Crashplan notes

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I do backups pretty much continuously both to a local drive and to the cloud. The service I use for both of these is CrashPlan. For $120 a year, I back up three computers with unlimited storage. I currently have about 1,100 gigabytes backed up, most of this being my photo collection.

March, 2011:

Because of a pretty major price increase associated with Mozy discontinuing "unlimited" backups, I removed Mozy in favor of CrashPlan. No problems with this so far. It works similarly to Mozy, but does local backups using an indexing scheme instead of a copy of the directories being backed up.

September, 2011:

CrashPlan is still working well for me. I am backing up both desktop machines and my laptop. One nice thing is that the CrashPlan software allows backing up to a drive on any other computer running their software, so you could conceivably mutually backup with a friend, and still have offsite backup. I have had no issues at all with the CrashPlan software or servers, and I get a regular email reporting if there are issues, like the fact that the laptop has not been backing up or that since a power failure, the Mac has not done any backups.

October, 2012

Another year of good service from CrashPlan. I had a C: drive failure early this year and had to bring up another drive. Once this was done, and my files were restored from my local backup drive, I had to re-establish backups for what was essentially a new system. I did not do this correctly, and my backup set on CrashPlan's server was deleted, making it necessary to completely re-build it, which would take weeks. CrashPlan customer service helped out a lot, eventually sending me a hard drive to bootstrap the backup. I backed up to their hard drive, shipped it to them, and they put it up on their system. This turned out not to be completely straightforward because of a network routing problem, and they moved me to another server. Since then things have been fine.