Several months ago now I posted a series of articles about offline backup. Its a topic that more and more people are dealing with. The realisation that you have many gigabytes of digital media that could easily be lost combined with better broadband is prompting a move to off-site backups. So I posted up my exploration into backing up off-site. Recently I have had a few people ask me if I am still happy with my final choice, crashplan.
Even my mum uses it!
I am very happy with the choice. In the original posts I managed to setup three home machines, one Linux one windows and a mackbook. Since then I added the iMac that I keep at my parents. This is a sign of how easy crashplan is to maintain. In a nutshell once you have set it up, you just forget about it. This has to be one of the most important things about backing up. It does not require any maintenance whatsoever. This is encouraging when your several hundred miles away from one of the machines. I can use the web to see if its backed up, and get alerts if a period goes by and it fails. I just checked it now, 100% backed up today.
What else?
The backup client allows you to set how much bandwidth and CPU its allowed to use. I use the default as I have never found it hogging either. I am probably lucky that so far several backups on different machines have not started at the same time. If it did its easily curable.
In summary
If you have anything worthwhile keeping, and want off-site backup – get a crashplan account. If you have friends with space, use crashplan for free and backup to each others machines. In fact do both!
Hi Martin,
Thanks for the update. Do you use Crashplan or Crashplan plus? …does the “instant” backup that plus provides versus daily backup from the free version make a difference to you?
I think I’ll buy the crashplan central now after reading your article. I too was (am) a Memopal user but it causes me constant disk drive activity which my anti-virus software gets very excited about!
I have one crashplan plus license which currently runs on my Linux box. This is where most of my frequent activity occurs. Something about using crashplan plus, possibly higher levels of encryption means my other machines would need plus for a restore. Which is not a massive issue, as the license can be transferred between machines. Possibly I could restore to the Linux box and move things later.
Plus has a lot of extra flexibility and settings and to be honest I can live with out on all my machines, but on the Linux box it does give a little extra peace of mind and flexibility. So for my situation:
Purchase Crashplan Central:100%
Purchase Crashplan Plus:50%