CrashPlan is Sweet

I was reading the Church Information Technology Roundtable (CITRT) spring notes recently and someone mentioned Crashplan for local backups. I decided to check it out.

Crashplan is a simple, cross-platform backup program available for free. It installs easily and uses login-credentials to identify itself with Crashplan servers. This is necessary because it allows you to ‘see’ other instances of your account on other hardware. Once you have Crashplan installed on multiple computers you can backup offsite in seconds. This includes attached drives as well.

Features:

• Encrypt and compress your backup
• Once daily schedule
• Backup selected folders/drives
• You can have multiple backup locations
• Backup both onsite and offsite
• Incremental and differential backups
• Many data retention options

There are more advanced (paid) versions available as well. However, for our needs this solution works extremely well. I have an extra drive at my house, 3 miles away, that is nearly empty. We now backup nightly to this drive over the internet. The initial backup took a long time (60 hours). Now though, the backups usually take minutes.

I am excited by this product because it is the last piece of our disaster recovery plan. Our DSR consists of an onsite data sync every two hours, an onsite full backup to freeNAS nightly, and now a nightly incremental backup offsite.