We moved into our new office in February of 2011. One of the first things we did was to get our lab back up and running (well, after installing the new fridge to cool my soda). Having heard good things about CrashPlan, we decided to give it a test run. The short version of the story is: it’s easy to install, administer, restore from and even easier to migrate to new hardware than I originally anticipated.
Environment
Just a quick review of our environment. We are backing up 2 Macbook Pro laptops and 1 iMac using the free version of CrashPlan. We are backing up to a Windows 7 box in our lab with a 16TB Drobo attached to it. Yes, we could have backed up each laptop to the CrashPlan site and not had to point it to our own server and storage, but where’s the fun in that? We may add that functionality in the future.
This is not intended as an in-depth review or detailed walk-through of the product. I was actually impressed with the ease of migrating to a new server and decided to share my experience with the product.
Installation and Use
Installation on all 4 machines (the macs and the backup server) took only minutes and was a simple process. The initial backup to our local server took the better part of a few days to complete, mostly because one of us actually has some 200+ GB of stuff on his 500 GB drive (I can “name fingers and point names”, but we’ll just say his name rhymes with Wurtis).
Restoring a file was as simple as walking through my filesystem in the CrashPlan GUI and selecting the file to restore, which restores the most recent copy to the Desktop by default, but it is easy to click and change which version and where to restore. I even did a restore while the backup was still running.
I’ll note here that administration with this version is rather minimal, as it was designed for personal backups, CrashPlan Pro is really where you would go to manage backups for multiple computers. With the version we have, I can see the status of all 3 laptop backups only if I log into CrashPlan on the backup server, and only get notifications for backups of my own laptop.
Migrating to New Hardware
Ok, so this would not have been a problem I would have to worry about if I had simply enabled the offsite feature and backed up to the CrashPlan site. However, there would not have been as much to test or play with had we gone that route.
The problem was our backup server which started to flake out on us. Since it is running on hardware that wasn’t exactly the newest and fastest when we bought it some 3 or 4 years ago, I didn’t even bother trying to spend much time troubleshooting and fixing. I just bought a new box from Fry’s.
Once I had gone through the 5,000 or so windows updates/patches, I installed CrashPlan on the new server, shutdown CrashPlan on the old server and moved the Drobo to the new server. I was anticipating re-configuring each of the 3 clients to point to the new server and having them re-sync themselves. I knew they wouldn’t need to start over on the backups since we essentially have the backups seeded on the Drobo. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was even easier than that. Once I started CrashPlan on the new server, and signed in with the same account as the old server, it showed me both computers the account was assigned to and asked me if I wanted it to take over (adopt) backups for the other computer. Why yes I do, thank you very much! That was all it took. Backups resumed for all 3 clients with no additional configuration needed.
Summary
As I said, easy to install, easy to restore from and even easy to move to new hardware if you’re using the onsite option.
thereedrobins 
And I can’t imagine who took up most of the disk space on the Drobo ;-)…Although, I do think I would have guessed without the hint.