Sounds harsh – no one wants a backup. But they don’t. They want what a backup gets them, the ability to restore in a crisis (it’s called ‘disaster recovery‘ for a reason). Some will argue, they need backups to do that, and while true, it is helpful to consider the “job companies hire backups for” as a way to better understand BackBox and the critical value our trusted backups provide.

What do you mean?

You’re going to hear me say that no-one wants a backup A LOT.

Your initial instinct might be to disagree. Not only do people WANT backups, they NEED them.

If no one wants a backup, why do over 500 companies buy our stuff to backup their devices?

Let me tell you… I GET IT.

Our backup stuff is amazing. Differentiated. Powerful. Not enough people have it.

And yet still I will die on the hill that has a little plaque at the bottom that says “this is the ‘no one wants a backup’ hill.”

Jobs to be done

There’s a way of looking at markets and customer behavior called Jobs to Be Done.

The classic example is that no one wants to buy a drill, what they want is a hole in the wall. (I’m not sure why that’s useful.) But it’s used at places like the ice cream shop near a school, trying to get parents to stop in more often. They realize that parents don’t want “milkshakes” (full sized), they want “after school treats”… so they create a smaller version and parents stop in more often. It’s the “job parents were hiring the milkshake for” that gave them the insight to launch a smaller shake (with higher margin).

If no one wants a backup, what do they want?

They want to know that their backups will restore, when they need them, quickly and 100% of the time.

Only BackBox does a 5-step validation of every backup, and then pre-validates the restore to make sure that happens.

Here’s the question to ask yourself

Instead of asking “what’s my backup process like?”, ask…

What’s my restore process like? How did it go the last time I had to restore something?

Then, you can understand the value that BackBox brings:

1. Are you 100% sure that your backup will restore?
2. What about the version of the software for each device you’re running… is every device on one version? If not, how do you know which version the failed device was running? A spreadsheet? A CMDB? When were those things updated, and are they correct? Looking up all this information slows down the restore.
3. Do you have everything you need to restore? What if you had to restore to a new device? Do you have the software? The license keys? The knowledge? Again, more time and more delays to restoring devices and getting the network back up and running.

With BackBox, just hit one button. We keep everything needed to restore your devices in one place, and validate the backup before trying to restore so that you know it’ll work… and then it just does.