in on Foursquare three blocks from our apartment…
My co-founder Geoff and I began our start-up adventure with nothing more than blind ambition, a…
CrashPlan’s “Family” plan is too risky for secure data
CrashPlan exposes your data and gives administrative rights to all members of the family plan
For the past four years I’ve been auditioning cloud backup solutions almost as rigorously as I test to-do/productivity apps. After Mozy, Backblaze, and my own experiments with Synk Pro and AWS, I settled on CrashPlan’s Family Plan (more info), which offers unlimited backup storage for 10 computers for around $110 a year. I don’t have 10 computers, but I have enough in my home that this was worth it. And since it’s a “family” plan, I invited a few family members.
What crashplan doesn’t mention in the marketing materials, and only mentions in the support FAQ, is that you
- share a single username and password across every user
- every family member has access to the data of every other family member
There is no administrator/user account model as you’d expect from a multi-user system. Every user is the admin, and every user can access everyone else’s data.
Whether or not you trust others on the family plan isn’t the issue. For anyone working with clients or employers, we’ve signed documents assuring our work (and their IP) is not accessible by or visible to anyone else. Aside from the complete visibility of basic files and documents, anyone using a native mail client (storing locally) exposes their entire mail archive to other users of the system.
I’ve reached out to CrashPlan about this and here was their response:
Good day Justin,
There is no supported way to separate the backups on the Family Plan. All users are able to access the backups of other users on your plan in case you need to restore in a system crash situation.
Regards,
~Michael
So unfortunately, if you are storing confidential data on your system or believe in privacy, CrashPlan’s family plan is not an acceptable solution.
New Pattern Tap (Beta)
I love Pattern Tap as a resource. Like Dribbble, I use Pattern Tap when I need inspiration, usually for a particular UI element. The redesign of this app has been a good while coming, but I like what I see.
Feel like this has been years in the works, but it looks great and is an undeniable resource to any web designer.
this will be useful when users can upload/submit
Dark Patterns: Deception vs. Honesty in UI Design
In particular, this passage does a fantastic job at articulating the hardest part of my job:
Removing dark patterns from any site involves a leap of faith. A company has to shift from a short-term quantitative measurement mindset to one that values relatively slow, steady growth of “warm fuzzy” qualitative things like brand image, credibility, and trust.
I wanted to agree with this article on ALA, but find it too naïve. It tries to differentiate between “what’s good for business” and “what’s good for the user”, a false dilemma that only exists in systems where the parts are not functioning together. Longer-term testing of this scenario would illustrate that users who felt deceived become net detractors, thus hurting business. There is no one versus the other. It is not a leap of faith at all, it is design strategy.
got my OneLessDesk from @deanheckler @hecklerdesign. It’s a work of art. Stunning precision and detail, beautiful surface, amazing constr.
so excited that john’s “recovered data 95” album finally came out. fans of old autechre, you’ll love this: http://bit.ly/3voMdD
huge congratulations to @wilsonminer! EveryBlock acquired by MSNBC! http://bit.ly/1wSHnr
YES! CSS3 attribute “background-size” implemented in FireFox (mozilla) today. http://bit.ly/RPP0v
