CrashPlan

[danaltick]

Peter,

I've got it installed and running on all PC's on my LAN now.  I really love it's simplicity and the way it was designed.  None of my PC's are really impacted performance-wise.  I'm even using it to back up my Working Files folders.  Because they've done such a good job with the CPU utilization, I really think I prefer this method over a scheduled job design like Genie-Soft.  With this method there is no real need for job logging, scheduling, or multiple jobs and job types.  The de-duping really comes into play here and helps support this design.  They've truly simplified the process.  Today's mult-core CPU's lend themselves well to this new approach.  I compared prices for online backup storage and CrashPlan is literally 1/10 the price, and from what I've read, their facilty is extremely secure.  I don't plan to use CrashPlan Central, instead using the offsite method.  Genie-Soft of course doesn't support offsite at all; except through their expensive service.  I may purchase CrashPlan+ if I decide that continuous backups are important enough.  Also, the Windows version of CrashPlan Free doesn't support VSS; not a real biggie for me though.

My hats off to Code42 for their ingenious design.  They've made it too easy; and it actually works!

Dan

[peterkrogh]

Dan,
I really hope that it delivers as promised.  It is terribly ingenious.

I think the way to think about CrashPlan is as though it were a second medium, like Optical Disk or Digital Tape.  It does not provide the same access as mirrored HD, and would be placing a lot of faith in the product for it to be your only backup, but as a "separate medium" it works. In many ways, it offers the same kind of protection as a second medium, due to versioning and data validation capabilities.

About the only thing it does not protect against that Optical disk does in Voltage Surge/ EMP. If the drive were even a few miles away, it would probably protect against the former, and as to the latter, well, that's a tough one to contemplate, especially as a DC resident.

Peter

[danaltick]

Peter,

Good analogy; and that's why I think they recommend backing up to two different locations, one offsite and one local; which is what I intend to do.  Also, I still intend to use Acronis True Image for my baseline bare metal recovery image; only now that image will have CrashPlan installed ready to overlay the CrashPlan backup should the need arise.  I only update the Acronis image about once a month when I bring my offsite drives home.  It takes about 5 minutes.

By the way, I actually have two offsite PC's to chose from that I built a while back; one is my son's Core 2 Duo across the state, and the other is an AMD64 PC that I built about 4 years ago for my niece in New Orleans (can't believe it's been 4 years; where does the time go).  I think I'm covered ;-).

Dan

[peterkrogh]

>By the way, I actually have two offsite PC's to chose from

As long as they don't mind you sucking up all the bandwidth in the background...
Peter

[BobSmith]

I really hope that it delivers as promised.  It is terribly ingenious.

The ingenious part is the simplicity of the interface and pricing.  Most all of its features and more have been available in products like Retrospect for ages.  Retrospect is finally about to roll out a version that will bring the Mac platform version on par with where the Windows version has been for years. Retrospect began as a Mac only product and was the probably the most highly regarded Mac backup product at one time... long ago. It will cost me the better part of $1K to UPGRADE to this version if I want to continue to back up two servers. 

I'm going to seriously test Crashplan to see if I can do with it, what I've been doing with Retrospect for quite some time.  I have an old G4 that is essentially a backup computer.  It's loaded to the gills with drives.  It runs Chronosync to mirror image archive drives twice per day and it runs Retrospect to do incremental backups of two servers and a small handful of workstations to hard drive at least once per day.  I can rotate those hard drives off site as needed.  Retrospect does an appropriate automated incremental backup based on whatever is already on the hard drive that's present for it to use.  It handles computers that come and go on the network (laptops) automatically and easily.  This system has saved my rear several times by allowing me to completely restore a system a prior state quite quickly.  It's also great for finding a good version of that one odd ball preference file that got accidently modified weeks ago.

Bob Smith

[danaltick]

Bob,

If you do use CrashPlan, let us know how it goes.

Peter,

Good point.  I'll try it with my son's first.  I was testing it with CrashPlan Central on Friday and Saturday and didn't really see much network utilization, but I was uploading, not downloading.  Should be interesting.  I'll let you know the results.

Dan

[peterkrogh]

Bob,
Can Retrospect do the offsite thing?  (Most important, can it navigate an internet connections between computers on dynamic IP connections?)

Also, does it perform data validation in the background? CrashPlan combs through the archive rechecking hashes - if any bits flip for any reason, it is supposed to alert you that there is some kind of problem with your storage. 

Both of these were issues I was going to try and navigate over the next several months, and I was not looking forward to it. 

Peter

[BobSmith]

Retrospect can work offsite via secure FTP with data encryption optional.  Whether or not it can deal with a dynamic IP address would depend on dns setup which is reasonably easy to do through someone like dyndns.com.  It's not something built into Retrospect.  I've never used Retrospect for offsite backups because of bandwidth issues.  It's easy enough to carry a tape or disk off site on a regular basis.

It does do (optionally) an immediate verification of data after a backup that is automatic and runs at roughly the same speed as the backup did.  If you want to verify data later, it isn't automatic and it's painfully slow.

My comments are related to the existing Mac version that is quite old now.  I haven't tried the beta of the new one.  Somehow beta and backup don't belong in the same sentence.  I currently don't have time for a lot of beta testing.  Some of these features are likely enhanced on the newer version.

Bob Smith

[peterkrogh]

>Somehow beta and backup don't belong in the same sentence.

LOL.

Thanks for the information.  A quick look at the dyndns site makes me think that it's something I could navigate if necessary, but that I would not *want* to do, and would *really* not want to spend time telling other people how to do.  Piling that on top of learning how to configure Retrospect sounds even less appealing.

We'll see how CrashPlan fares. If it continues to be as easy as it has been, it could be a great solution.
Peter

[danaltick]

I do think though that I will remove my Working Files folders from my backup, since I do plan to eventually duplicate this offsite.  I think I want to avoid large fluctuations in the size of the backup over the net.  It might actually be kind of nice if Code42 would allow for two separate backups: one onsite and one offsite.  You could then have your large fluctuations happen only to the local backup; or maybe just use the offsite one for more mission critical data.  That might be a nice addition, but supporting two databases from a single engine might be a feat unto itself.... don't know.

Dan

[danaltick]

Peter,

I took my 34GB CrashPlan backup to Springfield a few weeks ago, put it on my son's PC, installed CrashPlan and brought back his backup and put it on my PC.  I attached the backups over the net about two weeks ago.  It took a llittle while to sync them up, but has worked flawlessly since.  I must say at this point I think, "it just works".  I haven't really even noticed any slow down even while playing online video games.  I just check on it every couple of days to make sure it's doing its job.  So far so good.

Dan

[peterkrogh]

Dan,
Cool, thanks for the report.

I'm seeing something strange. I put my backup online after a long time away, and while it clearly sees the backup, it tells me it's unavailable. When I click on the destination in the "Backup Destinations" window, it pulls up the folder with the backup, but it won't write, no matter what I do.

I have not had time to troubleshoot, but maybe sometime in the next few weeks.
Peter

[danaltick]

Interesting.  I've got it running on 4 PC's now.  Haven't had any problems like that yet; however, I haven't taken them offline either.  Be sure to post back what you find.

Dan