Imagine you are overseas travelling and you left your drivers license at home. How would you get yourself a copy? You would probably contact someone and ask that they find the license, photocopy it or send a photo of it back to you. This can be time consuming, and difficult if no one is around to help.
A similar reason Couchdrop was created. Couchdrop was founded by a Developer who had devices scattered all through different geographical locations. Every now and then, these devices would have files or data stored on them that would help understand their behavior or troubleshoot a fault. Unfortunately, the only way to get these files off was to configure an SFTP server as a jumpbox at the same site, and transfer files to this jumpbox and then transfer them off the jumpbox to a more standardized machine. Once it was on this machine it could then be transferred across the internet to the Developer.
Standing up an SFTP server isn’t a quick solution, at times it could take hours, or if there wasn’t the required infrastructure, impossible — not to mention you needed someone physically on site, at 2am when something has gone amiss, good luck.
Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) to Dropbox was formed. Couchdrop started off with SCP and Dropbox support, enabling the Developer to send files and data directly into Dropbox within seconds using some simple legacy protocols and syntax from the geographical diverse devices. Not only was this secure, but it was quick and easy. This enabled the Developer to rectify any issues and get the devices back online within minutes, or optimized without needing to wait hours, or days for someone to get on site to help.
Couchdrop Today
Couchdrop has since evolved to support more than just Dropbox, it now supports anything from OneDrive, GoogleDrive, to Amazon S3, Wasabi and Sharepoint. It’s also adapted to transfer and receive files via SFTP, FTP, Rsync, Email, an Upload Portal, it’s comprehensive API and of course, SCP.
Couchdrop is used across the globe, from the finance industry, to medicine, healthcare and educational institutions. It’s often used as an SFTP server; whether this be for Managed File Transfer, or for the ability to backup older, and legacy infrastructure into the cloud. Other common use cases are workflow automation, round-trip testing, ability to connect multiple systems and a quick and easy file transfer service for project teams who are on different operating systems and cloud providers.
Couchdrop offers a quick and easy means to share, transfer, upload and download files internal and external of your organization and scales without you having to do any work. It can be programmatic via it’s API, or you can zip into the interface and quickly add a new user who will be locked down to a specific location within your cloud storage.
At it’s starting price of $49 a month, you really can’t go wrong considering they scale, infrastructure is hosted, you don’t incur data or maintenance costs, it takes less than a minute to setup and you can bring your own cloud to fall in line with your cloud compliance — by the way, Couchdrop is HIPAA compliant. Best yet, it’s accessed from anywhere globally.
Another offering that Couchdrop can provide is a Cloud SMB/NFS Gateway. Sick of hosting and maintaining those shared network drives? Stand up the Couchdrop gateway at the click of a button and mount S3 storage as you would a shared network drive or NAS. Incredibly easy way for your hybrid cloud solution.
So you want to learn more? Pop over to couchdrop.io or send an email to info@couchdrop.io and
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