The Good Computer Guy Blog :: CrashPlan review

Tags: Software

Backups are important, as I wrote about a few months ago. But there's a new kid on my backup block - CrashPlan. CrashPlan comes in three different flavors - free (one of my favorite things), Plus, and Pro. Several things make CrashPlan unique. As I mentioned the last time I wrote, it's important to have both onsite and offsite backups. This is true for everyone, both home and business. I always like having multiple backups because I never really trust just one (and that's not just me - all of my techie buddies agree.) You want a good local backup for speed - nothing is faster than hooking up an external drive and copying back a file you deleted by accident. But you also need something stored offsite in case of fire, theft, nuclear explosion, etc. The problem with offsite, though, is that it can be very slow to restore via Internet, or to have to go somewhere to get a drive. The other problems are that it's a pain to have to keep swapping out drives and you also don't want to have to manage 2 backup packages/schedules - one for local and one for remote. Finally, although I've loved Carbonite for a few years now, I'm really not that happy with its performance and restores are a bear.

Enter CrashPlan, which solves all these issues. First, most home users will be fine with the free version. Business users will need to use CrashPlan+ at a very reasonable $60/computer for the software. CrashPlanPro is for enterprise users who need to back up lots of workstations (my business clients know not to store anything locally though - everything belongs on the server, right?) CrashPlan is as easy to install and select the files to back up as anything else. Actually easier than my old favorite which makes you jump through some hoops to get going. Then the difference breaks out - you can choose multiple destinations, including other local computers, external hard drives, network folders, or remote computers. You can even back up to your Mom's computer if she'll let you. All the different destinations are eventually synchronized. If you have a lot of data it's better to do a local backup first, then bring that backup to the remote location and seed the remote backup, otherwise it can take days to get the first pass done. Backups are compressed, so they take up less room than the original data. So far I've seen backups around 67% of the original size but that's heavily dependent on the type of data you're backing up.

After the first backup backups are all incremental at the block level. That means if you change a line in a massive Word document all that needs to be backed up is that one line, not the whole thing. Don't worry - CrashPlan knows what to do. The important thing to note here is that future backups are small and fast since CrashPlan is just backing up the changes.

CrashPlan takes care of versioning and deleted files, too. It can do unlimited versioning, meaning you can go back to whatever date/version you want. If you noticed that something happened to an Excel spreadsheet today, restore yesterday's version. Oops, still has the problem, go back to last week or last month - it's all there and it's all easy and fast to restore, either from your local destination or a remote one. The free version backs up every 24 hours or manually while the Plus version has continuous protection. They both can back up open files using Microsoft VSS.

Wait a second though - what about security? Who wants to let their important data out in the wild? Actually, your data is encrypted before it even leaves your computer - don't lose your password or you'll never get it back. The destination computer keeps a database of your files and your Mom can't open them without your password. The free version has 128-bit encryption (good) while the Plus version uses 448-bit.

So what's not to love? For my clients, I'm now offering a remote backup location. The huge benefit is if someone ever needs a big restoration, I'll have easy access to the data on my server (with the password of course) which I can then bring back on an external drive. I can also seed the backup here rather than waiting days for the first backup to go via Internet. Oh, and CrashPlan is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You just can't go wrong.

Comments

1 - Good writeup, CrashPlan rocks and really helps when trying to convince people that they need backup as its so easy to use.

Always a bit shocked to find most people don't do backups.

Posted by Gerard Vanschip-Miyama At 05:20:59 PM On 06/24/2009 | - Website - |

2 - Thanks... Easiest way to get someone to back up their data is to have them experience a major crash. That gets them every time (don't ask me how I know.)

Posted by Bill Greenberg - Good Computer Guy At 05:28:59 PM On 06/24/2009 | - Website - |

3 - Have you compared Crashplan to Cucku.com? I wonder which one does a better job of compression and data deduplication. They are both similar in funcationality and benefit but there has to be a winner here.

Posted by Kevin At 04:52:31 PM On 01/09/2010 | - Website - |

4 - That gets them every time (don't ask me how I know.)

Posted by laptop At 09:42:40 PM On 05/26/2010 | - Website - |

5 - I agree that backups are important for every computer. Crash Plan is also a good idea!

Posted by Kim Portert At 04:02:57 AM On 06/08/2010 | - Website - |

6 - I have a question that isn't answered by Crash Plan's website (no contact button). If you buy the "Seed Initial Backup" for $124.99, does that include 1 year of storage or is that additional? It's not clear, but I'll assume the 1 year of storage is not included.

Posted by Paul At 08:18:07 AM On 06/27/2010 | - Website - |