Things I wish I knew before I started with crashplan backup
Backing up to the cloud takes a long time. No, I mean a seriously long time. I thought I was prepared when I had in mind that this process might take a week or 2 - no, it looks like it's going to take 2-3 months instead.
For comparison purposes, I have about 350 gigabytes that I'm trying to upload and I have a 1mbps upload speed on my connection. I had hoped to get about 10gigs per day, but instead I'm finding 7-8 is perhaps more reasonable (it was even less when I was trying SpiderOak).
UPDATE: I upgraded my conx to fiber with a 5mbps upload speed and now things are moving quite a bit more smoothly. Looks like I will finish inside of a week or 2.
Saturating your upload speed can bring your network to its knees. You have to leave a certain amount of "margin" or else your normal browsing and streaming (even though they are much more download-intensive than upload-intensive) will be non-viable. If you do a test and find that you are getting 0.8mbps upload then set up your throttles on one computer for 250kbps and on another computer for 250kbps and leave the other 300kbps for normal browsing.
UPDATE: Now that I have the faster upload speed I'm leaving my network unthrottled and not having any difficulty. (I'm not sure why CP won't saturate the faster upload speed - maybe because I'm based in Europe and just can't get the throughput to the servers in the states?)
External drives should be hooked up according to mobility needs, not according to where you normally use it. At least in our normal usage pattern of external hard drives. My poor, longsuffering wife carried her external drive with her "portable" computer for over 2 weeks (and this was *after* another 2 weeks of our unsuccessful attempt with SpiderOak!) before we realized that CrashPlan had been working almost exclusively on local (C:) files to that point and was only now going to start working on the external drive. (Priority is newest files get backed up first.) It would have been far better to take a computer (even an old computer) and choose a location where it can remain in that fixed location and then hook all the external drives to it and let it take all day. Erm, all week. Erm, I mean, for the rest of the quarter. But the fact is while it is sitting there nobody is being inconvenienced by it. The other computers back up their C: drive and then go about their lives in a business-as-usual sort of way instead of inconveniencing people over a long period of time.
Think carefully about your priority of backup and add folders one by one. I thought globally about what I wanted to backup on each machine and selected it all. Then CrashPlan made the decision about what to start with and what to put off for 3 months. If I had been thinking about this I would have included all the root folders but then only added folders one or two at a time so that I got backed up what I thought was important.
Set up external drives in a different backup set. I'm hoping (!) that I will be able to adopt a backup set from one computer to another and therefore move my exernal drive without losing the backup that I've already (painfully) waited for. Unfortunately I have clear confirmation that this doesn't help - you can't adopt a backup set by itself - you can adopt an entire computer or nothing.
Don't hold your breath for support. They say something about responding with 2 days but only once have I gotten anywhere close to that kind of timeframe. If support were a major factor for me I would probably be looking elsewhere... :-(
If you have suggestions or feature requests go to the forums rather than submitting a new ticket. I thought submitting feedback would be a good way to handle it, but apparently feature requests are handled in the forums. (And they've got a pretty good system for it - go over there and vote for your favorite ones!
There is a way to check the progress of your backups on a per-folder basis on any computer in your account. Open the CP application and go to the "Restore" tab and choose the computer you are interested in at the top. Then click the checkbox next to the folder you are interested. It may take a second or 2 to calculate, but it will then show the total number of files and gigabytes that have been backed up in that folder down at the bottom of that screen.
You can change settings on any computer (even through firewalls) on your account. Open the CP application and go to settings and the "account" tab and click on "manage". It will open your browser on the CP web-site on the "My Computers" page. Click on the computer you are interested in and then on "Settings" on the next page. You can now change network throttling speed, scheduling, etc. remotely.
For comparison purposes, I have about 350 gigabytes that I'm trying to upload and I have a 1mbps upload speed on my connection. I had hoped to get about 10gigs per day, but instead I'm finding 7-8 is perhaps more reasonable (it was even less when I was trying SpiderOak).
UPDATE: I upgraded my conx to fiber with a 5mbps upload speed and now things are moving quite a bit more smoothly. Looks like I will finish inside of a week or 2.
Saturating your upload speed can bring your network to its knees. You have to leave a certain amount of "margin" or else your normal browsing and streaming (even though they are much more download-intensive than upload-intensive) will be non-viable. If you do a test and find that you are getting 0.8mbps upload then set up your throttles on one computer for 250kbps and on another computer for 250kbps and leave the other 300kbps for normal browsing.
UPDATE: Now that I have the faster upload speed I'm leaving my network unthrottled and not having any difficulty. (I'm not sure why CP won't saturate the faster upload speed - maybe because I'm based in Europe and just can't get the throughput to the servers in the states?)
External drives should be hooked up according to mobility needs, not according to where you normally use it. At least in our normal usage pattern of external hard drives. My poor, longsuffering wife carried her external drive with her "portable" computer for over 2 weeks (and this was *after* another 2 weeks of our unsuccessful attempt with SpiderOak!) before we realized that CrashPlan had been working almost exclusively on local (C:) files to that point and was only now going to start working on the external drive. (Priority is newest files get backed up first.) It would have been far better to take a computer (even an old computer) and choose a location where it can remain in that fixed location and then hook all the external drives to it and let it take all day. Erm, all week. Erm, I mean, for the rest of the quarter. But the fact is while it is sitting there nobody is being inconvenienced by it. The other computers back up their C: drive and then go about their lives in a business-as-usual sort of way instead of inconveniencing people over a long period of time.
Think carefully about your priority of backup and add folders one by one. I thought globally about what I wanted to backup on each machine and selected it all. Then CrashPlan made the decision about what to start with and what to put off for 3 months. If I had been thinking about this I would have included all the root folders but then only added folders one or two at a time so that I got backed up what I thought was important.
Don't hold your breath for support. They say something about responding with 2 days but only once have I gotten anywhere close to that kind of timeframe. If support were a major factor for me I would probably be looking elsewhere... :-(
If you have suggestions or feature requests go to the forums rather than submitting a new ticket. I thought submitting feedback would be a good way to handle it, but apparently feature requests are handled in the forums. (And they've got a pretty good system for it - go over there and vote for your favorite ones!
There is a way to check the progress of your backups on a per-folder basis on any computer in your account. Open the CP application and go to the "Restore" tab and choose the computer you are interested in at the top. Then click the checkbox next to the folder you are interested. It may take a second or 2 to calculate, but it will then show the total number of files and gigabytes that have been backed up in that folder down at the bottom of that screen.
You can change settings on any computer (even through firewalls) on your account. Open the CP application and go to settings and the "account" tab and click on "manage". It will open your browser on the CP web-site on the "My Computers" page. Click on the computer you are interested in and then on "Settings" on the next page. You can now change network throttling speed, scheduling, etc. remotely.
posted by Peter Bowers at 5:48 AM
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