Introducing the Keepit Mobile App
I promised myself I wouldn’t spend any time in this post talking about how the world has changed because of COVID or how people now want / expect / need to be able to do the critical parts of their job from wherever they are, not just from a corporate device on a managed corporate network. So, I won’t.
Instead, let me focus on one specific use case: backup and recovery of Office 365 data. Of course, that’s a huge part of what we do at Keepit, and our customers love it. So do analysts. We all know that disasters can strike at any time—ransomware, human errors, and technical failures can leave you in need of recovery at any time of the day or any day of the year. In the old-school world, starting a recovery meant “drive to the data center, put a tape in the tape library, and then run backup software.” With a cloud-native data protection solution like Keepit, there’s no more driving and no physical tapes, but you still have to start the restore.
That’s where our mobile app comes in! You can check the status of your backup and restore jobs and start recoveries from anywhere your mobile device can get a connection! Let’s take a look at how this works.
Checking job status
The Connectors page shows you what’s going on with the current set of supported connectors. Right now, the mobile app supports our Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace connectors, and we’re adding support for our other popular connectors. The connector status page shows you the current size and run state of your connectors. You can see in the example below that I have a current backup using the M365 connector and a separate OneDrive-only backup that just finished its first update.
Restoring data
One of the unique ways Keepit makes your restores faster is by giving you multiple ways to restore data. You can restore data to its original location (“in-place restore,”) to an alternate location, or via a sharable URL. For the fastest possible restore, just create a shared restore link and send it to whoever needs instant access to the data. The recipient can use that link to browse the backup data you’ve chosen to give them and download only what they need, to whatever device or environment works best for them—without having to wait for you or Office 365 to complete the entire restore.
The Keepit mobile app supports both in-place and shared-URL restores. Tapping the connector lets you quickly create a link that points to the most recent snapshot, but if you want to browse the contents of the snapshot, you can do that too—tap the connector, choose “Open Connector,” and browse until you find the data you need. You can filter and sort the results to make it easier to quickly locate your data items. Once you’ve found what you’re looking for, you can restore it in-place or generate a link to send to the recipient for direct access.
The future
We’re excited to be the first cloud SaaS data protection solution with a full-featured mobile app, and we have a lot of exciting things planned for the future. (Vic, let’s talk about what you’d like to publicly disclose here). We’re always looking for feedback from our customers, too—you can get the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, and we’d love to hear what you think!