Several months ago I wrote about backups, and I talked about a number of things including my experiences with several different backup and archival solutions. Well, it’s been a few months, so how do I feel about the backup solution(s) I’ve chosen now?
One of the solutions I mentioned in that article was Code42’s CrashPlan cloud backup service. When I first started using it, I was only backing up between computers. So computer A would send its backup to computer B, and vice versa. This was OK, but not particularly great. I decided to shell out the money for the family cloud backup plan. This allows you to back up 2-10 computers to your account (I have three).
I mentioned in the previous article how easy CrashPlan was to install on any system. I installed it on my linux desktop, my Mac mini, and even the virtual machine that runs inside the mini. Once installed, I simply provided my account username and password and it started uploading data to my cloud. I won’t lie, the first full upload is definitely the most difficult. Upload speeds depend on many things, including your internet speed connection, CrashPlan’s internal throttling mechanism (so it doesn’t bog down your machine while you’re using it), and CrashPlan’s cloud server throttling. Overall, my upload speeds were not terrible, but my three computers needed to send a total of around 40 gigabytes. That would take a good amount of time even over a gigabit ethernet local network.
After that first backup completed, I have been extremely satisfied with CrashPlan. I know it’s running because I get weekly email summaries, but when I’m using my computer, it’s like it’s not even there. One of my favorite features is backup sets, of which you can have as many as you want. Backup sets help prioritize different groups of backup data on a single machine. For me, I want very frequent (every 15-30 minutes) backups of my home folder data, and I want those backups to take precedence over everything else. But I also have other data that, while equally important, doesn’t change every 15-30 minutes. Backup sets let me create a second backup for that data that only runs once a day. I can set it as “priority 2,” so that if my primary backup set wants to run, the second one will pause and wait for the primary to finish. This whole process is completely seamless, and really helps fine tune your backup to suit your individual needs.
In addition to fine tuning backup frequency, you can also fine tune how long revisions of files are kept. Since everything ends up in the cloud, and the storage is unlimited, I highly recommend setting your backups to never remove deleted files from the backups. That way, when you delete a file on your computer, it’ll remain in the cloud indefinitely.
Overall, I’m extremely satisfied with CrashPlan. They even have Android and iOS apps that let you monitor the state of your backups, change certain settings, and even download and view backed up files! So definitely check out CrashPlan and see if they have an option that will work for you. They’re even running a special in June for new subscribers.