Excellent Backup Software!

OK here is a bit of digression from the usual programming. Anyone who has had the misfortune of losing data knows only too well that a reliable backup scheme is very important. However, reliability is just one of the important criteria. Another, IMHO, is ease of use or more to the point minimal intervention to keep the backup running stably. I have gone through many cycles of downloading and using many backup tools (paid or otherwise). There was always some problem right down from configuring the tool to backups failing outright for simple things such as locked (or in-use) files. When one gets busy this kind of manual intervention is precisely the kind of thing that gets neglected and then bam! before you know it you need to recover some important data. The title of this post refers to CrashPlan. CrashPlan is one hell of a backup solution meeting all the criteria I had been seeking. However, until recently CrashPlan could only backup up to a remote machine be it their storage server (per GB cost) or your friend’s/family member’s remote machine (FREE). There was only one thing missing for me to qualify it as a top backup software and that was backup to local storage. This just changed in the latest version of CrashPlan and now, as far as I am concerned, this makes CrashPlan one of the best backup software out there. I am not in any way paid to write anything I am currently penning. I just wanted to share because I had looked high and low before discovering CrashPlan and it is worth every penny. If you are a programmer or someone interested in document versioning then
the continuous incremental backups feature of CrashPlan (only available in the “+” version of CrashPlan—CrashPlan+) alone is worth the price of the software. I believe that this feature of CrashPlan is an excellent compliment to a version management scheme (CVS, Subversion, SourceSafe, whatever). Here is your typical programmer scenario. You code like crazy, but wait for a check-in until you have reached some mini milestone. However, you end up introducing some subtle bug since the last test you did (mind you you may not have checked-in after every test, there may have been many small tests since you last checked-in). What now? If only you could see the changes you introduced that broke the code. Perhaps you need to rollback to day before yesterday’s code or perhaps yesterday’s code. The incremental continuous backup feature of CrashPlan has saved me hours looking for those subtle changes that may have triggered meltdown. So there, if you are a programmer or, for that matter, anyone who needs document versioning you cannot go wrong with CrashPlan. I also use it to backup all my family data (photos, etc). Finally, for the ~~paranoid~~ security types out there CrashPlan encrypts and compresses all data BEFORE it leaves your machine to it’s desired destination be it your friends machine or to any external server so that you can rest assured that your data is for-your-eyes-only no matter where it is. Seriously, do yourself a favor look into CrashPlan if you are considering a backup solution, personal or otherwise.

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