This looks interesting. Retrospect’s been sucking wind for years. Code 42’s Crashplan Pro is now offering similarly priced, multiplatform backup solutions. Furthermore there’s an expensive but not impossible online option. For a little under $500 per year I could backup my and my wife’s primary computers. (Most online backup solutions don’t offer nearly the storage space or bandwidth I’d need to do this at that price. JungleDisk, for instance, charges $0.10 per gigabyte upload and $0.17 per gigabyte down, as well as $0.15 per gigabyte per month.) I could also backup all our systems locally to hard drives.
The one thing Crashplan doesn’t seem to offer that Retrospect did is support for tape drives, but these days external hard drives are cheaper per-GB than tapes anyway; and I haven’t plugged in my DLT drive for a couple of years now.
Unlike most backup vendors, Code 42 does seem to understand the difference between network and local backup. They know you don’t just treat remote drives the same as a local drive. (I’ve been positively shocked at the ignorance of some vendors about this.)
I could still use a single Time Machine disk per Mac for local backup and restore of individual versioned files. Crashplan would handle the major disk and full system failures. I could stop swapping out Time Machine disks manually. (Yes, I’m paranoid. Running two independent backup solutions really appeals to me.)
What do folks think? How reliable is this? Does Crashplan actually understand the Mac file system, and can it do reliable restores? Do they have enough redundancy on the server to withstand failures on that end?
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