So I finally got around to trying out the Crashplan demo. While it looks promising in the long term, the current version has some minor problems and one major problem that rule it out. In ascending order of importance:
The first problem is that you can specify a file pattern not to backup, but you can’t simply select the folders you want to exclude. Thus you can exclude all your MP3 files but not just the ones in a particular folder. This is Windows thinking. On the Mac, file names don’t even have any guaranteed pattern. Even on Windows, though, it’s likely there’ll be certain temporary directories you’d like to completely exclude, regardless of their contents. Crashplan needs much more powerful inclusion and exclusion filters.
Update: I figured out how to do this one. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but it is possible to exclude and include individual folders.
The second, more serious problem, is that by default, the password you use for your backups is the same as your Crashplan Central account password, which presumably they have access to. You have to specify that you want a different data encryption password. Furthermore, where to do this is not obvious. Only an obsessive compulsive backup fanatic like myself would have gone through each and every preference pane, and thus found this option. Crashplan needs a third party security audit that worries about usage, not merely how many bits are in their encryption scheme.
But the real deal breaker is that there’s currently no support for backing up to a local hard drive. I seem to be able to backup to an external drive attached to my wife’s computer, but not to my own. That’s a pretty serious omission. Online backup is a good thing, but it’s only a backup for a good local backup. In 99%+ of scenarios restoring from a local drive will be much faster than restoring over the network. Network backup is only for the rare fire/theft scenario when all local devices are toast. They say they plan to add this, but until they have, Crashplan is not a feasible backup solution. I guess I could run Time Machine to backup locally, and Crashplan to backup remotely; but just how many daemons do I want doing repeated scans of my hard drive?
Possibly the Crashplan Pro version can handle this, but that’s a pretty serious upgrade. It seems to want a dedicated server, certainly costs more, and is way more complex. I’m not sure I want to go that far.
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