I've been playing with CrashPlan for a bit now. Its philosophy of operation is quite different from what I have been doing for the last decade and a half, but it looks like it can do what I need if I change the way I think about backups.

What I've been doing is to create near-clones of my C: and D: drives on my E: drive. That is, my root directory on E: shows "Disk 1" and "Disk 2". Disk 1 had the same directory tree and file structure as my C: drive, with the notable exception of the Windows directory and a few other files that wouldn't copy over because of in-use status. Disk 2 was a byte-for-byte reproduction of my D: drive. Similarly, my F: drive was byte-for-byte copied to an external USB drive L:. and just for a belt-and-suspenders mode, finally the C: and D: drives were copied again to an external USB drive M:, making the E: and M: drives identical twins. Finally, a few times a year my E: and F: drives were copied to N: and O: external drives which are kept off-premises at a neighbor's house. Backups were done at my discretion, on my schedule, not automatically. (They could have been automatic, but I'm enough of a control freak that I opted out of that.)

The point of the above confusion is that I had access to backups that could be used as-is in place of the original drives, except there was no backup of my operating system. I plan to address that shortcoming as part of my transition away from Karen's Replicator.

CrashPlan keeps all the backups in a single compressed, encrypted archive file. Well, in my case I decided on no compression and no encryption, but it is still all in a single big file. I'm not entirely sure why, but this idea makes me uncomfortable, sort of an "all my eggs in one basket" feeling. Also, CrashPlan insists on doing the backups on its schedule, not necessarily mine, Its default is to do a differential backup (or would it be incremental?) every 15 minutes in background. This is contrary to my philosophy. I don't view my backups as a tool to recover from a crash or failed hard drive, but as a safety reservoir I can go to when I screw up a file so badly that I need to replace it with a saved copy. If my backup program replicates my screwups every 15 minutes, that is counter-productive!

But... I can (and have) set CrashPlan to do its work just once a day instead of every quarter hour. It would appear that CrashPlan is backing up incrementally, and saving older backup data. I assume that the "Restore" function in CrashPlan is somehow sorting all that out and somehow allowing me to recover the particular version of the file that I want should the need arise, but I haven't played with Restore enough to understand how that will work, just enough to know that without the CrashPlan application up and running I have no backups available.

That leads me to my two main questions about CrashPlan.

1) Assume the worst, my SSD has died, nothing recoverable on it, including my installation of CrashPlan. Now what do I do? At a guess, I would go to the system clone copy I made previously with such impressive foresight and kept on... uhh, kept it on what? A flash drive? One of my internal hard drives? An external USB drive? A 180KB 5-1/4" floppy? (Just kidding...) What do I do to address this problem?

2) I have my power management set to turn off the monitor after one hour of inactivity, and start sleep mode after two hours. What happens if CrashPlan is backing up data when the two hour cutoff comes? I have been caught by this before with other background operations. I understand that after the initial backup archives are created, the subsequent incremental backups will take very little time, and this problem will not arise. But my first backup of my D: drive and in particular my F: drive (~2 TB) are going to take a long time. Do I need to disable my power management for those?

Below are the backup frequency settings I have chosen, but it is quite possible that I totally misunderstand the nature of these backups and have done it all wrong. Given what I have written above (sorry to have made you wade through all of this) are these reasonable settings? And what do you recommend that I do to make and keep a system clone stuck away in a drawer somewhere in the event of a total SSD failure?

tanstaafl.