Happy World Backup Day!

The greeting card companies don’t have a monopoly on creating holidays. The Reddit community has declared today, March 31, World Backup Day, a day to remind us all to review our backup strategies and ensure our digital valuables are protected. In case you didn’t see yesterday’s blog, we are celebrating today with a World Backup Day contest.

We know that backup is boring to most people. We get that. But for all of us at Code 42 Software, backup is why we get up in the morning. We restore files all the time, but when someone takes the time to write us to say thank you for saving their wedding photos, home movies, or other irreplaceable data, it makes all the hard work worthwhile.

We especially appreciate it when people from the outside are able to distill the essence of the CrashPlan backup story. Adam Pash at Lifehacker gets it and posted a great article on their site earlier today. We’re huge fans of Lifehacker and to see an article posted on the front page of one of our favorite tech sites is humbling. Adam wrote an excellent guide to backing up with CrashPlan. He explains important concepts, takes you through the setup process, and covers your options in a clear and easy to understand way. He even emphasizes the importance of multi-destination backup, something that is often overlooked but is integral for a true backup plan. We think it’s a great read for everyone, but especially if you’re looking for a backup solution.

Thanks to the Reddit community for putting backup at the forefront today and thanks to our customers for trusting us to protect your digital valuables.

Thursday, March 31st is “World Backup Day” and no, it’s not a coincidence that it’s the day before April Fool’s Day – a day notorious for pranks that can go wrong and instantly destroy hard drives and valuable files.

Therefore, in honor of World Backup Day and to the justification of data worldwide, we at CrashPlan are giving away a 1-year unlimited subscription of CrashPlan to 5 (five) lucky Twitter followers.

To enter, simply follow the CrashPlan Twitter handle (@crashplan) and tweet the following message from your personal Twitter account on Thursday, March 31, 2011:

I’m celebrating #WorldBackupDay by backing up my personal and business data with @CrashPlan! How are you celebrating @WorldBackUpDay?

Our contest starts at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Thursday, March 31, 2011 and ends on Thursday, March 31, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. 5 (five) winners will be chosen at random and notified via Twitter.

Already have a CrashPlan subscription? We can extend your current account or you can pass your winnings along to a friend. Only one entry per Twitter handle, please.

Have a data backup plan before it’s too late. Support World Backup Day by not only entering into our Twitter giveaway, but also joining in the World Backup Day conversation by following the #WorldBackupDay Twitter hash tag.

Keep you data protected on March 31, 2011 and every day with CrashPlan.

Now your purchase of CrashPlan+ will not only help you (and the safety of your personal data), but also aid the relief efforts in Japan.

To offer financial support to those in need overseas, Code 42 Software, makers of CrashPlan+, will donate 10% of all CrashPlan+ sales to the American Red Cross (through April 15^th).

If you would like to donate to directly to the cause, please visit the Red Cross website.

One of our main objectives in the design for CrashPlan is for it to be simple and easy to use. This is often very challenging, given that different users prefer different levels of control and have different strategies for their backup plan. Whenever we contemplate adding new features or settings, we prefer to err on the side of simplicity. When we added the Backup Sets feature, for example, we tried to consider the needs of the advanced users and weigh that against possible confusion for basic users. We think we arrived a good solution, but we are always looking for ways to improve it.

But since we are a bunch of nerds ourselves, we still wanted to find ways to satisfy our more advanced users. So we’ve included some of the more complex/advanced features in a command-line interface (CLI). These are mostly designed for our support team so they can make changes and diagnose problems, but some of them are more widely useful. You can pause your backup for any desired amount of time, manually initiate a scan for changed files, and a few other gems.

Before I tell you how to get to it, be aware that you can muck things up with the CLI. Much like the Terminal, you shouldn’t be using it if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Now that you’ve been suitably warned…you can get to the CLI by launching the CrashPlan application and double-clicking on the house image in the upper-right corner of the main window. The CLI window will open, along with a list of supported commands.

For detailed information on the CLI, see this article on our support site.

Tonight we released version 3.0.3 of CrashPlan via automatic update. If you’re already a CrashPlan user, you’ll have the newer version the next time you launch the application.

A Buried Gem

Along with a host of minor tweaks and bug-fixes, version 3.0.3 includes a significant performance upgrade to CrashPlan’s core deduplication engine. Deduplication is the technique of examining a file’s content, down to the block level, to determine which parts of it have changed since the last backup. This is what enables CrashPlan to upload just the parts of a file that have actually changed, saving huge amounts of time and storage space. One of the challenges of deduplication is that it requires the computer to do a lot of calculations to actually determine what’s changed. The ‘under the hood’ improvements we introduced in version 3.0.3 have increased the performance of the dededuplication engine by a factor of 3-5x. This translates to lower load on your processor, and increased backup speed in most situations.

Sophisticated data deduplication is one of the things that sets CrashPlan apart from other backup systems. And now with the advancements we’ve incorporated in version 3.0.3, the advantage is even greater.

Complete release notes on CrashPlan version 3.0.3 can be found here.

In effort to always provide our customers with the latest and greatest in data backup capabilities, CrashPlan has automatically upgraded all users with the following enhancements:

Version: 3.0.1

• Google Checkout – By popular request, we have reinstated Google checkout for seed services and 1, 2, 3 and 4-year subscriptions.
• Faster restores – The backup destination’s CPU settings no longer govern how fast you can restore.
• Welcome email – New CrashPlan users now receive a welcome email message that shows how to start the backup process.
• Printable support articles – Create your own CrashPlan support PDFs using the Print Page option on the support navigation menu.

Version: 3.0

• Backup sets in CrashPlan+ – Specify which files to which locations and with what settings!
• Detection of new computers and drives to your account – When you log into an existing account from a new computer you now have the option to have that computer adopt an existing one, allowing you to avoid the lengthy initial backup process from your old computer’s backup archive.
• Bundled CrashPlan Central destinations with CrashPlan+ – CrashPlan+ is now a subscription that you renew, with monthly and yearly subscriptions available.
• Flexible backup scheduling – If you want your backups to take place at scheduled times, in addition to specifying the time of day for backing up, you can now specify the days of the week when CrashPlan should backup.
• License transfers – Wanting to give CrashPlan+ as a gift? You can now transfer licenses between computers and users.

As always, we will keep you informed on the latest release updates via our Twitter, Facebook, and other social media accounts, as well as through email.

Here at Code 42, home of the universe’s greatest backup software, CrashPlan, we are always looking for more and better ways to connect with our users. So today, we’re happy to launch the CrashPlan blog, aka ‘Life, the Universe and Backup‘. Our goal is, not surprisingly, to share news and information about CrashPlan, but more importantly to hear from you about how we can improve our products, services and our company.

True to its name, this blog will be an  informal place where we talk about a wide range of subjects near to our heart, including, but not limited to backup. We hope you’ll visit regularly and join in the conversations. Tell us what you’d like to see covered on the blog.

Upcoming Topics

• Unlimited online backup – how we can do it
• The Secret of the Universe – Free backup software for everyone
• All about backup speed
• Ascertaining the location of your towel
• Backing up laptops – CrashPlan’s secret weapon
• How our enterprise business (CrashPlan PRO) strengthens our consumer products (and vice versa).

From everyone at Code 42/CrashPlan, thank you for your continued support.