Backblaze has published a lengthly blog post were they carefully outline how they were almost acquired recently.

It’s no surprise that a company like Backblaze would be the target for acquisition. Their online backup service simply works, and their Mac client is a favorite amongst Apple fans. But just who were the suitors?

There’s always rumors of companies being purchased by others. Earlier this year, the Top Ten Rumors in Data Storage was posted by Enterprise Storage Forum.com. While Backblaze wasn’t mentioned as a target, EMC (the company behind Mozy) was listed as being bought by IBM, Oracle, Cisco, HP, or Intel! This industry loves buy-out rumors, I guess.

Who was looking to buy Backblaze? Was HP looking to replace their failed Upline service? Or perhaps Dell was looking to get into the online backup market? Remember: both HP and Dell were just involved in a bidding war over 3Par, a global provider of utility storage systems, with no clear winner at this time.

What do you think?

Carbonite, the online backup service provider based out of Boston, ranks #9 on the Inc 500. With 2009 revenue of $19.1 million
 and a three-year growth of 11,207.6%, Carbonite not only ranks #9 on the Inc 500, but also #1 in Boston and #1 in IT Services

Congrats to Carbonite and CEO David Friend!

Backblaze has announced version 1.5 of their online backup software with two major improvements:

1. Backup Of Individual Files Up To 9 GB
2. Transfer Backup State

Backup Of Individual Files Up To 9 GB

Previously Backblaze’s limit on individual file size was 4GB. While Backblaze offers unlimited online backup for only $5 / month, files over 4GB could not be backed up remotely. Now, however, with version 1.5, the new limit on a single file is 9GB. Who has files that are 9GB in size? Some photographers, videographers, and serious Outlook users. You’ll have to change a setting in your Backblaze software to take advantage of this increased individual file size limit:

Transfer Backup State

With any online backup service, replacing a computer or operating system is a big concern. Initial backups can take days, weeks or even months, and nobody wants to have to re-upload files that they’ve already transferred, which haven’t changed. With Backblaze’s Transfer Backup State, if you upgrade your O/S, bought a new computer to replace an old one, or bought a new computer to replace a dead one, and you’ve already downloaded your data from Backblaze, you can easily transfer the backup state:

Nice work, Backblaze! Go ahead and read our Backblaze review or download Backblaze for your computer now

If your company is running Microsoft SQL Server as its database server, and you’d like to get the databases backed-up online, without downtime, IBackup has the solution. Using existing capabilities of SQL Server’s API, and combining it with IBackup’s online backup scheduling software, you can have your database backups performed quickly, regularly, and reliably.

IBackup supports both full and transaction log style backups, so you’re in control of how backups are performed. In addition, when you set-up the backup schedule, you can be notified of the success or any failures of the backup.

This month only, you can get double the storage space when you sign-up, so a 35GB Enhanced Backup Plan, which supports SQL Server backups, now gives you 70GB of space, for $34.95 per month.

To get started, sign-up for IBackup, then download the Advanced Backup Plug-in.

The newest beta release of Jungle Disk, version 3.1, now includes public online disk sharing. Now, you can create new online disks and make them public, giving you the ability to share the data using a conventional URL.

This allows users to share files with others who many not necessarily be Jungle Disk users.

Since Jungle Disk uses Amazon S3 to store the data, public data accessed by external users will be charged to the creator’s account. Selecting Rackspace to host the files will not incur bandwidth charges, as Rackspace only charges for data stored, not bandwidth used.

Scott Gibson from Jungle Disk adds,

this feature is not designed to be leveraged as a CDN service. We do have limits in place to prevent excessive downloads and abusing the service.

Additional features added to beta release 3.1 includes the ability to change sub-account passwords and to be able to search through the list of servers (versus scrolling through them all).

Read our Jungle Disk review or download Jungle Disk now and try these features out for yourself.

Lately we’ve seen anti-virus companies partnering with online backup services to bundle the offerings into a single package. We’ve seen McAfee, CA and CyberDefender partner with Mozy, and Kaspersky team up with SugarSync.

But Trend Micro, a global leader in Internet content security, announced today a definitive agreement to purchase online storage and data synchronization company humyo.

humyo has established itself as a leading online storage provider with its easy-to-use, yet technically powerful solutions. Its customers benefit from automatic data synchronization of files to a secure online storage center across all their computers and Internet-connected devices. humyo enables superior organization of data and removes the manual effort of moving files from one PC to another, which is not only time-consuming but subject to potential data loss. Using a Web browser, consumers and small businesses can protect, access and share important files, anytime and anywhere. Optionally, customers can download a client, which synchronizes files across all their computers and enables access to humyo through an extra hard drive on their PC — even when offline.

humyo offers 100GB of online storage & backup for $6.99 / month, with each additional 100GB increment another $9.99 / month.

If you’re interested in a free account, you can get 10GB of online storage (5GB of media files, 5GB of other documents) free for life.

SafeCopy Backup has increased the allotted space for their backup subscriptions from 150 & 250 GB to 200 & 300 GB.

You can now get 200 GB of online backup space for $50 / year, regardless of how many computers (Windows, Mac or Linux) use the space. Or, for $75 / year, get 300 GB of backup space.

With SafeCopy Backup, you can backup whatever you’d like – even if its stored on a USB or NAS drive.

Read our full SafeCopy Backup review; if you’re ready to sign-up, save up to 10% using a SafeCopy coupon.

Nomadesk is offering an Eye-Fi Connect X2 4GB ($49 retail) for every new customer to either their 1-year Nomadesk Team Fileserver ($180), or a 2-year Personal Fileserver ($100) services.

Nomadesk and Eye-Fi have joined forces to offer an exclusive solution that automatically safeguards your photos to your Nomadesk Fileserver, even when you are miles away from your computer. We are the first to create an inclusive package providing instant backup for your precious memories, automatic synchronization to your computers and sharing, straight from your camera (video uploads will be supported soon)!

What is an Eye-Fi card?

The Eye-Fi card is the 1st wireless memory card. It looks, stores media, and fits into cameras just like a regular SDHC card. On top of that, the Eye-Fi card has built-in Wi-Fi that uses your wireless network to effortlessly transfer photos and videos.

Nomadesk allows you to share, synchronize, and backup your data to the cloud, and they give you mobile access to your files. With unlimited (within fair use) cloud storage and the ability to sync 3 computers on the personal account, and unlimited computers with the Team Fileserver account, Nomadesk is a great solution for collaboration.

Shortly after releasing version 2.0 of the MozyHome online backup service, Mozy today unveiled their online support community at community.mozy.com.

Within the Mozy support community, you can post a message to the message boards, where a Mozy support staff or experienced user will respond to you, read the Knowledge Base, browse through Documentation, or view Video Tutorials. You can also file and follow-up on Support Tickets.

This is a huge improvement from the outsourced support system that was previously used. For users to be able to give feedback helps both the users (by receiving timely answers and direct answers to their problems) and Mozy (by allowing them to focus on customer-specific problems, versus general user-errors).

IBackup is running a Double Storage promo, but it ends tomorrow! Take advantage of this offer, signup for an IBackup account, or upgrade your existing account.

IBackup is a powerful online backup system, ideal for business use. But their higher monthly fees are typically a deterrent. With this double storage promotion, however, you can get twice the amount of storage, for the same price as before. Signup or upgrade your account now!