Jay_S wrote:
Just to continue the off-site discussion, has anyone used Crashplan's free 'cloud' backup solution?
I have used it an it works well. It is a great "set it and forget it" type solution. At a previous job I was able to use my work PC with a big external drive as a remote destination. When that no longer was an option I started paying for their cloud storage and it works fine as well.
You can make the initial backup locally then transfer the backup archive to the remote location so you don't have to backup everything over the internet. This saves a lot of time and bandwidth. It took a couple of months to do the initial backup once I switched to cloud storage.
Some issues:
- The free version only allows one backup set. I like to have different things backed up to different locations depending on importance, but that may not be an issue for many. You can still back up to multiple locations simultaneously. You can have a local backup and a remote friend, or two friends etc.
- The client is extremely memory hungry. It is written in Java, which speaks for itself. If you have a big backup set you may need to manually increase the amount of memory the JVM is allowed to use. If you have a machine with low memory then Crashplan is not for you. 8+ GB is fine. 4 GB on a lightly used machine will do. Less than 4 GB is not going to be usable unless it is a dedicated file/backup server that doesn't get used as a desktop.
- The backups are not stored as usable files. You must have Crashplan to recover. If Crashplan goes out of business your backups are useless. It is good as part of a backup solution, don't use it as your only backup.