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Shout out to CrashPlan!

August 24th, 2012 Leave a comment Go to comments

While I am typically a BackBlaze fan boy ("we'll always be unlimited" and so cost-effective) I somehow stumbled upon CrashPlan. Which when looking at it and seeing it's a Java-based client initially scared me, but the support for Linux and other OSes got me interested. Not only can I stick it on servers and home Linux boxes (and I have now...) but they even give you tips on how to use an SSH tunnel to connect to their local service. So I can launch a desktop application on my Windows machine and connect to my CrashPlan backup daemon on my server at SoftLayer. Neat.

It is supposed to be totally unlimited as well, and they only charge $12.99 or something for 2-10 computers, vs. a per-computer model from BackBlaze. Also, they don't list support for file shares, but it had no problem backing up one of my samba mounts. (Please don't fix that if it's a bug!)

So while I still consider BackBlaze to be more efficient and easier to use (just "set it and forget it" I will say that CrashPlan has a lot more options, is an opt-in policy (akin to Mozy, etc.) instead of an opt-out by default policy (BackBlaze) and it makes it really easy to list the entire filesystem, and select/deselect at any level of it.

The other interesting/neat thing is you can set it up to backup to friends machines, local storage, attached drives or their CrashPlan Central cloud (which is what they charge the monthly for.)

Since BackBlaze isn't playing in the Linux space yet, and has special ways to check if a filesystem is "local" and such, it looks like I will be using the best of both systems for now. The Java UI does feel a bit "Java-ey" but the price, features and performance of the actual network backups seem well worth it.

So +1 to CrashPlan!

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