Protect all your files with little effort and for a low cost. (CrashPlan)

Member Name: gump103

Product:	CrashPlan
Date:	16/04/09 (249 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: well priced, intuative interface, free non comercial use, feature packed,

Disadvantages: no disk imaging

Crashplan is file level backup software which allows home/business to backup files to a variety of locations in an incredibly simple process which could save irreplaceable photos, business critical documents or any other file type you can think of. It doesn't however perform disk imaging so is not to be seen as a "system restore" utility.

Crashplan comes in 3 versions which are:
Crashplan Free - allows backup of 1 computer to another computer on a scheduled 24 hour backup. The target for the backup can be located geographically anywhere as long as it has access to the internet. This is licensed purely as a personal use product.

Crashplan + - allows backup of 1 computer to another with extra features over the free edition. Such as almost instant backup where the folders are scanned and backed up every x minutes meaning that the backups are almost real-time. This product can be used for business purposes and costs $60usd per license.

Crashplan Pro - This is a client and server based product where you install a server side software which manages licenses, restores and backup repositories. This is designed for both corporate use and for resellers to provide backup solutions to there customers. The licenses are sold in bundles and starts at $350usd for a 5 license pack with 12 months included support.

I have used both the free and pro version of crashplan over the last 3 months. Starting out with the free product which I installed on my work computer as I had some free hard disk space and my home computer as I really wanted to get an off site backup of my photos and documents which I really wouldn't want to loose in the event of either robbery or as disaster. I all ready backup all these files to a second location in the house incise of drive failure. The install is easy and requires you to register on the crashplan website for a user account. I then used the same account on both computers and then in the client at home I could see my work pc as a backup target. I marked all the folders that I wanted to backup and started the backup. 30GB's worth of photos though were going to take a few days over the internet so I decided I would do a seeded backup where I used a portable drive as another target and backup up to that first. I then took the USB drive to work and copied the backup folder over the one created on the local hard disk. From then on crashplan only needed to perform delta backups which it has done flawlessly since. (I will explain the way crashplan performs its backups later) The internet backup runs from 12:00 midday every day and unless a large number of photos have been added it takes minutes to update the backup.

After my success with configuring the crashplan free product for home I began looking at the crashplan pro product with a view of using it for remote offsite backups of our corporate infrastructure (in particular our large file server which struggles to do a full backup over night).
I started by installing the mare server appliance on our ESX server with it pointed at a NFS share on a 4.5tb (raid 5) NAS. I then create an organisation and a user account to connect to the server so as to perform the backups.
I then installed the client on the file server and connected it to the crashplan server. I selected the 2 drives that needed to be backed up and told crashplan to backup every 15 minutes. I then started the backup and after about 14 hours the full backup was complete, and from then on the server would take snapshots every 15 minutes. The NAS box was then moved to a remote site so as to provide a restorable location in the event of a failure.
We have since purchased licenses for crashplan (25 seats on educational licensing) for around £1500 and have applied them to several SQL servers and other database servers.

The interface for crashplan is really simple and easy to use. Once installed a service runs when ever the machine is turned on and that controls the backup regardless of whether the user is logged on or not. When logged on a task tray icon is visible and indicates the status of the backups. If the icon is pulsing and green then a backup is occurring, amber means that the backup hasn't performed in a user defined number of days and if the icon is red then the backup hasn't occurred in an even longer user defined number of days. Double clicking on the icon brings up the crashplan interface which is a tabbed interface. The tabs are backup, restore, settings, history and destinations. Each of these tabs are pretty self explanatory and provides access to the required functions.
The pro server interface is slightly different in that it is web based but the essential functionality and simple layout is maintained and provides a comfortable environment to work within. Special mention can be made to the reporting functions of the server where it provides a graph showing the growth of the backups as well as informing you as to the average growth over the last months so you can plan if storage is due to run out.

Crashplan backups differ from the usual backup methods where a full backup is taken and then differential backups are taken until the next full backup is taken. Crashplan only ever needs to do one full backup of a drive and from then on it only takes byte level different ional backups (delta changes) of the files. This allows the backups to run really quickly as only the changes made to a file are backed up. This process means that it can (in the pro and + versions) be set to backup every 10-15 minutes and capture almost real time backups of the files.
Backups are also compressed before they are sent from the computer to the server/remote computer so network bandwidth is reduced and the amount of space used is significantly reduced. On top of this the pro version of crashplan also does a process known as de-duplication which finds files that are the same in 2 folders and only creates one backup with a pointer to the other file location incise a restore is needed.
Both wan bandwidth and CPU usage can be throttled on machines to prevent them crashplan causing performance issues, in the case of the file server which is backing up during the day this is important as you don't want users to see performance problems.

In the case of our servers we have been backing up 400 GB of data now for just over 2 months (nightly backups for databases) and the entire crashplan archive takes up less than 250 GB in total.

Restores can be performed with ease in all versions of the product by going to the application on either the client, target or server and choosing the restore option. You can then choose to restore the files by date and time, to original location of a separate location at either folder or file level. This is done really easily by all of the interfaces.
If a restore is large you can choose to copy the encrypted backed up folder on to a removable storage device and take it to the restore destination, add the folder to the crashplan app and restore from there in the same way as the network version.

Both crashplan free and crashplan + have the option to purchase storage from crashplan them selves at a cost of $50usd for 50 GB of storage. The downside to this type of backup is that the files will be held in the US and as such a full restore would take several days (depending on connection speed) to recovered.

In all I really like crashplan, it's a simple product that uses a bunch of clever features to allow backups to become an easy thing to manage and deal with.

Summary: Excellent file level backup solution

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