Last week our CEO (Matthew Dornquast) and our director of west coast sales (Bob Casserly) flew to San Francisco for a meeting with a large CrashPlan PROe customer. It was an important technical meeting, with several key people from engineering and management.

Their presentation, which had been refined during the flight out, along with supporting PDFs and video clips, were on Bob’s MacBook Pro. Everything was ready to go.

Or so they thought. Two hours before the meeting, while gathering his gear to leave the hotel room, Bob accidentally dropped his MacBook, which slammed hard onto the granite tiled floor.

It made a sound no one wants to hear.

Opening the lid, Bob saw this -

And on the screen…nothing.

The fall had damaged the hard drive, so the computer would not start up. Ninety minutes before the meeting all the supporting materials were inaccessible.

Fortunately, Bob is diligent about backing up his data. Or more accurately, CrashPlan is diligent (Bob installed CrashPlan on his computer when he bought it last year, and he hasn’t really thought about it since.) But thanks to CrashPlan’s continuous backup feature, the latest changes Bob and Matthew were making to the presentation during the flight had already been automatically backed up while Bob was connected to WiFi in the hotel. He just logged into his CrashPlan account online using Matthew’s computer and restored all the files in minutes.

Bacon saved, Bob and Matthew had the documents they needed (along with a great story to tell) in time for the meeting.

That’s the beauty of CrashPlan – set it and forget it. When you need it, it’s there!

After a fire blazed through the Necker Island home of Virgin Group’s chairman, Richard Branson, the mogul suddenly faced a loss of fifteen years worth of handwritten notes that he was preparing to use for an upcoming memoir.

Although Branson and 20 other individuals who were in the home at the time safely survived the fire and are now safe, the loss of his book material was devastating.

A representative for Branson said, “The biggest disappointment is that Richard was well through his new book. It was sitting on top of about 10 years of notebooks, about 40 of them in total. He’s now just hoping his memory is still intact as he’s going to need it – and he plans to buy a fireproof vault.”

In light of this unfortunate event, we have to ask ourselves, and Mr. Branson as well, what about a fault-proof backup in addition to a fireproof vault?

Accidents happen. And in the case of Richard Branson, this accident resulted in the loss of years worth of effort. Although Branson was able to find the bright side of the situation, noting that, “There’s a lot of damage but we’ll create something even more special out of the ruins,” we at Code 42 still feel for his loss.

We only wish that we could protect non-digital files as easily as we protect digital ones. But here’s a tip from our own “ink-on-paper” guy (Mike Evangelist, Director of Marketing):  When I write anything that I really value and would dread losing, I scan it with my Neatworks scanner, so I have a digital backup, which is then protected by CrashPlan, of course.

To all of our users who are backing up with us: we are grateful that you have chosen CrashPlan to protect your data.