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Crashplan refugee


Edward

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So Crashplan, which I have been using for years, has decided to give up on their retail clients - concentrating on their 'business' clients (more expensive and less functionality so far as I can see).

 

Crashplan are giving two months free beyond whatever expiration a customer has - in my case this takes me to August 2018.  However within a week of their announcement I start getting various major errors (no inbound connections, limited outbound connections and severe throttling).  Must have been a coincidence (!) but anyways makes me now need to put in place different plans. </rant>

 

So I was wondering if CloudDrive (CD) can be used instead, particularly as I have various storage (google, onedrive etc) available.

 

My cloud backup is currently about 2.2tb

 

So my wish list:

 

- upload to the cloud the 2.2tb - with room to grow.

- decide what data is backed up to the cloud - most of my local data is not 'critical' - a nuisance to lose but life would continue.

- duplicate all data (so not reliant on one provider) - which would I assume mean I need 4.4tb storage.

- ensure the CD pool is up even if one provider is down (i.e. auto switch to the duplicate data).

- Ideally the duplication transmission occurs 'provider to provider' rather than via my local machine.

- fully encrypt all data - both in its transmission and end storage - must simply be a secure blob from the provider's point of view.

- deduplication (I often move large folders around)

 

I already have DrivePool so I would be able to integrate with that nicely.  Not sure if I would create a new pool (for the cloud stuff) or simply add the cloud drives to the existing pool. 

 

One other thing I do with Crashplan is to have several computers (locally and externally) back up to my local server.  This is beyond the scope of Covecube but would highly appreciate any suggestions of how I can replicate this functionality.  I'm thinking perhaps a mixture of rsync and a vpn?  Or perhaps I can purchase a multi CD licence and sync things somehow (locally and externally - two machines 13k miles away!).

 

I did try CD a short while ago but ran out of time, so I guess I need to purchase CD now.

 

cheers

Edward

 

 

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Pretty much dead on for most of this.

 

For the trial period, check you email. I've created a trial extension for you, so you should have some more time to play around with stuff before committing to a purchase.

 

 

The only issue with this, is the deduplication. We don't do this.  And you'd need a server OS to do this on the drives themselves, and ... there are some issues with deduplication.

 

 

As for using the pool, you can do that, and the latest betas include hierarchical pooling, so you can keep a copy on a local pool and one on a clouddrive pool, and pool both so that DrivePool handles the duplication.

 

As for backing up to the local server, there are a couple of options for that:

  • File History Backup *may* work to do this.
  • Veeam Endpoint Backup is free, and should let you do this.
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Christopher

 

Thanks very much, most appreciated.

 

Couple of quick Qs if I may?

 

- What is the optimum way of organising the DrivePool? Create a new pool for the cloud stuff or simply add the cloud pools to the existing pool?  In either case how do I ensure that data in the cloud is the backup and not live data being used? Or should I just add to the existing pool and let the balancers and the local caching just do its stuff with no hit on (perceived) performance?  I have about 75m downstream bandwidth with no data cap.

 

- Is versioning enabled either in CD or DP?

 

The Veeam app looks very interesting.

 

regards

Edward

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You're very welcome!

 

Versioning is not handled by our software at all.  

That said, Shadow Copy/VSS does work on StableBit CloudDrive, because it is a block based solution. So VSS based Previous Versions does work on the drive. 

But VSS is a file system thing and very deeply integrated and HORRIBLY documented. Implementing it in StableBit DrivePool would require reverse engineering it and extensive testing.  Something that would be incredibly time consuming, and may still not work right.

 

 

As for the optimal way to organize the pool, you knows that's a loaded question, right? :)

If you want a "realtime" sync of local and cloud data.... 

 

Create a pool with local disks, and ONLY the local disks.  

If you want to use multiple CloudDrive disks, you can do so. Either create a single disk or create a bunch and create a pool with *just* the cloud disks. 

 

Then add both of these pool to new pool (so that it has the local and cloud pools in it).

Then enable duplication on the top level pool.

 

You can then enable duplication on the lower level pools (at least in the most recent internal betas), so that you can control/micromanage the file locations.

 

The internal betas also ALWAYS prioritize local disks for access over the cloud disks, to minimize latency and bandwidth usage. 

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Thanks Chris

 

Since I posted last time I created 3 onedrive drives (totalling 2.2tb) and added that to my existing pool.  I got terribly lost trying to work out how to do things like balancing and duplication.  :P   So I removed them and created a new (z:) pool just with the cloud drives.  I was just researching how to backup things to this new clouddrive.  Things like Allways Sync (which I know well) and opendedup were on my radar.  However you mention creating a new pool encompassing the two pools (which I did not know was possible) is something I need to look at and see if it achieves what I want.  Let me think on that.

 

Allways Sync I like as it 'just works'.  It does not have dedup and versioning but does allow deletions not to be propagated which is useful. 

 

I had another look at Crashplan and see that I can get 75% of their business account for the year following expiry of my account.  Given that I still have about a year left on my plan it will only cost me $30 for two years of their business plan. So I may keep that as well as keep clouddrive (hey, one can't have too many backups!).  I'll probably switch the backups from my local drives rather than the DrivePool so as to get round the shadow copy issues we spoke about (via a recent ticket).

 

I thought my google accounts had 1tb attached to them but find it is only 15gb which is pretty useless for my purposes.  So I'm stuck with onedrive for now - unless you know of some place that still does not charge a fortune?  I really need an university account with 1pb of ftp storage.  :D

 

Anyway thanks again for your time on this.

 

Edward

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Yeah, the hierarchical pooling was added somewhat recently, in the internal betas, and Alex (the developer) has made some changes recently that makes it *really* nice for managing your data this way.

 

 

 

But yeah, it can get very complex, very quickly.  We definitely need to expand the manual to cover this feature in great detail. 

 

 

As for Crashplan, yeah, the business stuff is nice. But not quite as good as the personal plans.

 

 

And Google has been changing a bunch of things lately, so this doesn't surprise me, one bit.  They have business plans, and apparently don't enforce their limits, but that's "for now", unless you want to have 5 accounts paid each month.

 

 

As for the PB of FTP storage, if you find something that doesn't break the bank, let me know! Because my 60+ TB of data (and then duplicated) is waay to big for most of the solutions we support currently.  It really sucks for me. :(

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I’m also affected from CrashPlan’s shutdown of their consumer service (using their family plan since 6 years). But I don’t consider using CloudDrive for an alternative backup solution.

 

I use CD (together with DP) for what I think it is intended to be used, as a perfect solution to securely store data in the cloud but in a way that I still can directly access them.

 

Sure could a cloud drive or a pool be used as a destination by any (local) backup solution, but I guess that might have a negative performance impact, especially if the backup solution should do things like versioning or deduplication and needs to go through the CD/PD software layers in order to get the backup into the cloud.

 

Therefore I’m evaluating backup solutions that are designed to target cloud storages “directly†(e.g. Duplicati, CloudBacko, MultiCloudBackup or Arq Backup). Another good CrashPlan alternative might be Idrive. They currently have a great offer for CrashPlan users (I will probably take it).

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