BackupAssist's Newsletter for December 2014
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Happy Holidays from BackupAssist!

It's only a week out from the Holidays! 

We sincerely want to thank all of our amazing BackupAssist users for making this a great year.

We hope everyone has a fantastic time off. Please fill-up with great food, give and receive even better gifts, while surrounded with plenty of friends and family.
The security of your data means a lot to us, and we appreciate your trust in our software.  We can't wait to help keep your data safe again next year!

Holiday support hours

Our team have worked hard this year and are looking forward to a well-deserved couple of days with friends and family.

For those who will require technical support over the Holiday period, we wish to advise that our support offices will be closed on the following days.

We hope this won't cause too much inconvenience.
US Office
Closed 24th, 25th & 31st of December 2014. 
Closed 1st January 2015
Australian Office
Closed 25th & 26th of December 2014
Closed 1st January 2015
All support services will be unavailable on the above days.

BackupAssist v8.2

In case you missed the announcement late last month, the latest feature-release of BackupAssist is here!

BackupAssist v8.2 offers a whole lot of awesome new features - in fact, it contains the most new features we've added to the software since the release of v8 back in June!

So what should you be most excited about? BitLocker encryption for System Protection backups to HDD!
Don't forget, to upgrade to v8.2 you'll need valid Upgrade Protection - you can
check your status here.

To see the full details on new features, check out the release notes here.
 
Upgrade to v8.2

For your interest

How to spot a true IT Pro - image.
This month, we put together a cheeky graphic that points out some grim realities of life as an IT professional.

If you work in IT, we hope you'll get a good chuckle out of this. If you do, please feel free to share it around! 

Of course, it could be a little too real...

Check it out.
Okay, so we're always yacking on about how important it is to back up critical data.

Unfortunately, all too many businesses still don't take backups seriously!

Here at BackupAssist, we could scream ourselves blue trying to warn people that backups matter, but instead this month we took a different tact - pointing out some equally crazy activities!

If you know someone whose business doesn't back up its servers, please feel free to question their sanity on our behalf.

These helpful examples will get you started.
As we mentioned earlier, the newest versions of BackupAssist includes the option for secure encryption on System Protection HDD backups using BitLocker.

This is great news, because it means your backups are even more secure!

However, because some of our customers may be unfamiliar with the BitLocker process, we took the time to point out on the blog this month that the initial encryption may take some time.

Thankfully, this only needs to be undertaken once - and you can estimate fairly reliably how long the encryption will take based on a number of factors.

What you need to know.

Making news

In case you missed the huge security brew-ha this month, Sony Pictures was the victim of a large-scale cyber attack. The attack was particularly nasty: designed to leak sensitive documents externally before destroying them internally.

Here's Ars Technica's take on the story.
Google has announced it will be helping an autism advocacy group conduct research into the condition. The group will be mapping the Human Genomes of 10,000 autistic people, and Google will provide the vast amounts of cloud storage necessary to hold all that data.

Read more here.
Lastly this month...

What's that, you say? You want to watch a French guy ride his dirt-bike on a roller coaster?

Well, okay then.

Find us on Facebook

Are you one of the 1.35 billion active Facebook users this planet now has?

Well, the next time you're browsing through baby-photos and cat-memes, we'd love it if you could take the time to connect with BackupAssist!

Plus, in the new year we'll be running some great comps for our community!

Join us.
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Our mailing address is:
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Box Hill Victoria 3128
AUSTRALIA