TechCrunch: Pair Up! Cucku Lets You Swap Data With A Backup Buddy

In the last few years we’ve seen a number of backup solutions emerge that have tried to make the backup process as painless as possible. Local backup solutions like Apple’s Time Machine back up to an external disk and tend to be quick and easy, but they also leave data exposed to theft and natural disaster. Cloud-based storage services like Mozy and Carbonite remove the risk of physical damage to a disk, but it can take days or weeks to recover data after a disk fails. Cucku , a new startup that launched last week, is trying to merge the benefits of local and remote backup. Using a technology it calls “social backup”, users are able to automatically save their files to a friend’s computer over the Skype P2P network. The software is Windows only for now, with a Mac version planned for the future. Here’s how it works: Each user pairs off with a friend, who becomes their “backup buddy”. Every time you modify a file on y...