Backup Disk Upgrade

From Ed's Mediawiki

Back to Maintenance log

My Toshiba 1T drive was getting full with backups of the three machines I have running on Crashplan. This drive was dedicated to Crashplan. I have so far been happy with the trouble free operation of this Toshiba drive and when a 3T Toshiba drive showed up at Best Buy, I decided to upgrade before the drive filled up. My approach based on having worked with a Crashplan external drive for seeding my cloud backup:

  • Change the current backup drive letter from X: to Y:. This takes it out of the clutches of Crashplan, which then just stopped, waiting form the X: drive to return.
  • Plug in the new drive, which is a USB 3.0 drive. This drive has some Toshiba backup software on it that I don't want to use, along with autorun.inf for automatic installation. I renamed autorun.inf and setup.exe on this drive by appending .renamed to the end of each one.
  • Change the drive letter of the new drive to Z:
  • Copy the entire CrashplanLocalBackup directory from Y:, the old backup drive, to Z:, the new backup drive, using the command line "robocopy /MIR Y:\CrashplanLocalBackup Z:\CrashplanLocalBackup" This does an exact copy, including all of the security stuff, etc. Since there was a nearly a terabyte of data, it took all afternoon and over night to finish.
  • The next morning, changed the drive letter of the new drive from Z: to X: Crashplan immediately resumed backups to the new drive.
  • One note: Somewhere in there, one file was skipped during the copy. I am thinking this might be as a result of the fact the before I did the robocopy thing, I started by doing a simple drag/drop copy in Explorer and something was left behind. Hopefully this is not going to cause a problem.
    • Update 11/5/2012: I ran a comparison of the directory trees between the old backup directory and the new one. The only situation where a file existed in one and not the other was new files in the new one, which I expected. There are no files in the old set that are not also in the new set.
    • I got email back from Crashplan support that the method I used should be fine.

So far, things seem to be running OK.