{"id":3742,"date":"2012-06-02T09:35:23","date_gmt":"2012-06-01T23:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=3742"},"modified":"2012-12-21T07:51:20","modified_gmt":"2012-12-20T21:51:20","slug":"crashplan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2012\/06\/02\/crashplan\/","title":{"rendered":"Crashplan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those who regularly follow my blog know that I see cloud as a great unknown when it comes to data protection. It’s still an evolving model, and many cloud vendors take the process of backup and data protection a little to cavalierly \u2013 pushing it onto the end users. Some supposedly “enterprise” vendors won’t even let you see<\/em>\u00a0what their data protection options are, until you sign an NDA.<\/p>\n

Recently I’ve been working with a cloud service provider to build a fairly comprehensive backup model, and it’s greatly reassuring to see companies starting to approach cloud with a sensible, responsible approach to data protection processes. It’s a good change to witness, and it’s proven to me that my key concerns with data protection in the cloud originated from poor practices. Take that problem away, and cloud data protection becomes a lot better.<\/p>\n

Stepping back from the enterprise level, one thing I’m quite cognisant of as a “backup expert” is designing my own<\/em>\u00a0systems for recovery. I have a variety of backup options in use that provide local protection, but providing off-site protection is a little more challenging. Removable hard-drives stored elsewhere exist more for disaster recovery purposes \u2013 best used for data that doesn’t change frequently, or for data you don’t need to recover instantly \u2013 such as media.<\/p>\n

Inevitably though, for personal backups that are off-site as quickly<\/em>\u00a0as possible, cloud represents an obvious option, so long as your link is fast enough.<\/p>\n

Some time ago, I used Mozy, but found it somewhat unsatisfying to use. I could never quite bring myself to paying for the full service, and once they introduced their pricing changes, I was rather grateful I’d abandoned it \u2013 too pricey, and prone on the Mac at least to deciding it needed to start all backups from scratch again.<\/p>\n

So a bit of digging around led me to Crashplan<\/a>. Specifically, I chose the “CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited Monthly Subscription<\/a>” option. It costs me $12 US a month \u2013 I could bring that down to an effective $6 US monthly charge by paying up-front, but I prefer the minimised regular billing option over a single, up-front hit.<\/p>\n

Crashplan+ Family Unlimited allows me to backup as much data as I want from up to 10 computers, all tied to the same account. Since it has clients for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris, I’m fairly covered for options. (In fact, so far I’ve only been working on getting Mac OS X clients backing up.)<\/p>\n

On standard ADSL2, with an uplink speed currently maxing out at 600Kbps, I don’t have the luxury of backing up\u00a0everything<\/em>\u00a0I have to a cloud provider. At last count, Darren and I have about 30TB of allocated storage at home, of which about 10TB is\u00a0active<\/em>\u00a0storage. So, contrary to everything I talk about, I have to run an\u00a0inclusive<\/em>\u00a0backup policy for cloud backups \u2013 I select explicitly what I want backed up.<\/p>\n

That being said, I’ve managed in the last few months, given a host of distractions, including moving house, to push a reasonable chunk of non-recreatable data across to Crashplan:<\/p>\n

\"Crashplan<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s the first thing I like about Crashplan \u2013 I get a weekly report showing how much data I’m protecting, how much of it has been backed up, and what machines that data belongs to. (I like<\/em>\u00a0reports.)<\/p>\n

As an aside, for the purposes of backing up over a slow link where I have to be selective, I classify data as follows:<\/p>\n