CrashPlan questions

[inquam]

Hi... I just installed Amahi after about a year with a WHS and a few days with a WHS Vail. Dropped it due to the decision of dropping DE from WHS. I have set up a storage pool using greystone, moved over all my data etc. I'm ow at configuring crashplan. I have installed it and connected to the instance on my hda server using ssh forwarding on my local crashplan gui. What stopped me in my tracks was a question that I thought you might be able to answer. Should I set up the crashplan instance on my HDA to backup my / partition of my HDA?
Would be nice if that would mean that I could quickly restore the server if the system drive would fail.
But if it would actually be harder than what I think it owuld then it probably wouldnt be worth it. and instead just use the HDA as a backup reciver from my other computers.
Not sure that I have understood it right but it seems like CrashPlans only rsyncs the files? No actual clone of my HDD that could easily be used to restore an entire drive right?
And a secondary question... Does crashplan on amahi automaticly use the storage pool or is it stored in /? I can't seem to find it anywhere to set how many copies I would like of my backups etc.

[radioz]

I'm not sure I can answer your questions, but I can tell you how I am using Crashplan.

I have mine configured to only backup my shares, not the / partition. My reasoning is that it should be relatively easy to re-install Amahi should something bad happen.

I'm not sure how hard it would be to do a full recovery of '/'. Seems like you would need Crashplan already running in order to do the recovery, but without root you couldn't do that. I think there are better solutions for bare-metal backups of the OS. Check around.

And a secondary question... Does crashplan on amahi automaticly use the storage pool or is it stored in /? I can't seem to find it anywhere to set how many copies I would like of my backups etc.

I'm not sure I understand your question. You want to use Crashplan to store backups on other computers (which is what I do), or sign up with Crashplan and store backups in the cloud. You don't want backups stored on the HDA itself since if it crashes, you may not be able to get them back again.

I have 3 boxes on my network besides my hda and I distribute backups among them.

Does that help?

[jammastercd]

I have mine configured to only backup my shares, not the / partition. My reasoning is that it should be relatively easy to re-install Amahi should something bad happen.

This sounds like the configuration I'm looking for, but I wanted to confirm a few things. It sounds like you are using CrashPlan to back up only the shares on Amahi. Is this an Amahi installation using Greyhole? I just installed Amahi with Greyhole using three 1TB drives, and I store all of our media on Amahi. No media files are stored on any computers in our home. Thus I only want to be able to back up the shares on Amahi but in different ways, such as:
-Use CrashPlan online backup for our photos
-Use CrashPlan to back up our music and movies to an external hard drive located in our home

Does CrashPlan with Amahi seem to work well when using Greyhole? I'm wondering because I would like to purchase CrashPlan+, which includes 10GB of online storage for 1 computer. If my Amahi server is considered one computer, then I'm all set!

I know this probably sounds obvious but I needed to check first. I used to be a WHS user. I was researching online backups and found one vendor (can't remember the name) that charged professional pricing for WHS because it was based on Windows Server 2003. Although I understood the technical reasoning, it was poor product segmentation, since WHS was aimed at the home market.

[radioz]

No, I don't use Greyhole yet, so I can't answer questions about how to set it up with it.

I'm hoping someone that does use Greyhole can provide some answers about how to use CrashPlan with that configuraion. I'm interested myself, since I hope to get a couple of extra drives for my hda and try it out.

In my situation (non Greyhole) I have 3 computers in addition to my hda. I'm a bit of a cheapskate, so I wanted a backup situation that didn't rely on an outside fee service. So I have CrashPlan set up on each machine to backup to one (or more) of the other machines. I set up a separate /data partition on each machine as a place to store backups. The CrashPlan configuration of each machine is set up to backup to one of the others. It seems to work pretty well for me so far, although I haven't needed to do a restore yet.

Let us know if you get it running.

[jammastercd]

I just wanted to mention that I did get CrashPlan installed last night with the 30 day trial. I initially set it up to back up my pictures share (using Greyhole) to CrashPlan's online backup storage. I just needed to find the appropriate var/hda shares directory and check it for backup. Having about 4.5 GB of data in that share, the backup is about half done 14 hours later. So far so good.

If all continues to go well, I plan to subscribe to CrashPlan+ with 10GB online storage, which I will use for our pictures. I then would back up other shares (music, movies, etc.) to an external hard drive.