Niklas Fischer

I built Tusk because I had a backup problem I couldn't solve with existing tools. I shoot video for Udemy courses and YouTube tutorials. Projects grow over weeks of shooting, raw footage overflows my Mac's storage long before I'm anywhere near done editing, and my “backup system” was dragging and dropping files to whichever external drive had space. Then doing the same to a second drive because I was worried the first one would fail.

It drove me nuts. I couldn't remember which files were backed up and which weren't. Whether I had copied the camera roll but not the screen recordings. When I needed a file from three months ago, I plugged in drives one by one until I found it. The more time passed and the more drives I accumulated, the worse it got.

I talked to other photographers and videographers from my network who said they had exactly the same problem. So I built Tusk: a tool that automatically backs up project folders to external drives and cloud destinations, continuously watches for changes, verifies every transfer with a checksum, and keeps a catalogue of where every file is, even when the drives are unplugged.

By background I'm a software engineer. I am the founding engineer at cleverklagen (five years), previously worked as a Data Scientist at DAZN and FC Barcelona, and run a software agency with clients including Zattoo. I have published courses on Udemy and through Packt Publishing on O'Reilly.