Why does Radar42 exist? In the words of our Founder:

"One of the earliest concepts that was drilled into my mind while learning to drive a car was that it's not just good enough to focus on the operation of your own vehicle, you need to be aware of what is happening around you - and in some cases, perhaps what is about to happen to you.

It was from this perspective that I enjoyed many in-depth discussions with the early development team of CrashPlan, always asking questions and requesting features. With the quantity and pace of requests that I was making however, it was no surprise that it quickly became an exercise of categorizing my ideas into one of three buckets: Enlightenment (no, we don't do that and we won't, for the following reasons), Consideration (that sounds interesting, put that one up in the forum and lets get people commenting on it) or Disengagement (I could see where that would be neat, but that's not what CrashPlan is being built to do. That's too much of a corner-case, off the fringe of our target).

With my feature requests neatly stacked into two piles (no need to track the topics of enlightenment anymore) I began to explore how I could still get the enhanced capabilities and peripheral perspective that I wanted - despite agreeing with Code42 that a number of my asks would only be appreciated by a very small percentage of the overall install base (current and future). And with that, it struck me - even if only 2-3% of all organizations using CrashPlan have similar corner-case desires, we would still add up to measure in the hundreds or thousands of obscure-feature seeking administrators.

By 2010, we had rolled out our first in-depth scripts and had begun building the platform which would later become known as Radar42. There were two main thrusts at this stage: Usage-based billing (we were a managed service provider, needing to accurately charge for data that needed to be stored at our site, in Canada), and full-spectrum situational awareness about obscure and external threats to a future restore. It had been established that these items weren't part of the core use-case scenarios which CrashPlan was being built to satisfy, so with the encouragement of one of the founders (tip of the hat to the ever helpful Matthew Dornquast), we invested and we built.

Through the years, we have always made it a point to continue our meetings with the senior engineers and managers within Code42, sharing our experiences, our observations and our wish lists. Sometimes this results in some of our Radar42 functionality being adopted and rolled into the core CrashPlan product (a humbling feeling) and other times we have our ideas confirmed as being on the fringe of the core Code42 focus - which is not a bad spot to be, as long as you know that that is where you are.

So that's it - we provide visibility on corner case information and deliverables, offering niche reports and details that not necessarily everyone wants - but we believe that we are not alone and that there are other, like-minded CrashPlan admins among us."

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Sean Costello

Founder, CEO

Background Backup, Inc. & Radar42

When development first began for Radar42 we were laser focused on supporting Code42's end-to-end backup solutions and we are proud to say we currently fully support Code42 environments 3.6.5.1 and later. With an eye to the future, we are planning to open the platform to support other backup solutions, check back often for updates!