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Yes. Their business version does not support peer-to-peer. They do, however, support backing up to a local folder, and they have instructions on how to get the backup archives with your data moved from the other computer to a local filesystem (e.g. an external disk): https://support.crashplan.com/...

But the only offsite target they're going to support appears to be themselves.

What happens when you cloud storage company closes up shop and you lose your data?

CrashPlan is discontinuing consumer accounts

We're actually going through something very similar at work right now.

If you've not found https://www.crashplan.com/ yet, you might wanna check them out. They have BYOK options.

Not associated with them, just evaluated them a couple years back for a similar project.

Min

https://store.crashplan.com/st... offers the ability to back up to a friend over the internet for free.

While time will tell the extent of this, I have been recommending the following to my friends (copied verbatim from https://www.facebook.com/stuar... ).

As a precaution, here are some prudent tips:
1. Log into your Apple Account at https://appleid.apple.com/ and enable two-factor authentication if you haven't already (see https://support.apple.com/en-a...) .
2. While you are there, if you have not changed your password in a while, consider doing that too (https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT201355).
3. As the threats include the threat of remotely wiping devices, you can disable this on each of your iCloud connected devices. See Macworld's good article on how to do this for each device type: http://www.macworld.co.uk/how-... . Note that if you do this, you will also be unable to use the Find my iPhone/iPad/Mac feature. Until more details come out, personally I feel this is acceptable given the risk.
4. When you are logged in at https://appleid.apple.com/acco..., check to ensure there are no devices you do not recognise under 'Devices'.
5. For the next few weeks, periodically do a local backup using iTunes of your iDevices. See https://support.apple.com/en-a... and click on 'Use iTunes'. I recommend you also set a backup password, this encrypts the backup and stores additional information making a future restore easier.
6. As always, BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP. For your Mac, I would already hope you have backups in place. If not, my favourite is CrashPlan http://crashplan.com/ and I have used it for years/put many friends onto it also.
Time will tell what will happen with these accounts, it never hurts to take a few prudent steps until the community at large knows more.

Crashplan, amongst others, implements a backup scheme as you describe. I use it - some friends allocate drive space to me, and I allocate drive space for them. We back up remotely to each other's systems via Crashplan, and do so for free. The resultant backujps are encrypted, so they can't see my files and I can't see theirs.

Works well - I've used it a couple of times for actual recovery of files, and it worked both times.

Unfortunately, if Crashplan goes out of business, all of my backups are toast... You can't restore without contacting crashplan.com... This is something I understand and acknowledge but it's important to note for people who may not already know.

If the Crashplan servers get nuked, how does that effect the files stored on local devices (or remote ones at a friend's place)? Are the servers needed to un-encrypting or something? I've never tried to restore from my local devices without having the internet connected, but are you saying it won't work if I pull the ethernet connection? This FAQ questions does not explicitly say an internet connection is needed: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/faq/restore#can_i_restore_without_an_internet_connection

Crashplan Pro Enterprise does dedup. This is the version of the software you can host on your own server and encrypt on the workstation end. Linux, Windows, Mac and Solaris support.

http://www.crashplan.com/enterprise/

CrashPlan is free, but not open, and I think will do everything you need. You can backupto an external disk, over the network to one of your own machines, or back up to a freind who also runs it. Great key based encryption support. If you want, you can pay them for offsite backups (which is a great deal as well, in my opinion). It's cross-platform, and easy to use. Never underestimate the benefits of off-site backups.

You already can: Crashplan and Backblaze will do exactly that.

+1 for *NOT* using Plex.

It's a horrible piece of "software"... easy? yes... fine for a couple hundred videos, absolutely... start getting into MP3's or images of any substantial number... >1000 you're going to be in progress pain.

Also, it doesn't do back-ups... so the "dumping" part is still open for debate... and since there are apps that do both, alternatives highly suggested... but I have no suggestion.

I'm using Plex to manage a very large library and it's working fine. With the addition of PlexWeb I've been watching movies via web browser while visiting with relatives. I still prefer the OpenELEC (XBMC) interface for my main TV, though.

As far as storage goes, I recommend either NAS4Free or FreeNAS for DIY (I prefer FreeNAS's interface). I did this on a hypervisor system a couple months ago, details are at http://pcpartpicker.com/b/yxP.

Everything is backed up to the cloud using http://www.crashplan.com./ I can't recommend them highly enough.

I'm an ordinary home user who wants to backup my really important data in case of catastrophe. Besides lots of little stuff, by far my biggest data in this category is my pictures, and when all totaled up, it comes out to about 75GB.

I've been mulling investing in a service like Crashplan, which according to their pricing would cost me $5 a month if I was month to month, or about $3 a month if I committed to 4 years (!).

Amazon Glacier could offer me backups for one cent a GB per month. So for my scenario, that'd come out to 75 cents a month.

Is it just me or is this an insanely good deal for my consumer scenario?

I use a backup service called Crashplan. They have clients for Linux/Mac/Windows and support backups either to your local network (free), "friends" machines in a p2p type configuration (free) or to their servers (paid). Everything's encrypted locally and the client app is pretty decent IMHO. Best of all is that the paid plans are pretty reasonable - I have the unlimited plan for something like $100 a year, and it really is unlimited (well, they claim it is and I have no reason to doubt them). I currently have about 3TB up there so I don't see why you'd have an issue.

The way I have it configured is that all the machines on my network backup to both my local fileserver and to their cloud. The local backup has a higher priority so any changes get pushed over the lan immediately and then batched up and sent offsite over the slower link. Speedwise I can't saturate my uplink when uploading to them but I get a pretty consistent 1-2MB/s, so figure maybe 100GB a day? I think my initial seed took a couple of weeks. I've done a couple of small test restores and download speeds were similar (although in all but complete disasters I'd be restoring from my local fileserver which is obviously far faster).

Disclaimer - Not related to the company in any way, just a very happy customer.

Not to sound like a shill (I'm a fanboy, which, while different, will sound somewhat similar in practice), Crashplan has a free option available where you and a friend can both run it and can use it to back up to each other. If you have a photographer friend (ideally in a place far enough away that you won't be hit by the same natural disaster), this can be a pretty good option. It'll likely take awhile to do the backups, however, and you'll also need to have adequate hard drives on hand to store not only your own work, but also your friend's, which may get in the way of going cheap.

That said, for $140 (the price of a hard drive or two) you can get a 4-year subscription for their cloud hosting with an unlimited backup size. The company I work at uses their business-level product, and I recently started using Crashplan+ at home for my own computers. While it does take awhile to back up, it's painless to do so. At least so far, I prefer it quite a bit over Carbonite, which is what I was previously using at home.

Crashplan will do this with bulk storage. Syncing contacts, email, etc is a different problem. I found a guy in a nordic country who is my crashplan buddy (I have his backup and he has mine), and I also backup between my own computers. I could add more crashplan buddies in different countries but I feel pretty safe now.

I've been running CrashPlan as an online backup solution for my Linux system to back up all of my photos. It also has a feature allowing you to back up to another PC over the Internet. It's easy to set up so you can back up to your home PC and it's free (unless you buy the cloud backup service). See http://www.crashplan.com/

-Aaron

A previous Slashdot topic (many months ago) pointed out this program.

http://www.crashplan.com/ (Mac, windows, linux)

I've been using it for a few months and it has proven very reliable and useful. You can use it for free with a few unobtrusive ads in the UI. Thier business strategy seems to be to sell you storage space on their servers, but you don't need to pay a dime to use your own or your friends hard drive space.

You can set up all your pc's to backup to each other or certain locations (PC in your group/ Friends PC /External drive/local file folder) and configure what get's automatically backed up.
You can give out "referral keys" to your friends so they can store on your computer(s) and vica versa, however you can't see their files because you don't have their password.

Using this setup I have all my PC's backed up to my server. All my critical documents and family photos backed up off site to a friends PC and also to an external drive that spends 99% of it's time in a fire safe. I have also got my family in different towns and countries backed up to me.

It also does journaling so you can recover an older version of a file.

So choose a well trusted friend or family member and use crash plan to arrange your off site backups.

The company I work for, which is a leader in information security based products, has a lot of road warriors; me being one of them. We use a service called Crash Plan Pro - http://www.crashplan.com/business/ Crash Plan Pro essentially provides you with onsite and off-site backup with a secure cloud storage feature. Basically, for us road warriors, we have a client that is configured to backup certain directories on a certain frequency. It's pretty awesome; we never have to worry about losing data. My laptop does a backup of my C:\users\USERNAME directory about every 15 minutes; only the files that have changed, not a full backup every 15 minutes. At home, I have a Buffalo Linkstation 1TB NAS configured with RAID 1 (disk mirroring). It's an awesome home solution. I've had the NAS since 2008 and I've only had to replace 1 hard drive, which was a cost of 50 bucks off Amazon. Replacing the Serial ATA drive took about 5 minutes and then the RAID rebuild took about an hour. It has FTP and web services that allow you to access your data from anywhere.

1mbps can transfer about 10GB/day.

https://www.google.com/search?q=1+megabit+per+second+in+gigabytes+per+day

Uploading 1T would take you a few months.

I would suggest CrashPlan. They have a 'backup seed' service: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/feature/seed_service

Basically they mail you a 1T drive, you let it fill up with ecrypted backup data, and then you mail it back to them.

How do you know they don't have the decryption keys at the destination?

Because I'm using my own private key to encrypt the data. Research is your friend: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/articles/encryption_key?s%5B%5D=encryption

There's no guarantee that the key is not uploaded at some point. It's less than 1kb in size.

I have a second internal drive that is automatically synced with the main hard drive that contains all the important data. (No RAID, just plain old backup.) Moreover, all important data is backed up from one machine to another and to an online server.

For both of it I'm using Crashplan with a long-term contract. It's quite affordable and the software works really fine both for online and local backups. I don't understand why the "cloud" is not a solution apart from the obvious fact that you should avoid companies that use the word "cloud" too often. I've been using Jungledisk and Crashplan without complaint so far. Then again, I've never been struck by disaster so I don't know how easy it is to get the data back.

If you're storing a lot of illegal content like pirated movies then you'd probably be better off with choosing a European backup provider, but in any case you need to have encrypted online backup if you really care about the integrity of your data. No local backup can safe you from a flood or a fire.

How do you know they don't have the decryption keys at the destination?

Because I'm using my own private key to encrypt the data. Research is your friend: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/articles/encryption_key?s%5B%5D=encryption

Too late.

AT&T and Comcrap are both "you get a warning and throttled if you exceed 250GB" shops now. Meanwhile, applications use more all the time. HD video from Hulu+ or Netflix or Amazon streaming? Whoops! Telecommute? Oh dear. Set up a backup pairing with your family or friends, over Crashplan? Oh my.

4: Use an offsite provider. The usual stuff about losing access, security, and reliability of the offsite provider apply.

As people get more and more connected, the best way would be to pool with your friends and store offsite at their homes. A 2-4TB external drive is fairly cheap, and although some people might have more data, it should work to store the truly "cannot be reproduced" data (e.g., not ripped CDs, as you should still have the original).

CrashPlan is free for this kind of backup (as well as local backup), and supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris, which should cover most real-world users (although FreeBSD is specifically not supported).

Automatic offsite backup services like Crashplan, Mozy, Carbonite etc ensures your data will survive both media failure, theft and fire. You may also choose to keep a local copy of your media, because downloading hundreds of gigs over the net takes a while. But: I'd first put my money into one of these providers, and if I felt I still have too much money then I'd consider a NAS/Time Capsule kinda solution as a supplement.

And never, ever, ever exclusively store data you care about on DVDs and external hard drives.

For the first time in history, our pictures and videos can live forever - completely without quality degradation. It's amazing. And it's disappointing how few people take opportunity of this.

(Of course, you should take care to double-check your new computer can play back whatever media formats you have used - and convert if necessary. )

I would recommend you look at crash plan: http://www.crashplan.com/ It works great for me, I use their hosted service, although you could use crash plan to backup to a friends computer as well as their hosted service. Also if you start now it wont take you three weeks to backup your collection like it did mine (200gb)! I also use TimeMachine for local backups, that has also worked great for me. I used to use Mozy but switched when they changed their price plans.

http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/faq/security#what_type_of_encryption_does_crashplancrashplan_use

Alternatively, you can encrypt the data yourself before passing it on to Crashplan.

http://www.crashplan.com/

I'd love to check it out, but it looks like they are having problems with at least parts of their website (maybe slashdotted?).

That does not bode well for use as an online backup solution.

Try http://www.crashplan.com/ You can either pay to backup to their servers, otherwise you can backup between different computers running the client. Supports Windows / Mac / Linux / Solaris. If you are paranoid, you can setup a Solaris box with ZFS and run it on that. Also look at http://www.nexenta.org/ for a nice Solaris platform to make a NAS. rad

Crashplan is free for home users who back up to "friends". All you need to do is register the computers as friends and have them back up onto each-other.

http://www.crashplan.com/

I'm not affilitated with Crashplan. I'm just a happy end-user.

Actually this hacker "time capsule" sounds a lot like crashplan but far more complicated. Crashplan simply backs up one computer to another. No routers with USB or external hard drives necessary, just two computers with an internet connection and this free software installed and you're done. I use it to backup the laptops to the desktop, haven't had to restore yet but so far so good, it's automated so I don't even notice it running.

SugarSync might be good too but I haven't used them in a few years.

You might be interested in CrashPlan. Works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris. After I had my laptop get stolen I had no problem restoring ~50 gigabytes of data.

It's not really a Dropbox-type service, but it is useful as a backup software/service.

That's why I use CrashPlan, because even thought their *client* isn't open source where I can read it, their program lets me use servers under my control to see exactly what they're writing.(*) I'm happy with that. They also have different levels of passwords: lazy let-them-handle-it, or heres-my-half-of-the-key, but I keep the other half.


(*) Of course w/o source, they could be writing to their servers in a different or a decryptable format, I've not sampled the wire to see. But I trust that they're lazy and I can already see that they can encrypt locally -- I don't expect (but they could) that they'll create a totally different module just to send data to their own servers.

I could use their program for free with only my servers, or just run rsync myself. But if I'm that paranoid I shouldn't have my data connected to the internet anyway.

Just saw this tool over on Lifehacker: http://www.crashplan.com/

When uploading to photo sharing sites - beware!
I just finished moving my photo collection OUT of the cloud and I have to say, getting my 33,000+ photos BACK from Flickr (which is relatively open, as cloud photo services go) was not an easy task.
Cloud photo storage is plagued by compression and data loss (picasa), by warrantless unrecoverable deletion (Flickr - of a paid account! and obviously - Facebook) and other reliability/survivability problems.

Personally, as an avid photographer, I can't sleep soundly unless my photos are backed up in at least three places, one of the offsite. I accomplish this using a local mirrored drive, and the great cloud backup service - crashplan.
A mirrored drive would be tricky in your case, but you could use a USB hard drive connected to a family member/friends always-on computer. Back up to that using either the crashplan client (which is free for such uses, and works great) or rsync, syncback or any other homebrew solution. Pair that with a cloud backup service, and you should be fine.

Most importantly, never relay on the cloud as your single backup strategy - the internet is full of horror stories of people who THOUGHT they had everything backed up in the cloud... a USB drive sitting at a friends place is much easier to verify.

Try CrashPlan http://b5.crashplan.com/landing/index.html

I tried half a dozen online backup services before settling on this one, as it's the only one that was stable and not too resource-hungry on Windows. I also ran numbers vs. S3/Jungledisk and for the amount of data I store (~50GB) CrashPlan was much cheaper.

They also have backup agents for Win/Mac/Linux.

I was researching this earlier today and found something called CrashPlan, but admittedly I haven't had time to read about it yet. Could be useful? Supports Win/OSX/Linux. http://www9.crashplan.com/landing/index.html

Jungledisk/Amazon S3 beats the hell out of Mozy/MozyPro/Carbonite, neither of which can run on Linux (Jungledisk *can*).

That's why I've decided that, sometime very soon, I'll be signing up for an account at CrashPlan; not only does it support Linux, but you can have them ship a terabyte drive to you for seeding your initial backup, and I can get "unlimited" storage for 4.50$US/month, which is far more economical than S3-type solutions, with my 1.2 TB of data. :)

I use CrashPlan. I set it up for my family and you can then backup to their PCs and they can backup to you for off-site backup (via Invites), likewise, you can still backup to an external drive internally. I've been using this method the past year and its been fabulous.

Like most people, I have a small amount of truly irreplaceable content (documents, pictures) and a whole bunch of "it'd be annoying if I lost that" content (music, movies). One of the really convenient things about this split: the truly irreplaceable stuff is not very large. My docs and pictures occupy about 15 GB, and most of that is pictures.

I have an external hard drive where I back up everything at least nightly. This protects me from accidental deletions and a failed hard drive. It doesn't protect against fire or theft, though.

Services like Mozy and Carbonite offer off-site backup for about $5/month (there are many others -- these are the two best known, I think). I could string together something with a spare drive and a friend, but frankly, it would take a year or two before that approach matched the cost of Mozy et al., and frankly, I just don't WANT to worry about this crap. I'll pay the $60/year to make it someone else's problem.

One interesting option: Crash Plan at http://www4.crashplan.com/consumer/index.html . They offer free backups to friends' machines, and paid backups to their own fileservers. Sounds like the best of both worlds, but I haven't gotten around to trying it yet.

Everyone should take a look-see at CrashPlan - free app that runs in the background on macs, pcs, and linux, and lets you back up to/from any of them. Including (and this is the good part) a friend's computer over the internet. You and a friend each do initial backups to external drives for speed, then swap drives, take them to your respective houses, and plug 'em in. Now Crashplan does incremental backups offsite (and onsite too if you want). Keeps multiple versions of files, regularly checks for data integrity, encrypts - its the backup solution you'd design. The only thing that it won't do is let you restore to a bare drive and make it bootable (at least on a mac or windows, haven't tried linux.) And no, not a shill for the company, just a very very satisfied customer. CrashPlan rocks, *especially* for a free app.

I have heard about this site and it looks darn easy to use:

http://www.crashplan.com/

They support Win, MacOS and Linux

If you have a "buddy" to store your backups then it'll be free otherwise to store stuff on their servers they charge a fee for it.

Darkk

I've been using CrashPlan on my OS X machines for quite awhile, and it's been working nicely. It's not free (for the person that wants to do a backup), but they do have Windows, Mac and Linux clients. And it's completely free to run on machines that will only run as backup destinations.

It can't do your photopoll stuff, as far as I know, but the rest seems fine.

CrashPlan is an excellent option: supports Windows, OS X, and Linux, backups to other computers you own or trust (or even to CrashPlan servers, if you prefer), everything is encrypted, responsive dev team, etc, etc. Check out the video.

CrashPlan is an excellent option: supports Windows, OS X, and Linux, backups to other computers you own or trust (or even to CrashPlan servers, if you prefer), everything is encrypted, responsive dev team, etc, etc. Check out the video.

CrashPlan is a really nice option IMO. You can backup your stuff to multiple friends' computers, and the files are of course encrypted (Blowfish, I think) before they're transferred over the network. You pay for a license but your friends don't, which is nice. Very affordable, too.

What about something like CrashPlan, JungleDisk, or even Mozy? I haven't used these, but am seriously considering adding one of them to my existing backup system. CrashPlan lets you decide who hosts your data (them, a friend with free disk space, whatever); JungleDisk relies on Amazon's S3 service, and Mozy is its own thing...