Announcing New, Lower Pricing for Recurring Basecamp Backups

We heard it loud and clear from many of our customers that we hadn’t gotten our pricing quite right yet. We talked in detail to some industry experts, a number of current customers as well as lots of people who tried out our products but didn’t sign up for a paid plan and we think we have a set of prices for our monthly recurring plans that are in line with the service that is being offered. All new customers will be given these new prices, and all of our existing customers will also get the new pricing on all upcoming bills. Check it out and let us know what you think:

Automate Basecamp XML and HTML Exports for Free

We have recently been testing our new HTML export functionality for Basecamp data with our higher level plans. It was met with a lot of enthusiasm from our customers that were on those plans. We’ve now completed rolling that out to all of the plans including our free trial and our always free plan. What this means is that anyone can automate the export of all Basecamp data from your account and get it in both XML and HTML formats and have it delivered directly to you. Are you sick of going in to your Basecamp account when you think about doing a backup of your data? Are you afraid you might forget to do a backup that you might need? Do you wish you could request a data export in both html and xml and not have to choose one or the other? Would you rather just have your data delivered to your computer and not have to go and download something after it has run? Well our automated data export functionality does all of that for you. We even have plans that will get all of your Files and Writeboards at the same time.

Launch Party

It wasn't quite the ship party like I was used to in my days at Microsoft or Sun Microsystems, but we were determined to celebrate the launch of Centripetal Retrieve. We headed to the local Foster's Freeze and had hot fudge sundaes!

HTML Export

As a Basecamp users you are able to export all of your data in either XML or HTML formats. These don’t include files or Writeboards and there is no way to automate the scheduling of the exports. With Centripetal Software you are able to automate the backups as well as get copies of all files and Writeboards. We also give you all of your data in XML format, but until today we did not offer the HTML export capability. We now have that functionality we’ll be rolling it out to most of the plans shortly. The HTML files are similar to the export you can get from Basecamp, but also include html pages for files and Writeboards on a per project basis.

Weekly Release

This weeks release adds in some long overdue user preference settings. Previously we sent email messages for everything that happens to a user’s account, but with this release we’ve added in capabilities for the user to control whether or not they should receive different notification messages. In order to update your email preferences simply log in to the application and click on “Account” link on the top of the screen. This will take you to our Account Settings screen which allows you to see and update certain information.

More Dropbox Benefits

Our integration with Dropbox has proven to be a very popular feature. More than 90% of our customers use Dropbox to have their Basecamp files, writeboards and data delivered to them. There are plenty of reasons for this from a customer perspective: Dropbox is drop dead simple to use and it makes getting your Basecamp backup just as simple. They provide syncing between all of your devices as well as online backup of them all so you will have multiple copies of all your Basecamp information. All of your data and files stored online in Dropbox are encrypted which addresses many of the potential security threats. With our latest release Basecamp backups are also versioned using Dropbox’s versioning system, so if the backup engine pulls the same file multiple times from your Basecamp account across different backups that file will be versioned in Dropbox.

There’s one other cool feature that Dropbox provides that many FTP servers do not: Internationalization. For many of our customers, English isn’t their first language, nor is it the language that they work in with their customers. This means that they are naming files and data in different languages and, many what that does is forces applications like Centripetal Retrieve to use UTF8 character sets to handle those file names. The problem comes when we try to store those file names to FTP servers that do not support UTF8 (which surprisingly many don’t). What you end up with is a bunch of gibberish for the file name, and it is unreadable in any language. Dropbox fully supports all of the international character sets that we test with and so our customers that use Dropbox to receive their Basecamp backups are ensured to have their file names stored correctly. For FTP there are no issues with the content of the files, only with the file names because the FTP server never attempts to do any conversion on the file contents only on the name of the file.

Top threats to cloud computing? - Data Loss

The Cloud Security Alliance, a group that focuses on security in cloud computing, released a paper recently titled "Top threats to Cloud Computing". Of the 7 threats that they discussed, #5 was most interesting to us and is titled "Data Loss or Leakage". This is something particularly close to our minds as it is what we are working on helping to alleviate. In their report they state:

There are many ways to compromise data. Deletion or alteration of records without a backup of the original content is an obvious example. Unlinking a record from a larger context may render it unrecoverable, as can storage on unreliable media. Loss of an encoding key may result in effective destruction. Finally, unauthorized parties must be prevented
from gaining access to sensitive data.

The threat of data compromise increases in the cloud, due to the number of and interactions between risks and challenges which are either unique to cloud, or more dangerous because of the architectural or operational characteristics of the cloud environment.

It is extremely important for businesses that are beginning to adopt or already have adopted Cloud applications into their core business to ensure that they are taking the threat of data loss seriously. Businesses need to be sure that they maintain local copies of their critical business data that is stored in these cloud applications.

Read the full Cloud Security Alliance paper.