CrashPlan = 1000+ diggs!

Well it finally happened and much sooner than I ever anticipated. CrashPlan, our new backup product got Dugg by none other than Kevin Rose.

First off, I want to make clear that we are in no way associated with Kevin, Digg or any of their financiers. This was an honest to goodness commercially unbiased digg by Mr. Rose.

Secondly, CrashPlan is very advanced backup – it does encryption, incrementals, versioning and even byte pattern analysis to ensure only non-duplicated data gets backedup. Our story – backup should be brain dead simple and you should be able to use any number of machines to provide any combination of onsite/offsite backup you need without paying monthly service fees.

So back to being dugg. The receiving end of the Digg effect is an extremely exciting rollercoaster ride of phone calls to friends laced with website operations support. I was notified that we were on the front page of Digg via email yesterday morning. By 3:00 PM our site finally succumbed to the traffic. The Code 42 team hastily added in volume measures that we weren’t expecting to have to put in for another 6 months.

Then the emails started appearing from magazine writers requesting evaluation copies of the product for review – of course right as our site goes offline! Getting Dugg is like planning a party for your friends in your college dorm, then somebody yells ‘Free Beer!’ and the entire college shows up.

We did manage to keep up a maintenance sign during the downtime and of course our volume fixes went in right as the digg effect was subsiding. Good news is we don’t have to worry about load testing the website anymore!

Macworld 2007 and Crashplan

The Code 42 team launched our latest software product, Crashplan, at Macworld 2007 and it went better than any of us could imagine.

People were lining up to buy and were amazingly enthusiastic. The product seems to have the right combination of idea, timing and execution. Now the hard part – we need to keep all of these customers happy and supported!

FDT and Xray

Quick post entry before I get back to the grind – big product review tomorrow! I’ve been using two new tools in my development that I thought I’d share – FDT and XRAY!