Well, CrashPlan is now up and running, backups are complete except for the off-premises backup, and I am even more uncomfortable about CrashPlan's backup philosophy than I was before.

CrashPlan is quite proud of their De-Duplication process, in which each file as it is backed up is compared block by block (not file by file or filename by filename, but block by block) with all previous files that were backed up and if the data is the same, that block is saved as a pointer to the first block. This is a marvelous idea for saving disk space, which now costs four one-thousandths of a penny per megabyte if you buy it in two terabyte chunks.

Great -- they're saving me a tiny fraction of a penny in storage cost at the expense of removing any semblance of redundancy in my backup.

I used to back up all my data, unarchived, uncompressed, unencrypted, instantly and easily retrievable without special software... and then I backed up my backups the same way, and then I backed up those backups for off premises storage. Now all of my backed up data is kept in a single archive file (even if that archive is spread across several backup sets kept on multiple drives, it's one archive) and that's a lot of eggs to keep in a single basket!



At the moment I am less enthusiastic about CrashPlan than most people. Perhaps it is because I have some basic misunderstanding about how it works, but I don't think that is the case. I have spent a fair number of hours puzzling out their most "un-wizard-like" interface (it is astonishingly easy to set your backups up incorrectly) and studying how it works.

After the time and effort invested in the project, I will probably leave it as is, unless something noticeably better* comes to my attention.

*Better defined as more like how I am used to doing it, not necessarily faster, or more secure, or using less disk space, or whatever.

tanstaafl.