Failing Forward

I had the fortune of getting a private beta invite (to sound official and TechCrunch-y about it) to a really neat startup this morning called Fwd:Vault.

The new service allows the user to create secure file backups via email, and email alone.  Ordinary backup programs require some sort of client/server software, or at least a special program running in the background that needs to be configured.  Not so with Fwd:Vault.  If you want a secure remote copy of a document, a PowerPoint presentation, a photograph, or indeed anything else you could attach to an email and send to someone, all that’s required is for you to send the email(s) [and attachment(s)] to an email address provided by Fwd:Vault.  To recover a document stored in this fashion, you send a request email, and receive the file in an automatically generated reply message.

The system is actually really neat – and it’s fast too.  I sent a picture taken of my girlfriend and I over Easter to the system, and instantly got a reply email with a confirmation of the backup, as well as a code to retrieve the file at a later date.  I went ahead and requested the file back again using the code, and the Fwd:Vault system promptly replied via email with my photo attached.

There is a web interface (currently in development, so I can’t try it yet) that will allow you to view your archived files.  This is going to be important, because if everything is done over email, and your email goes down, or you delete the confirmation emails with the codes in them, then you wouldn’t otherwise be able to retrieve your files… which will prove a pretty big problem.  But from what I’m able to gather, the web interface for archived files sounds like it’s going to be really spot-on.  Fwd:Vault is also said to handle file versioning, but I’ve not yet tested that.

Overall, from the portions of the site that are active at the moment, this is a really neat idea and looks to be developing pretty solidly.  I don’t know what the cap on attachment size is, but I’m definitely going to be using this when it goes live.

Disclosure: Fwd:Vault founder Frank Koehl is a great friend and mentor of mine.  I let him know that I’d be a willing beta tester if ever he wanted one, and he took me up on the offer.  He never asked me to review Fwd:Vault here and I do so only because I think it’s a cool idea.  The content of this review is entirely my own, and entirely subjective.