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Fund this: Bleep cable backs up your smartphone while it charges

Smarter than your average sync/charge cable, Bleep backs up your important data every time you plug in.

Rick Broida Senior Editor
Rick Broida is the author of numerous books and thousands of reviews, features and blog posts. He writes CNET's popular Cheapskate blog and co-hosts Protocol 1: A Travelers Podcast (about the TV show Travelers). He lives in Michigan, where he previously owned two escape rooms (chronicled in the ebook "I Was a Middle-Aged Zombie").
Rick Broida

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It may look like a standard sync/charge cable, but it also has flash storage for automatic backups. Maayan Goren

For many a smartphone user, a backup is something they wish they had -- right after their phone gets lost, stolen or broken.

Indiegogo project Bleep promises to back up your smartphone every time you charge it. It looks like an ordinary sync/charge cable, but it houses anywhere from 16 to 64GB of flash storage. That storage works in tandem with a backup app that automatically archives your data.

In other words, it's a local alternative to cloud backup. The latter isn't always reliable, especially if you're traveling and don't have access to Wi-Fi or a strong cellular network. Plus, cloud backup tends to cost money, and as a number of celebrities have recently discovered, it's anything but secure. The Bleep affords a much faster and more secure option, one that requires no subscription fees.

The six-foot cable will come in Lightning and microSD varieties, with early backers given their choice before the product ships.

When will that be? That's the rub: the developers are estimating August of 2015.

If you don't mind waiting, there are early-backer Bleeps available for $40 (16GB), $55 (32GB), and $78 (64GB).

Your thoughts? Is this a product you'd back? Or are you content with existing phone-backup options?