Crashplan

Discussion in 'Backup & Disaster Recovery' started by qilin, Feb 6, 2012.

  1. qilin

    qilin Member

    Just ordered an HP Proliant N40L micro server and plan to try VMware and ZFS on it. Will set this up at home and I'm thinking about using Crashplan to do offsite backup from office to home. Crashplan also offers online backup, currrently offers $6/mo unlimited family plan. For the amount of data I have at home, this will be much cheaper than Amazon S3. Any one has any experience?
  2. Jason

    Jason Developer / Handyman Staff Member

  3. qilin

    qilin Member

    Just curious, how are you guys do offsite back up? I have a rev drive with 5 disks rotating. I am supposed to take a disk offsite every day with me, but of course often I forget to do it. I may do it once a week or even once a month, totally defeating the purpose. So I'm looking now for a better solution, i.e. automated one, so I can set it up and forget about it. Synpase is using S3, but that does not include all other office documents. This HP N40L has very good reviews and is onsale at Newegg.com for $300 with a free 2TB hard drive. At this price, I'm thinking of getting another one to place in the office, using something like Crashplan to mirror the two servers so I'll have a back up for both my home and office files.

    This microserver also looks like a perfect one for sunning Synapse server. I'm debating on what OS to use. I have no experience other than Windows family, but I'm looking at VMware, freeNAS, ZFS with RAID-Z, unRAID, WHS with flexRAID, etc. Anyone has experience may give some thoughts?
  4. Jason

    Jason Developer / Handyman Staff Member

    I have plans for an unRAID server for my digital files @ home (pictures, home movies, personal files).
    For now, I just put the files on more than one hard drive on my Home LAN. [not a great setup]

    For patient files:
    - I backup to my house [real time, via LogMeIn hamachi and Allway Sync ] - works OK. Fails every once in a while.
    - Acronis backup the server to a hidden partition.
    - I also use DropBox to sync patient files to many PCs (including multiple tablets and PCs at home).

    I am considering syncing synapse stuff to Amazon S3.

    My solutions are not fool proof yet.
  5. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

    Not true. Once you install your Amazon credentials, Synapse server downloads a backup script to copy and encrypt your other files to S3.

    Synapse-server runs under windows. Even if you install vmware, you still need windows.

    I have a HP proliant microserver but I haven't managed to find time to set it up ... as I also thought it would be ideal.
    The windows 64 bit server is not currently supported though you can get it running but there are problems.
  6. qilin

    qilin Member

    I meant other office documents on other computers or documents not in Synapse server folder. So far I've tried different virtual machines under vmware vsphere ESXi, including windows 7 64bit, Ubuntu, Openindiana with Napp-it and Nexenta, I played with ZFS RAIDz but performance/network copying speed was not as good as Windows, I haven't figured why. So I may eventually just run Windows 7 virtual machine as my file server at home. I put 8gb ECC RAM, 2x2tb and 2x640gb hard drives in it, run ESXi from USB falsh drive and all the VMs from the 250gb hard drive it came with. I had to use a faster Dell server in the office due to the requirement of my practice manager software (runs on MS SQL server 2008), otherwise this will be perfect as Synapse server.
  7. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

    Jason and I both use dropbox to backup other files. I guess there should be a way to symlink directories outside of the dropbox folder.
    You should really use a server OS such as windows 2003.
  8. qilin

    qilin Member

    Tried windows 2003 server, however, when copying a large 5GB test file, the speed will drop from 50MB/sec to less than 10 MB/sec. Windows 7 will drop from 100MB/sec to a relatively stable 35MB/sec. Maybe a NIC adapter driver issue.
  9. Graham

    Graham Developer Staff Member

    I should get back to working on a linux server again.
  10. Jason

    Jason Developer / Handyman Staff Member

    Alot of time.
    Very little interest.
    = Pass !

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