Launched this week
Tusk
The backup app that never forgets where your files went
24 followers
The backup app that never forgets where your files went
24 followers
Tusk is a Mac backup app for photographers and video editors with footage spread across many drives. Unlike cloning or sync tools, it tracks every file by checksum across all your destinations and can tell you what's on a drive sitting on your shelf. Plug in an SD card and it fans out to every drive and cloud at once. Free up your Mac once every backup holds a verified copy. Drive dies? One-click restore from the best copy. $49 lifetime at launch (later $79). 14-day free trial, no credit card.
Hey PH! I'm Niklas, solo founder of Tusk.
I built it because keeping my own footage safe was incredibly tedious. After a year of shooting, I had six external drives and no idea where I could find any specific file. Worse, I could never be sure if a file was safely backed up or if it only existed in one place, meaning one corrupted drive could wipe out some irreproducible footage forever.
The existing tools are good at backup: cloning a drive, syncing a folder, and verifying the copy. But then they leave you alone. None of them answered the question "Where is this file?" once the drive was back on the shelf.
Tusk is built around that question. It backs up your project folders to external drives and the cloud, verifies every file (BLAKE3 checksums), and keeps a library of where every copy lives. It's local-first: your files, your storage, your control, with cloud as one destination rather than the whole plan. Open a project, and you see which files are safely backed up, which aren't, and which drive to grab. It watches your project folders, too, so new or updated files are automatically copied to your backup locations. Once everything is safely backed up, you can delete your local copies with one click to free up space on your Mac Tusk verifies every destination first and refuses if anything's missing.
Launch offer: First 100 licenses for $49 lifetime (later $79). You can try Tusk out for free for 14 days, no signup or credit card required.
Photographers and videographers have tested it over the past months and shaped much of what it is today. If you're a music producer, VFX artist, or anyone sitting on more data than you can keep in your head, I'd love to hear whether Tusk solves your problem.
I’d especially love feedback on:
Is the backup workflow intuitive?
Is there anything missing before you’d trust it with your data?
How do you currently organize archived projects?
Teorico Vocab
@_emily_daykin Thank you!! Really appreciate this.
About the data privacy: All of your data stays completely on your Mac. I see neither the actual files nor the file catalogue of you, when you use Tusk.
If you back up any files to the cloud (Dropbox/Google Drive/Amazon S3), you'd connect your own account/credentials and Tusk just keeps track of where the files went.
So in other words, you still own all your data and I never get to see it :)
Teorico Vocab
EditWithAva
as a content creator that is regularly on the run, this is so cool. congrats on the launch niklas!!! can't wait to never worry about losing video footage due to premature deletion ever again.
one question: you said it keeps watching the project folder and sends the updates to the different backup locations. i often do not have my external drives plugged in. what happens then? similarly if I'm offline but have just added footage that should also be backed up to the cloud?
@matthiasrossini thank you Matthias!! Premature deletion anxiety was honestly the original reason why Tusk exists today 😄
Not having the drives plugged in or not being connected to the internet is no problem! Tusk stores any update that was made in the meantime and then remembers to run them as soon as it's possible again. So once you do plug in your drives (or connect back to the internet), Tusk knows which files have changed and will back them up for you.
Also "content-creator on the run" is probably the main target group for this, so would love to hear your thoughts once you've tried it out!
Would love to see granular scheduling per drive tier, like hourly syncs to local SSDs but only weekly to offsite backups. Right now if you support that already I missed it, but being able to tune frequency and bandwidth caps per destination would help when you're juggling fast scratch drives and slower cold storage in the same workflow.
@fatmaodef39623 Hey Fatma, thanks for the input!
At the moment I'm planning to do scheduled syncs for larger projects, where it becomes unfeasible to continuously watch the local folders all the time.
For smaller projects, in its current version, Tusk automatically takes care of the backups for you without you needing to set up anything.
If you prefer not to offload files as much to specific drives, you can just leave them unplugged/disconnected for now though.
Will definitely add the scheduling though in the next few weeks!
Plugging in an old drive and instantly seeing what was on it was genuinely satisfying. The checksum tracking gives real peace of mind for anyone juggling footage across multiple backups.
Plugged in a random drive from my shelf and it instantly knew exactly what was backed up where. Super handy for someone drowning in scattered footage across half a dozen SSDs.