Getting Knox

There was a nice bump in Knox sales during the last few days, and Google Analytics found the culprit: Jon Hannibal Stokes of Ars Technica told his audience that

Personally, I’m using Knox for making encrypted backups to my iPod and NAS box. I mount a secure vault and back up to it with my backup tool of choice, Chronosync. Knox itself then handles backing up the image to the iPod when I dock it, and Chronosync backs up the image to the NAS on a weekly basis.

That illustrates what I think is one of the coolest features of Knox: you can set Knox to backup a vault onto an iPod whenever the iPod is docked, rather than just at a specified interval with a “Please connect your iPod now for the scheduled backup” nag screen. Assuming you sync your iPod regularly, it’s a great, hassle-free way of ensuring that your backup stays up-to-date (and often on your person).

But one commentator didn’t get it:

I’m not getting what Knox actually gives you that you can’t do with disk utility. It’s just a different interface to create an encrypted sparseimage, right?

Given that Hannibal just explicitly detailed his Knox usage, this comment seems completely nonsensical. What Knox gives you? Jon says it right there! But it illustrates something we’ve learned about Knox sales: that it’s hard to change preconceptions once you’ve let them form.

When we released Knox 1.0 in April 2005, the site wasn’t very up front about Knox using the OS’s built-in encrypted disk images to do the encryption (now it is). What happened, inevitably, was that once the techies figured it out, they felt that they had uncovered Knox’s secret and wrote the app off as a “command-line tool wrapper” rip-off.

Had we been more up front about this in the beginning, those techies would have been forced to look beyond the encryption to the actual value-adds we provide: the management UI and the backup features. Now, they didn’t get that far, which is why we see the same knee-jerk reactions wherever Knox is mentioned.

When Knox 2.0 comes out, this audience will be forced to take another look, and what they’ll see is something that is not possible with any other app or OS tool. So, stay tuned…