If you missed it, Lifehacker had a great little interview with Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote. This is a gem:

I’m going to tell you the best advice I’ve ever given: a friend of mine was sad that he didn’t have a girlfriend, so I told him, “You know how when you first walk into your house, the first thing you see is that bookcase by the door?”
And he said, “Uh huh.”
And I said, “And how, on that bookcase you have your boxed set of all the old Star Trek movies on VHS?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
And I said, “And how, since you have them lined up in chronological order, the art on the spines of the tapes comes together to form a picture of the USS Enterprise?”
And he said, “Right.”

“Mix up those tapes.”

He was married a year later.

To me, the applicable lesson for business is: if you want to achieve a radical goal, be willing to make a change that disturbs you.

We may be in the depths of a Minnesota winter, but positive reactions to CrashPlan make us feel all warm and cozy inside! According to PC Advisor and eWeek, CrashPlan is a valuable service for your Mac or PC. Check out these quotes:

PC Advisor: Top 20 cloud storage services: The great hard drive in the sky

“CrashPlan’s main appeal lies in the degree of control it allows users to exert over their backups. With this service, you can manage everything from how often CrashPlan

checks for new file versions (from once a minute to once a day) to how frequently the service purges deleted files.

eWeek: Hollywood Actors Kutcher, Gad channel Jobs, Wozniak at Macworld 2013

eWeek included CrashPlan as a great exhibitor at Macworld 2013 with an image of this year’s booth!

“…CrashPlan is now offering unlimited cloud and on-site storage backup with a simple-to-understand user interface and demonstrated the service at the show.”

As we get more sunlight every day, check back for more news about CrashPlan!

Want to stay on top of all the latest app technology? Mashable makes it easy with their list of 8 Apps You Don’t Want to Miss. You can read the complete list over on their techs-savvy site, but here are a few that have caught the attention of the Code 42 team.

• THX Tune-up. We love anything that helps make every day technology easier to use. Designed to help ease the tedious task of setting up a home theater system, the THX tune-up app offers users step-by-step instructions on how to set up a television’s aspect ratio, brightness, contrast, color, and tint. Additionally, it can help you set up your surround system so you can enjoy movies at home just as you would in the movie theater.
• GrubTonight. If you’re looking to make new friends or casually extend your business network, then you’re going to love the GrubTonight app. This app brings people together over drinks and casual dinners in cities across the country. GrubTonight lets you reserve a space at a group dinner and keep in touch with your new friends long after the dessert course.
• Foursquare for Business. Ever since Foursquare launched in 2009, savvy businesses have been trying to use the location-based social networking platform to enhance their presence in the realm of mobile devices. Now it’s easy! The Foursquare for Business app allows business owners to view their locations’ recent check-ins, learn more about their clientele, easily add Foursquare specials, and cross promote on Facebook and Twitter.
• Facebook for iOS.  It seems like Facebook rolls out a new update for their iOS app every week, but this latest update is big news. Users of the Facebook iOS app can now record and share videos from the app, as well as send voice messages to members of their social network. These latest developments may be Facebook’s answer to the new Vine video recording and sharing app from Vine Labs, Inc.

While all of these apps are great, we think our mobile apps are pretty cool, too. With the CrashPlan suite of mobile apps, you can quickly and easily access all of your protected content from any mobile device. Better yet, they’re free!

Learn more about our convenient and easy to use mobile apps, available for the enterprise (CrashPlan PROe), small businesses (CrashPlan PRO) and personal use (CrashPlan+). All three are supported on iOS, Windows Phone and Android (including Kindle Fire).

With the latest CrashPlan PROe release, version 3.5, it is now even easier to manage your enterprise backup solution. What’s new to our most recent enterprise offering? We listened to your feedback and implemented the following upgrades in this release:

• User-based licensing delivers more value, and makes it easier for you to manage all users and devices.
• Proactive license management gives you better visibility into usage.
• Automated seeding of data to your own private cloud simplifies and speeds up initial backups.
• Evaluation user accounts bypass procurement delays to protect data for new users.

See all of the new features in the CrashPlan PROe 3.5 release notes. Be sure to reap all the enterprise backup benefits by upgrading today!

It’s a beautiful day in San Francisco and the annual Macworld conference is about to get underway. The cloud wranglers are putting the finishing touches on the booth, and we’re looking forward to talking to all you when the show opens.

CrashPlan is front and center in the main hall (booth #502) and the CrashPlan PROe team is out in force at the MacIT conference up on the third floor.

We’d love to see you if you’re out for the show! Come chat with our backup experts, get some great tips on protecting your digital life, and register for our awesome prize drawing. (We’re giving away a bunch of those super-cool Lytro cameras.)

Brian Bispala, Code 42 co-founder and head of engineering, checks out the booth before the show opens.

Wanting to learn more about CrashPlan PROe enterprise backup software in a more hands-on environment? Look no further! We have several Sysadmin 3-day classroom training sessions scheduled throughout 2013 and are waiting for you to register.

Join our team for live instruction at our Minneapolis headquarters as we cover everything you need to effectively deploy, maintain and support PROe in your organization.

What’s on the agenda, you ask?

• The principles behind CrashPlan PROe, including data/information security and scalability
• How to install and configure PROe Server
• How to complete recommended operations, including: seeding, migrating backup archives, doing database dumps
• How to manage user roles and permissions and control user access
• How to integrate PROe with an existing LDAP-based directory services infrastructure
• How to customize PROe Client installers for deployment via desktop management systems
• How to effectively maintain and support CrashPlan PROe

The next Sysadmin 3-day is scheduled for March 26, 2013, leaving you plenty of time to try a free 30-day CrashPlan PROe evaluation.

For the complete schedule of classroom training sessions, webinar and tech forums, visit the PROe learning and events page.

So what exactly is Big Data and how does it impact a business?

The basics of Big Data can be boiled down to four main components, affectionately know as the “4 Vs of Big Data.” Having a general understanding of the 4 Vs is crucial to avoiding misconceptions about Big Data.

The 4 Vs of Big Data:

1. Volume – It’s no surprise the first component of Big Data is the amount of data a business needs to store. Experts consider Big Data to be the massive volume of both structured (database) and unstructured (native files, like Microsoft Word, Excel, Keynote, Pages, etc.) data existing at any given time across an enterprise. This volume of data is cumbersome, difficult to manage and difficult to process using traditional database and software methods.
2. Velocity – Velocity refers to how frequently a company creates or updates data, and how long it sits until it is put to use. The future of Big Data relies heavily on this component as the rate at which data is constantly updated determines the utility of sending Big Data to the Cloud.
3. Variety – The term “Big Data” encompasses an assortment of different data and file types, including text strings, documents of all types, audio and video files, social media feeds, and form data. In fact, it’s not the run-of-the-mill files stored by a business that are responsible for the rise of Big Data; this honor belongs to social media, according to Mashable’s “Top 5 Myths About Big Data” article. The influx of user content published to sites like Facebook and Twitter requires that the storage capacity of these social platforms be constantly expanded.
4. Veracity – In order for organizations to put their trust in Big Data and be confident with its integrity within the cloud, Big Data storage must be extremely secure, and protected against malware and other external threats. Also, the effects of Big Data on productivity and growth within a company require that decision-making executives see the value of cloud-based storage. Additionally, reliability must be proven in terms of the functionality of cloud-based storage.

Big Data will likely continue to be a topic of discussion for some time to come. There is a lot to learn about the future of information storage, and having a general understanding of Big Data is an important first step to avoid becoming overwhelmed by this new theme in tech. How has your company taken steps toward managing its Big Data?

Need to recover your CrashPlan PROe server or move it to new hardware? This step-by-step guide shows how easy it is to bring your existing server up on new hardware:

This is a companion to the “Recovering or Moving your PROe Server” page, describing how to recover your system if you lose the machine on which you installed the PROe Server.

In need of additional enterprise backup assistance? Find more on the CrashPlan PROe support page.