Ah yes, hadn't spotted "Other" hidden down there at the bottom.

I want my bandwidth control in the software. I've also got bittorrent uploading data 24/7, controlling the two sharing bandwidth at the router would be much harder than having a scheduling option in the software (as uTorrent already has).

I really need them to fix the WAN/LAN detection. That is a completely brain dead design choice they've made there.

I could really do with the option to spot when a machine has moved from its home LAN too, so that you can ramp back the bandwidth usage (or disable it completely) when you take you laptop elsewhere.

I'm glad to hear that you're liking it overall, Andy. I'm a big fan of Crashplan and have installed it on several clients' computers.

I went with "$6/month" for three reasons: 1) it's the cheapest option, 2) I can put my entire family (in-laws too) on this one plan, and 3) I don't mind the four years in advance because that at least assures that the price isn't going to change on me for the next four years. If they change their plans tomorrow, presumably they'd honor the deals they've already made and grandfather me in. Then, in four years, if I think the new prices are horribly high, I'd wager that by then we'll have methods of backup available to us that we haven't even thought of yet


One thing I wish Crashplan could do is backup to a network drive, or backup files on a networked drive. This is a big irritation for me, as I don't have a server that I can install Crashplan onto.

How are you guys still finding crash plan?

I've just installed it as I'm looking for a decent backup solution, I'm primarily interested in backing up my source code off site.

There is something that I particularly dislike, they seem to have some sort of odd reseller system, some of the products can't be purchased in the UK (seriously, this is just data) because they have a UK reseller - although it would appear that the UK reseller uses their own storage, and of course it seems to be much worse value for money than the US offering.

Selecting backup folders is a bit nasty, no way of sorting stuff, so you have to scroll through the tree, I'd prefer a list of files/folders.

Regular expressions would be nice on a per folder basis too, would save me having to build the folder name into the regular expression.

Adrian

I'm still using CrashPlan and still reasonably happy.

I do wish they'd get on and fix some of the important design oddities. In particular I want them to fix their local/remote detection. Assuming that every machine hosted on a public IP address is remote is lazy and daft (and it a real *pain when it comes to restore time).

Having UK storage sounds like a good idea, to avoid the hop over the pond. And I'll bet that hosted storage in the UK costs more than in the US, so it is bound to cost a bit more.

When it comes down to it, it works much better that the other online solutions I've tried. All of which either don't cope with very high overall storage levels or can't cope with massive files (>40GB virtual hard disk files).

I use it to backup the massive virtual disk images on my laptops to my server (350GB of data backed up). I also use it to backup 285GB from my server to CrashPlan Central (and also a small amount direct from my laptops to CrashPlan Central, things like the local git repos for my current projects).

I like its flexibility compared to the others I've tried.

I have never yet made use of the backup to other users feature, as my 800k upstream is just too slow to host my servers and to start swapping large amounts of data with other people.

* to restore to my laptops from the server, I have to temporarily raise the server's send bandwidth limit, as the server is treated as being remote from the laptop on the same local network because I use public IP addresses

Cool, thanks! Sounds good.

Another annoyance is that you can't edit a regular expression, you can't even copy it to clipboard, so if you want to make a change, you have to enter the whole bloody thing in again, now that's irritating.

Still, it seems to be doing what I want and I take a lot of faith in peoples opinions here - and it seems to be that people think it's good.

We have bt infinity at work and I have 50Mbit here at home, so I might give the "friend backups" a go as well, can't hurt.

I've probably got a gigabyte or so of source code that needs backing up, other than that, there's not an awful lot that needs backing up.

Out of interest, when you backup your virtual machine images, do you stop/pause the VM? How does it cope with backing up files that are "in use" like a VM?

Thanks.

Adrian

I do have a tip if you are trying to use it to backup large virtual disk images.

Use snapshots to stop the vhd from being updated all the time. I keep a snapshot running, so that CP only has to scan the smaller snapshot file.

Every couple of weeks I merge the snapshot back into the main file, at which point CP has a few hours work to do to scan the vhd, but at least that means that on a daily basis I get to have a current backup of the image without CP spending hours each day processing a massive file.

I'll guess that I'm not the only person out there doing their Windows development in a 50GB VM on OSX

I thought someone might ask that

At the moment I'm not stopping/pausing them. I haven't had any problems yet and I have restored a couple of them.

My main dev VM is running pretty much 24/7, so it has lots of time when it is sat idle. I expect at that point all the guest OSes caches get flushed, so anything important gets written out.

I guess what I should be doing running script once a day to create a snapshot and then kick off and explicit CP run. But to be honest recovering the data in the lastest snapshot isn't really important, as long as I can restore a vaguely recent working copy of the VM so I don't have to rebuild it all when something goes wrong.

All my important data within the VM is backed up separately from CP running within the VM anyway And the only data I really care about on it is source code, so the whole open file issues don't really apply.

That's a good idea for minimising the amount of data that could be changed by the virtual machine, I hadn't thought of that trick.



You're not!

Although we use parallels, our actual "data" resides on the mac and is mounted by the VM, so the data gets backed up by the host and doesn't exist inside the VM, the virtual machine basically just exists as a build/test environment, so losing it isn't really much of an issue, it just means creating a new VM image with the necessary build tools and libraries installed - a pain, but not critical and as you say, it's the source code that is all I really care about too.

I also still recommend Crashplan. I've been using it since June of last year, and I've had one or two points where I've needed to do a recovery. It always works just as promised.

I've set up a couple of my clients with the "back up to friends" destination, and it works very well.

I've also set up a small real estate group with the "backup to another computer" destination. That's used mostly for those on the Family Unlimited+ plan, and you get a list of the other computers set up with Crashplan on your account. You're able to back up to any and all of the other computers. Recovery from these locations, if they're local like with this real estate group, are very quick.

So yes, I'm still very pleased with Crashplan.

I think the only thing I dislike is how difficult it is to work with mapped drives like NAS devices. How are you doing that, Andy? I've seen a couple solutions to this and was able to get one of them to work with one client of mine, but I didn't have a great deal of confidence in it.

One way I've seen is to change the process so that it runs as the local user instead of the system. That way it can get around some security feature in Windows that prevents accessing mapped drives or something.

Oh, wait, you're running this on OSX, aren't you? Nevermind then, it's easy for you

Still happy enough here.

Like Andy I found many other solutions did not seem to handle large numbers of files/data. That was even on more enterprise levels a few years back when I was looking for a solution for my old company.

Took about 6 months to get about 800GB uploaded to their backend. The deduplication works quite well too. Currently I'm at 959GB and the server reports 672GB, so there's about 30% compression/deduplication in there.

Originally I only was looking at about 2-300GB but with the unlimited plan I just added more stuff that doesn't change at a lower priority and eventually it was all up there. I do backup VMs but hadn't bothered doing anything particularly special.

In the time I've been using it (about 1 year now), there hasn't been a single update I don't think. There are a few quirks and inflexible things but really I find it's set and forget. It just works(tm). Most of the things I would prefer to change are more related to the initial backup stage. e.g. if you have two backup jobs and a local and remote server for the high priority one but only the remote server for the lower priority job, it will do the local high priority one first and then the lower priority job remotely. I realise it's trying to do make sure all the data is backed up to at least one place first, but that's not really what I wanted initially. I was able to work around it by fiddling with some priorities. I wanted the higher priority backed up remotely first (most important stuff like photos etc). This is still an issue if I have a large amount of new data in the lower priority backup. It doesn't do the high priority/remote server stuff first.

Every now and then I do an audit to make sure everything's there and apart from the initial issue with the code page (more my Linux box's faulty), it's all been good. Need to do another one actually.

One thing that does occasionally annoy me (particularly on my work machine) is that the CrashplanService.exe + CrashplanDesktop.exe (if open) processes seem to consume a slightly excessive amount of CPU. My work machine (a Dell Precision Workstation) is a few years old but not that underpowered. The corporate coreload does seem to have some wierdness though (e.g. a sometimes Remote Desktop session is unusable because it seems to be spread 1% CPU around a lot of processes. Go and log on locally and it comes good straight away).

A couple of times I've found my remote server e.g. atls5.crashplan.com has "disappeared" and it couldn't connect. At least twice that was due to network issues at their end. Whilst it is kind of sold as a cloud, it does seem that specific machines (not accounts) are assigned to specific backup servers. They do rotate around and I've seen at least three or four different servers assigned to my NAS backup account at various times.

I also can't find another company that does it for as little money. That's the only thing that worries me, that they're going to realize they're not charging enough and raise their prices. Oh well, I paid for 4 years up front, so presumably I'm safe for another 3.5 years unless they go out of business

To compare, Mozy would cost me $35 a month if I didn't add any more data to my backup. Carbonite initially looks like it has even better prices than Crashplan, but that $59/year doesn't let you back up ANY external hard drives! The higher priced plans only let you back up one! Also, their software client is the worst of these three.


Where do you see this information? I'd like to check that out too...


I've found it to be the same. That's exactly what I want from such a service. I have noticed some of those server-side issues, but they're very infrequent.

As an example of what I'd call a quirk - really it's a UI bug but something I found when doing my audits that is confusing.

On the backup tab it will show "'x' files" to be backed up. However this is actually files + folders.

When on the Restore tab it will show files and folders as separate line items. A bit confusing when you don't know.

Took me a while to figure that out and when I've mentioned it to support as a note alongside other issues, they haven't responded to that part. There may be a reason for it but I can't think of it.

Also where I have had real issues like the network problems, they were only responsive during the US business day. I can live with that I guess for $70/year.

I also paid the $280 for 4 years upfront.


I got the total data size (959GB) from the automated emails. I have it send one once a day and covers things like missed back ups etc. It also sends individual mails if a machine hasn't backed up for an extended period. My car PC is one that often does that because it's not online long enough in the garage to complete a backup. That one doesn't really need it though since the MP3s are rsynced from my NAS anyway but it's nice to have.

The compressed value you will see if you click on the "Crashplan Central" text from one of your backups on the Backup tab/screen.

I don't need to worry about about mapped drives on NASes, all my data is stored on really computers that can all run the CrashPlan service.

From reading their forums there isn't likely to be any software update any time soon. At the moment they are focussing all their effort on getting their enterprise version's features in line with the consumer one (the enterprise software doesn't support backup sets for example).

When you guys mention NAS, what kinds of stumbling blocks am I going to find in setting Crashplan up on Windows to back up specific folders, including the boot partition, to my NAS sitting on the same subnet?

This is really the only thing I need the software for, because honestly, all other backup software I've tried or read about just sounds like complete garbage. There just isn't any decent software available for Windows for this purpose. Nothing as nice as Time Machine in Mac OS at all.

My other option was just to set up a few scheduled backups via the ReadyNAS UI using rsync.

The inability to create a bootable 100% backup of a live Windows machine seems to be a real stumbling block.

Here, I do confess to having exactly one machine with WinXP-Pro on a hard drive. I've yet to figure out how to prevent having to do a full OS reinstall in the event of catastrophic drive failure.

The best idea I have so far, is to install a second identical drive, and boot from Linux/USB to bit-clone one drive to the other. Slow, and not terribly practical.

The second best idea is to do something similar, booting from Linux/USB, except do a file-by-file copy to the second drive (both drives ntfs). But for this scenario, I have no idea how to make the backup disk "bootable". Perhaps someone here knows a simple recipe for that?

Thanks

And along similar lines, I may someday want to move everything from the current mechanical drive to a SSD. Same problem. Hopefully with a simple solution.

Is there a reason why you can't just virtualise the WinXP machine ?

CrashPlan isn't designed for giving you a full machine recovery like Time Machine, it really is aimed at backing data up.

With more recent version of Windows the included backup software can in theory give you a full system backup. The problem is I've never managed to get it to run to completion (either across the network or to a USB attached drive) !

I believe the normally recommended "free" option is http://clonezilla.org/

I've never used it myself though. There are also various commerical apps, the most often mentioned one being http://www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing/products/trueimage/

But again, I've never used that either

The only way I know of to make a full system, bootable windows backup is by using Windows Home Server. But something tells me that's not really up your alley.

Clonezilla appears to be a bit-cloning solution
(it's just a wrapper for the ntfsclone bit-cloner).
So not terribly useful other than that it can also
bit-clone to a self-compressed image file.

How do people move their Windows installs to SSDs?
There must be a few people on the planet who have done this
for WinXP. This normally requires partition realignment
to a 4KB or 1MB boundary, something that Clonezilla cannot handle.

??

Well, apart from the exact same issue (how to copy the existing f/s into a VM), I suppose that might be a good thing to do.

But it will screw up the software licences for WinXP (requires a telephone call to MS) and also for Adobe Photoshop on the same disk (requires a telephone call to Adobe, or perhaps just taking care to deregister before cloning, then reregister).

I wonder if the DVD copy utilities will still work from within the VM? Gotta try it, I guess.

The one Windows machine that I have virtualised, I used the VMWare migration tool, which is free. I then converted from VMWare's virtual disc format to VirtualBox's one using VBox's tools.

Everyone who has asked me that question about SSD conversion, I've recommended just doing a reinstall

For my HDD->SSD conversion, I used WinClone. Not a great answer though for those who don't have access to OS X.

http://bubba.org/winclone/

May be a starting point for finding the tools that work on the Linux side, as WinClone makes use of NTFSProgs.

Link

Yup, Window's will pickup on the hardware change, but when I last did this I was able to do it over the net. When it has required a call to MS it has been quick & painless, they didn't even ask why.



Copy? I was going to say no, but it looks like it is more of a maybe, and depends on the burner in question:
Configuring the Virtual Machine to Burn and Rip CDs, but this dates from 2009.
Random VMware forum tread, there are probably other similar threads.

I do CD ripping from within a VM. I've successfully done it with both VMWare and VirtualBox under Windows Vista, Windows 7 and OSX hosts (my ripping guest is a bare bones WinXP install).

Do make it work, you have to tell the VM software to operate the virtual drive in pass thru mode, rather than emulating a drive. I did have some messing about at some points to get it working.

I don't know wether it is as straight forward with DVD ripping.

After reading about what you guys go through to back up, I realize that my backup needs are not the same as yours.

To begin with, while much of my data is precious to me, very little of it is "mission critical." If it all went away tomorrow, I would be unhappy, but my day to day life would not be hugely disrupted.

So, my backup system is maybe once a week or so back up to external hard drive(s), and maybe four times a year back up to a pair of 2-TB drives that I keep at my neighbor's house. Good enough for me, but YMMV.

tanstaafl.