CrashPlan’s unique feature is the “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” of backup. What I’m talking about is the ability to backup to a friend’s computer, by mutual consent, which probably means letting your friend backup to your computer. This feature is part of CrashPlan’s emphasis on targeting multiple backup destinations from a single application. CrashPlan offers four classes of backup destination.

Friends
If you and a friend each have a CrashPlan account, you can exchange friend codes. When you enter a friend code into your copy of CrashPlan, you gain the ability to backup to your friend’s computer over the internet. This gives you offsite backup without the need to pay for online storage. You have to rely on your friend’s computer being online during the times when you want to perform backups, but as long as there’s enough overlap in your typical online times, this shouldn’t be an issue. More importantly, your friend’s computer will have to available online or in person for you to restore any data.

Computers
Any computer you install CrashPlan on using your own account becomes available to you as a backup destination. Destination computers can be on your local network or on the other side of the country. As with friends, the only requirement is that a destination computer be online when you need to backup or restore. In one scenario, you have a home server with ample free disk space and you use it as a destination for onsite backup. In another scenario, your kid goes off to college and uses a computer that stayed home for offsite backup.

Folders
A destination folder can be on your main drive or on an external drive. For example, you can let CrashPlan automatically backup to an external drive as an alternative to something like Mac OS Time Machine.

Online
CrashPlan Central is the name of CrashPlan’s online storage destination. The compelling feature of CrashPlan Central is the pricing. There are essentially two levels. The Individual Unlimited Plan lets you backup an unlimited amount of data from a single computer. The Family Unlimited Plan lets you backup an unlimited amount of data from any number of computers, provided they are all owned by you or by a family member. Both plans compare favorably with all the other online storage options that I considered.

CrashPlan works on Mac OS, Windows, Linux and, uniquely among the solutions I researched, OpenSolaris. The inclusion of OpenSolaris may not seem like a big deal, but that happens to be the OS that we run on the in-house web server that we use for testing. As a result, I’ve learned to appreciate ZFS, the OpenSolaris filesystem. In short, ZFS is one of the most reliable filesystems available, and you can have it for free with OpenSolaris. Put two or more identical hard drives into a mirror or RAID configuration (a snap with ZFS), set up your OpenSolaris box as a CrashPlan backup destination, and you have a very solid onsite backup solution. ZFS can automatically detect and correct physical hard drive errors that would result in silent corruption on most filesystems. With CrashPlan’s automatic archive maintenance running on top of ZFS, you should be protected from everything but physical destruction or theft of your onsite backup.

For now I’m sold on CrashPlan as our main offsite backup solution and seriously considering it for onsite backup too.

SpiderOak is a highly capable online backup solution, with competitive pricing in 100GB increments for an unlimited number of computers. Your first 2GB of online storage is free, just like with Dropbox. The application gives you extensive control of your ‘SpiderOak network’, which consists of all the computers that you’re backing up, and all the files you’re backing up on those computers. SpiderOak works fluidly across Mac OS, Windows and Linux, automatically uploading changes to any file or folder that’s marked for backup. Selecting the files you want to backup, restoring backed up files and previous versions are all easy tasks with the SpiderOak application. Beyond efficient online backup, SpiderOak has a couple of tricks up its sleeve.

First, let’s say you like the idea of synchronizing specific data across two or more computers (a la Dropbox), but you don’t want to have to move files and folders around to achieve this. With SpiderOak, you can set up a ‘Sync’ between two or more folders in your SpiderOak network. Those folders can be on different computers or on the same computer, SpiderOak doesn’t care. Once a Sync is set up, SpiderOak will keep those folders synchronized automatically. Want to do the same with another folder? Just set up another Sync. It’s like having multiple Dropbox folders, all of which are independent, so you don’t have to synchronize everything on all your computers.

SpiderOak’s second clever trick is a feature called ShareRooms or Shares. This feature lets you make a subset of your data available to others online. You set up a named Share that includes one or more of the folders in your SpiderOak network. These folders don’t have to live on the same computer. When you want to give someone access to a share, you give them either the login credentials or a unique URL. Your friend or colleague can then browse and download anything contained in that share. If you make changes to files or folders included in a Share, those changes are reflected in the online ShareRoom. Users can even be notified of changes via an RSS feed.

So why would anyone use Dropbox when you can have SpiderOak? Although SpiderOak easy to use, the process of setting up a Sync or a Share is not as simple as just installing Dropbox and throwing files at it. Contrast Dropbox’s no-UI approach with the 5 main tabs, 11 sub-tabs and maybe 50+ buttons, checkboxes, combo-boxes, text boxes and menus of SpiderOak. The absolute simplicity of Dropbox is a big win if what it does so well is all that you need.

We’ll continue using SpiderOak for its Sync feature. This will make it easy for us to keep files synchronized when we’re both working on the same project, without having to move project folders around. The only reason we won’t be using it for all our online backup is that I found a solution offering unlimited storage for the same price as SpiderOak’s 100GB package. If you have less than 100GB of data to backup, SpiderOak’s unique combination of features is compelling. I also find the company’s philosophy and openness to be very refreshing.

When you install the Dropbox application, it creates a special folder under your user folder – this is your ‘Dropbox’. Any files you put in this folder are automatically uploaded to your online storage area. These files are also accessible through the Dropbox website on any computer that has an internet connection. All you have to do is login with your username and password.

The point of Dropbox is that when you install it on a second computer, the contents of your Dropbox are synchronized on both computers. Make a change to a file in your Dropbox on one computer and those changes appear on the other computer. Install it on a third and the same files are synchronized on all three. Install it on your iPhone and … well, you get the idea.

Dropbox is clean, simple and easy to understand. In fact, it’s so simple it doesn’t even have a user interface, beyond a small set of preferences. It works automatically and seamlessly, on Mac OS, Windows and Linux.

I’ve installed Dropbox for three clients and they are all very satisfied. Two have both a desktop computer and a laptop, with files they want to maintain and backup on both. Instead of going nuts trying to keep both machines in sync by copying or emailing files back and forth, they just work inside their Dropbox and their files remain synchronized and backed up offsite. They get the bonus of a local backup by having their important files stored on both computers. Both clients have less than 2GB of data that needs to be backed up, which means they get their offsite backup free.

The third client uses Dropbox to keep specific files synchronized between two desktop PCs. One PC runs his CAD program, the other controls his CNC milling machine. He told me having Dropbox is saving him an hour of file sharing chores every day, while also preventing multiple version confusion.

Here’s why Dropbox isn’t a solution to our offsite backup needs:

1. We have a couple of hundred GB of data to backup and Dropbox gets expensive at that level.
2. We don’t want the hundreds of GB of data we’re backing up to be duplicated across all our computers.
3. We don’t want to move the hundreds of thousands of files we’re backing up into the Dropbox folder.

Nevertheless, I will continue to use Dropbox for what it does so well and to recommend it whenever it makes sense.

For a free trial of Dropbox, click here and we’ll both get an extra 250MB of online storage for free!

If you’re serious about protecting your data, you need both onsite and offsite backups. Onsite backups provide immediate access to previous versions of files and copies of accidentally deleted files. Onsite backups can also get you up and running again within minutes of a hard drive failure. Offsite backups protect you against less likely but more catastrophic events that result in physical loss or destruction of your data and your onsite backups.

Onsite
At Trevellyan.biz our onsite backups are implemented primarily using the Time Machine application that’s built into Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and later. This gives us instant access to hourly backups for the last 24 hours, daily backups for the last month, and weekly backups limited only by the capacity of our backup drives. We also use SuperDuper to duplicate the system drive of our Mac Pro to enable immediate restart in the event of drive failure.

Offsite

None of the above protects our data against physical disaster. If the house burns down, our backups are toast. When I was commuting to an office every day, I took a duplicate of our Time Machine backup to my office each Monday on a portable hard drive, rotating weekly between two drives so there was always a fairly recent backup stored offsite. Now that I work at home, we need a different solution to offsite backup.

We could rent a safe deposit box at our local bank and continue with the portable drives, but we’d need several more drives (two for each system being backed up) and one of us would have to remember to make the copies and switch them at the bank. This would introduce the elements most likely to break any backup strategy that has a manual component, namely human error and inertia.

I decided to take a closer look at online backup solutions for the offsite portion of our backup strategy. I didn’t consider anything that doesn’t run on MacOS. My search included Arq, Carbonite, CrashPlan, Dropbox, JungleDisk, memopal, mozy, and SpiderOak. The following three posts describe the solutions that I plan to use and what I like about each of them.