It's been four months since our last release and we have been very busy. Lots of new features, enhancements to existing features and a few minor bug fixes are included in this release.

This is a free upgrade for customers who have purchased in the last two years.

We're really excited about this one. We've completely reorganized how destinations look and feel when you're setting them up. We hope you agree that it's far more intuitive and easier to understand than it was before. Destinations are now divided into 4 categories:

• Friends - These are people you trust to store your encrypted data (Don't tell them it's encrypted, they'll feel more special). When you start or stop backing up to a friend, this is the tab to use. We've added a new backup code & social network feature to make it even easier to invite friends!
• Computers - These are your computers. Your laptop to your desktop. Your office computer to your home. All your computers are possible destinations and they're listed here.
• Disk - Any local folder / disk that's attached. This feature isn't quite done yet, we hope to have it out in next month or two but we wanted to show you where it would be and also to illustrate the flexibility of our new UI.
• Online - Some of you don't have other computers or don't want to hassle with managing your own backup network. That's where online comes in. You've always been able to use us, and you still can. But it's not about us. CrashPlan has always been about destinations you know and trust. Maybe you're in Oklahoma and would like to send your data to a qualified provider who you know is reliable. Or perhaps you're across the pond in London. If you're interested in being a provider, drop our sales folks a note.

For you data heroes providing backup to your friends - it's never been easier to invite others to back up to you. We now support existing address books on Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and MSN Mail.

Offer backup to each other? Same story, just a few clicks to send offers to 10 people.

Want to mooch backup destinations off your friends? Again, super-easy! Who said these social networks don't pay off?

How do you get that special someone's digits? Offer them your backup code, of course. Nothing says, “Nerds do backup better,” than your CrashPlan backup code.

But seriously… our new secure backup codes make establishing backup between any two computers a quick one step process. Any computer (A) can have a unique code. Use that code on any other computer to start backing up to “A”. Did your code get in the wrong hands? No worries, you can change it with a click.

Imagine you've backed up 200GB across town to a friend or your office. Next, imagine losing a drive, laptop, etc. Now, it's faster than ever to do a restore from a friend:

1. Head over to your friend's house with USB/Firewire drive.
2. Attach drive and open up CrashPlan.
3. Click Friends, click your name, click Guest Restore.
4. Type in your password and restore directly to the disk!

Sure, you could do it over the Internet or LAN, but that would be slower than direct to disk.

How do you make the fastest online backup restore even better? Offer web access to your files, of course! If you are a CrashPlan Central subscriber with a CrashPlan+ (formerly PRO) license, you can remotely access your backups from anywhere using the CrashPlan Central tab in your online account.

Really fun demonstration:

1. Head over to coffee shop with a buddy.
2. Whip out your iPhone and log into your account, pick a single file to restore, maybe a picture, Excel, Word, PDF, even a movie.
3. Press Restore and presto! You're looking at that file on your iPhone!

CrashPlan archives have been upgraded to a new format to allow for several new features:

• Improved archive portability - This will help in identifying who owns the data in an archive that has been moved to a new location. This sets the stage for backing up directly to an attached disk and bringing it over to a friend's house.
• Advanced healing techniques - One of the really cool features we have is that backup destinations verify that the backups it manages are in good working order. We've added a bunch of new checks and healing methods to automatically correct discovered problems. If CrashPlan finds any issues, you'll get an alert.
• Archives are now divided into 4GB chunks - We do this so you can back up onto FAT32 drives. Why would you care? Well, a lot of USB drive manufacturers ship with that disk format and files cannot be larger than 4GB. This would break large backups unless you reformatted your disk. Some of our users don't want to reformat as FAT32 works with both PC, Mac and Linux. Now you don't have to!

We made many changes to improve performance. This release is about 400% faster using about 30% less CPU. Our engine currently tops out at approximately 50MB/sec on your average laptop. (Servers go faster.)

• Data de-duplication part of engine now tunes itself automatically
• Added new threading features to backup engine to better leverage quad core CPUs
• Provided specific control of CPU intensive features via advanced backup settings (Encryption, Compression, etc.)
• Improved efficiency when backing up minor changes in very large files
• Improved message efficiency in network layer for network speed improvements

We now support German, French, Japanese, Spanish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Languages are automatically selected, but you can override that choice in settings if you like.

Thinking about running open Solaris on your laptop? Now you have a backup solution. :)

Since the beginning we've had two versions of our product: CrashPlan and CrashPlan PRO. CrashPlan PRO was for professionals, business users, folks who needed more serious features beyond basic backup. Once we launched our PRO Server product for businesses that want onsite, offsite and online backup for 10+ computers, things got a little confusing. “I have CrashPlan PRO” you'd say and we'd scratch our heads wondering which product you were using. To keep things simple, we've renamed the consumer version of CrashPlan PRO (Green one) to CrashPlan+ (Plus). No features were changed, nothing lost, just a minor name change.

Now when you ask for support, and you say “PRO” we'll know you're talking about our business product.

• Backup:Scan - Added Scan button, so you can scan at any time if you wish. It will scan even if you're not scheduled to run if you manually request it.
• Engine - Better management of handling file backup to do items when volumes where they are located are not present or removed while backup is in progress.
• Engine - New items in scheduled file to do list is now flushed to disk on shutdown. This means files that changed as you were shutting down are backed up after reboot.
• Backup archives now start with “cp” instead of ”~”
• Logging - Improved verbosity in some areas, reduced in others, improvements all around.
• I/O - Changes made to allow Macs to sleep more reliably.

• Restore file search - Search results are now displayed first instead of last.

• Friend - No longer displays last backup in Friend tab for specific friend. Use inbound backup panel instead.

• Backup:Inbound Backup - Simplified this greatly. Now when you disable incoming backup, all dependencies are cleaned up automatically greatly simplifying administration.
• Backup:Advanced - You may now turn off compression & encryption in your backups if you wish. This can greatly speed up initial backups where speed is more important than compression or security.
• Language may now be selected.
• Settings - We had so many new features, we had to reorganize settings a bit to make room. Where a specific setting is located should be even more intuitive. The “advanced” concept now exists underneath various categories instead of a broad “advanced” category.
• Network - Bandwidth limits may now be specified for greater than 999kbps and less than unlimited.

• Deactivation - “Please wait…” animation now displays when deactivating computers.

• New web restore feature for CrashPlan PRO users
• Added ability to opt out of our mailing list proactively

• Backup source would not show nice green check-mark when complete
• Changing nickname on website might not be propagated to client
• Better backup error notification for rare & odd situations
• Better filtering of user inputs related to account & computer names
• Switching locales could result in history not displaying
• Advanced setting changes could fail to enable save button
• Restore - You may no longer search while a search is already in progress
• Private Data Password - Enabling and disabling on computer A could leave confusing message on computer B
• Network layer - Forcing a connect works more reliably for users testing rare network conditions
• Archive Validation - User would notice slowdown if archive was being validated and they were present
• Payment History bug fixed where amounts could be inaccurate (Invoices are accurate. This only affected history.)

• Fixed rare situation where you could get stuck changing the backup location for a friend.
• Fixed display issue when next backup was scheduled to occur.
• Tray icon could fail to display info on computer.
• Windows registry is no longer used for anything.
• VSS / Volume Shadow Service - Open files now supported on XP, Server 2003, Vista, and more!
• Real-time file watcher now ignores volumes we're not backing up.
• ntuser.dat is now excluded from backup.

• Now exclude /sys, /dev, and /proc for novice users

• Fixed situation where folder is pretending to be a disk in /Volumes and convinces PRO Client drive is present