Anyone using CrashPlan?

[radioz]

I'm curious about this backup solution. How well does it work?

Is the free version only usable for 30 days, or is that the Plus version?

[bigfoot65]

I have not tried it, but believe the free version is unlimited time, but limited storage on their site. The pro version is time limited I think...might check out the wiki for it under apps.

[radioz]

Thanks for the response.

I've been investigating further, and it looks very interesting.

I think I'll give it a try. My current plan is to do backups from machine to machine on my hda network.
I'm not too eager to pay for external storage (although they do make it very easy and relatively inexpensive).

[radioz]

Success!

I installed CrashPlan on 3 of my machines on my local network without much trouble.

I'm still trying to understand the backup reports and log files. They can be a little confusing to decipher.

I don't have a huge amount of drive space remaining on my machines, so I backup one machine to the next.

It would be very nice if CrashPlanDesktop application was integrated into the Amahi control panel somehow. Does anyone know if this is possible? It would be even better if there was a GUI to talk to all of the CrashPlan machines on my network. Right now I have to ssh into each box and run CrashPlanDesktop on each one to look at the configuration and status.

Anybody else using it?

[bt107]

I've installed Crashplan but I'm a little confused as to which directories on the server to backup. I want to backup only the shares but if I select /var/hda/files/sharename it only has a link to the file and Crashplan doesn't appear to backup anything. I'm using Greyhole with 2 drives for the shares, drive1 and drive2. If I look at /var/hda/files/drive1 (or drive2) I see a gh folder which contains the actual files.

Should I tell Crashplan to backup the /var/hda/files/drive1/gh folder? Should I do that for both drives (redundant)? It's not really very clear how to use Crashplan on the server with Greyhole. Can anyone provide a little guidance?

No problems at all using it on the clients.

Thanks!

[radioz]

That's a good question!

Unfortunately, I haven't used Greyhole yet, so I don't know the answer.

I'm sure an expert will come along with an answer.

[polaris20]

So Crashplan is now easily installed as a part of Amahi. I don't need to back up other computers locally to it, but I would like to back up the server itself to another computer miles away. The question is, what directories on the Amahi server? /var/hda?

I plan to use Greyhole eventually too; does that throw a wrench in the works?

[radioz]

So far, I just back up /var/hda/files/<shares>

Where <shares> are the names of the shares my hda manages. Just put a check mark next to each share you want to back up in the CrashPlanDesktop file tree.

I'd be interested in hearing how other people manage backups on their hda's.

[btw - I don't use greyhole, so I don't know how that might play into your decision]

[t800]

I'm testing "Crashplan" over the LAN in the "to folder" free mode. Its only 14 days in to the test and they have just upgraded it. I'm curious what will me left working at the end of the 30 days. I'm backing up 3 machine onto the server with a 1TB drive mounted into the native storage area.

I'm testing 4 backup programs, Crashplan, Grsync, Win7 Backup and Paragon Pro. I will let you know in the fullness of time how they score. Crashplan so far has done what its says on the tin. How ever the putting Crashpaln on my other linux machines required a little work with the xintd. The Windows machines suffer a little DNS lag in http but thats probably of my own doing.

I have been incrementally increasing the storage load on the machines to find the tipping point rather than feed it a complete partition and watch it choke on the volume of data. So far its routinely handling 780mb and I'm going to deliberately run out of storage space in the next few weeks to see what happens

[jammastercd]

I just installed CrashPlan on my HDA with the 30 day trial. My goal is to use CrashPlan to store online backups of our pictures and attached storage for everything else on the HDA shares. As someone else mentioned, I just found the appropriate var/hda share directory and checked it for online backup. For now I just clicked the pictures share and set it for online backup. I then compared the number of files and total size of the backup being done with the original files, and they match.

If all goes well, I will be happy to support CrashPlan by purchasing CrashPlan+ with the 10GB online limit.

By the way, I do use Greyhole for my shares.

One question I do have is that since I've configured CrashPlan via the desktop window, the CrashPlan server is no longer shown as running in my HDA dashboard. I tried clicking on the restart service icon and also restarted the HDA, but the CrashPlan server still shows a stopped status. However, the backup is continuing. Is this a small bug? It doesn't appear to affect the backup; perhaps the CrashPlan server will start once the HDA backup is done? Anyone else experience this?