Did you know the CrashPlan Family Plan allows you to back up 2-10 computers? Perfect for protecting computers for your whole family.

And thanks to our friends at SheKnows.com, you have a chance to win a free 1-year Family subscription to CrashPlan+. Sharing valuable information about a range of topics including beauty, career, parenting and pets, SheKnows.com is one of the top 10 women-focused sites on the web.

Click here to enter for this awesome opportunity to win a full year of free CrashPlan+for your entire family!

The CrashPlan+ features list for its online and offsite backup is quite impressive: automatic backup, unlimited file size, the ability to back up attached drives, backup sets… we could go on.

While everyone has their favorites, we asked our fans to share what they liked best with us.

Below is a snapshot of the poll from the CrashPlan Facebook fan page. As you can see, our fans love the option to backup locally as well as online to CrashPlan Central; it’s the clear winner in this poll. Honorable mentions include CrashPlan’s unlimited storage capabilities and the cross-platform feature.

The winners:

• CrashPlan Central and local backup: 27 percent
• Available for Mac, Windows, Linux and Solaris: 21 percent
• Unlimited storage and no bandwidth limits: 18 percent
• Backup sets: 11 percent
• Enhanced 448-bit encryption: 7 percent

• The CrashPlan support team
• Realtime backup
• Backup of network drive
• Backed up file versioning
• Seed service

 

What is your favorite CrashPlan feature? Share it with us in the comment section below.

How-To Geek recently answered a reader inquiry about cloud-based backup solutions for backing up to other computers, remote locations and removable media. CrashPlan+ is a perfect fit!

In the response, “Where Can I Find a Backup Solution That Scales Well”, How-To Geek points out that CrashPlan+ is the best option for someone who wants multiple backup destinations in one package. With the ability to back up online to CrashPlan Central as well as offsite to computers belong to friends and family, CrashPlan+ provides the solution to all the reader’s needs.

Check out the review for yourself at How-To Geek.

Backing up computers has been a well-established practice for decades. Despite the explosion of online backup over the last decade (IDC projects the market for online backup services to grow to $715 million by 2011), lower hardware and software costs, and easeir to use solutions, many myths and misperceptions stemming back from those early days remain, and unfortunately prevent people from making smart choices regarding backup.

So to set the record straight we will examine the top six current myths – good, bad, and bogus – about online backup.

• Synchronization is backup. We love sync, but that’s not backup. Synchronization automatically replicates your changes (and mistakes!) to all locations. Imagine you were retouching a photo, cropped it, and saved it. Months later, you wished you could undo that crop; you’re out of luck. Your original is gone as it was synchronized.
• All online backup providers are about the same. All backup solutions are not created equal. The ability to back up external drives and what the solution does with your deleted files are just two of the many differences which can, if unbeknownst to you, can cost you important files.
• Initial online backup takes forever. While this can seem that way for many online backup services, options such as CrashPlan offer customers the ability to seed their backup cloud by shipping a drive overnight to their data centers. This can shave weeks off your initial backup time.
• It takes weeks to get your files back. When you’ve lost everything, you want your files back in a hurry, waiting weeks for your files is not uncommon. However, solutions such as CrashPlan offer the option to overnight your data to you for a small fee if you’ve lost everything. Better still, follow point #6 below and you’ll have a copy nearby for free.
• Online backup is expensive. $5/month/computer can really add up, especially with most households having several computers. Four computers (his, hers, child laptop and media server) cost nearly $250/year. However, CrashPlan, for example, solves this by offering a family plan that provides unlimited storage for up to 10 computers for as low as $6/mo.
• Online backup is enough backups. Online backup is better than nothing, but putting all your files and photos in one basket is risky, as we learned from our CEO Matthew Dornquast in a recent video. Two destinations are infinitely better than one, so have backup onsite and offsite. That’s why CrashPlan was the first to offer multi-destination backups, allowing you to have all of your data in as many locations as you need.

The team here at Code 42 could accurately be described as geeky. Many desks display SciFi collectibles of various flavors, with Star Trek, Star Wars, Tron and Harry Potter currently dominating. Typical lunch conversations range from the latest advances in development tools to debating the relative merits of UFO vs Red Dwarf. Everyone has seen every episode of ‘The IT Crowd’. You get the idea.

But even knowing this, you cannot imagine the wave of nerd-pride that swept the office about a year ago when we learned that none other than Neil Gaiman chose CrashPlan to protect his computers.

Our minds boggled at the thought of CrashPlan protecting the files that probably included originals of some of our favorite graphic novels, books and movies.* “Who knows?” we posited. “At this very moment it could be backing up the latest revisions for a sequel to American Gods or Coraline!” No doubt about it; we were proud.

And then we went back to our regular routine of protecting everyone’s data and talking about why the old Doctor Who series is better than the new one (or vice versa).

This ritual was interrupted last month when we learned, via Twitter, that Neil had lost his computer.

On a trip with his daughter visiting college campuses, Neil had fallen asleep mid-flight and forgot to remove his MacBook Air from his seatback’s pocket. By the time he had returned home and realized his Mac was missing, the airline’s lost-and-found office had closed. When he called back in the morning, the Mac was still missing.

In full-on panic mode, Neil contacted the Code 42 Support team. He had been working on a few confidential pieces that he hadn’t emailed to anyone. In Neil’s mind, they were potentially not backed up. CrashPlan to the rescue!

Not only did CrashPlan have backups of everything he did up until he got on the plane, CrashPlan also retrieved his data in time for an important upcoming presentation.

 

“I cannot speak highly enough for the guys at CrashPlan. They were absolutely fantastic. The knowledge that I do not lose things any more makes me ridiculously happy.” – Neil Gaiman

 

This, of course, is what CrashPlan was designed to do, so we were not surprised. But we can’t deny our delight when we saw Neil’s tweet (and blushing a bit) about the whole affair…

Thanks Neil. We’re proud to have been part of the plan!

 

*For those not familiar with Neil’s prolific output, here’s the Wikipedia entry for his extensive bibliography

The Wall Street Journal’s Katherine Boehret has reviewed CrashPlan and CrashPlan+ for her weekly column, The Digital Solution. The article, titled “For Backup, You’ve Got a Friend, Family or Cloud,” is featured in today’s Wall Street Journal and AllThingsD.com.

In her detailed review, Boehret describes her out of the box experience with CrashPlan and discusses in detail features such as cross-platform abilities, multi-destination backup, mobile apps, backup status notifications and the seeding and Restore to Your Door Services.

The print version of the article appears in today’s Wall Street Journal and online versions are available at wsj.com or AllThingsD.

There’s also a companion video review, available below.

CrashPlan is designed to work in the background, with default backup settings configured to trade speed for quiet, background operation. During your initial backup, however, you might decide that backup speed is be more important than staying out of your way.

Our latest video covers how to configure CrashPlan to back up faster by increasing the system resources CrashPlan is allowed to use.

For more information on changing your backup settings or how you can sign up for your free trial of CrashPlan backup software, visit http://crashplan.com

Popular YouTube tech personality and Revision 3 partner, NixiePixel, discusses “the good, bad and ugly of open source” on her new show, OS ALT.

The show’s first episode, Linux vs. Windows, tackles her favorite alternative for those using Microsoft Windows; Linux Mint. While we at Code 42 have no preference on operating systems (we support Mac, Windows, Solaris and Linux, after all), we did partner with Nixie to host a giveaway of a CrashPlan+ 1-year unlimited subscription. Watch and see how to enter:

The winners will be chosen this Friday, so be sure to enter soon!

Thanks to NixiePixel for using CrashPlan!