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general_tux
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Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 11:25 am

Hi everyone,

I am looking for a solution backing my parents Mac to my Windows server. My parents enjoy photography and have about 500GB of photos that they would like backed up at full resolution. I have been using Crashplan to do this for the last 4 years but, from the looks of Code 42's announcement, even this functionality of Crashplan for Home is going away. I have looked into several different software packages (Resilio Sync, Syncthing, Cloudberry Backup and several others) but I haven't found one that is setup well for backup from computer to computer over the internet.

Syncthing seems to be the best so far when setup with the backing up computer set to "Send Only" and the server set to "Ignore Delete" and "Staggered File Versioning". The biggest hurdle so far has been the setup process though since they are not very computer savvy. I wish Cloudberry offer sftp backups from their Mac client as that would have made things simpler.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a better way to backup a Mac to a remote Windows server?

Thanks!
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Flying Fox
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 12:16 pm

Are you using peer-to-peer only? This article claimed that there is no direct replacement. Perhaps time to research setting up an SFTP server, or roll your own offsite backup rotation schemes (not possible if you have a geographical distance limitation).
https://www.macworld.com/article/321864 ... ution.html

In general, it looks like the common alternatives being mentioned by various articles are: CrashPlan for Small Business at doubled the price, Carbonite, Backblaze, and/or Arq.
http://lifehacker.com/how-to-back-up-yo ... 1798320345
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08 ... next-best/
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just brew it!
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 12:29 pm

What version of Windows? If you've got Win10 you could install Windows Subsystem for Linux and use rsync, launched as a cron job from the Mac side.

For older versions of Windows there's still Cygwin.

You'll need a static IP or dynamic DNS service for your server, since the other system will need to initiate connections to it.
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codedivine
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 12:36 pm

I had some success in using Duplicati. It is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, OSX) and open-source software. It allows encrypted backups to local drives, local windows shares, over SFTP and to many cloud providers. You can setup jobs about which directories you want to backup and when, and where the destination is, and provide it with a password for AES encryption.

Disclaimer: The v2.0 is still marked as beta, but actually has been stable and working fine for me. But you may want to take that into account.
 
general_tux
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 12:49 pm

Flying Fox wrote:
Are you using peer-to-peer only? This article claimed that there is no direct replacement. Perhaps time to research setting up an SFTP server, or roll your own offsite backup rotation schemes (not possible if you have a geographical distance limitation).
https://www.macworld.com/article/321864 ... ution.html
Thanks Flying Fox! I hadn't looked into Arq before but I think that might be an ideal solution. I have an SFTP server setup already and was hoping to be able to use Cloudberry Backup with it but their Mac app doesn't support SFTP. I will look into Arq more in depth tonight and see if I can make it work.

just brew it!, my server is running Windows 10 and I thought about using rsync, however I wanted a solution with a client side GUI so that could more easily have my parents assist in troubleshooting without immediately requiring the use of remote desktop or ssh.

codedivine, I'll look into Duplicati as well. Their website seems a bit sparse with info but the forums seems filled with good information.

Thanks!
Last edited by general_tux on Thu Sep 07, 2017 2:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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llisandro
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 1:01 pm

If you don't need access, and are just providing a safe spot for their backups, Time Machine (as of Sierra) lets you back up to a networked SMB share.
 
general_tux
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 2:07 pm

llisandro wrote:
If you don't need access, and are just providing a safe spot for their backups, Time Machine (as of Sierra) lets you back up to a networked SMB share.
Unfortunately, my parent's internet speed is too slow to have this work. I have tried using these directions (https://www.bytemark.co.uk/docs/example-setups/time-machine-linux/) to a linux box but it wasn't viable due to their 5Mbs connection.

I guess I should explain my backup situation. My first level of backup on their system is Time Machine. I then want to backup just their important files to my server so that I can easily and quickly help them in the case of a failure. I then backup their data and my own machines' data to BackBlaze B2. The only part of the system that Crashplan has made difficult is the intermediate offsite backup to my server.

Thanks!
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Mentawl
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 2:18 pm

I had the same issue, carrying out peer-to-peer backups from my mum/sister/brother's PC to my little home server, and a backup of my stuff to an old HP MicroServer offsite too.

Best option I've found so far is BuddyBackup, which seems to do most of what Crashplan peer-to-peer was doing, with the exception that you don't seem to be able to set a time window for the sync to happen, it's always-on.

http://www.buddybackup.com/

Hope that helps.

T
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general_tux
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 3:11 pm

Mentawl wrote:
Best option I've found so far is BuddyBackup, which seems to do most of what Crashplan peer-to-peer was doing, with the exception that you don't seem to be able to set a time window for the sync to happen, it's always-on.
I just wish they had a Mac client. Thanks for the suggestion though!
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Mentawl
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 3:26 pm

Ach my apologies, missed that part :( sorry!
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general_tux
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Thu Sep 07, 2017 10:09 pm

Mentawl wrote:
Ach my apologies, missed that part :( sorry!
No worries!
codedivine wrote:
I had some success in using Duplicati.
I gave Duplicati a try tonight from one of my PCs and it seems to work like a champ! I will give it try from my parents Mac tomorrow evening after installing an additional 8TB of storage in my server. Thanks again!
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codedivine
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Mon Sep 11, 2017 2:21 pm

general_tux wrote:
I gave Duplicati a try tonight from one of my PCs and it seems to work like a champ! I will give it try from my parents Mac tomorrow evening after installing an additional 8TB of storage in my server. Thanks again!


One tip for using Duplicati. Duplicati will create a local DB file on the source PC. It will be stored somewhere in user's home folder. On Windows, it is under AppData hidden folder. It is better to back that local DB somewhere manually or using a scheduled job. If the source PC crashes, and your local DB is lost, my understanding is that you can still recover all your data but recovery is slow.
 
general_tux
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Mon Sep 11, 2017 2:30 pm

codedivine wrote:
One tip for using Duplicati. Duplicati will create a local DB file on the source PC. It will be stored somewhere in user's home folder. On Windows, it is under AppData hidden folder. It is better to back that local DB somewhere manually or using a scheduled job. If the source PC crashes, and your local DB is lost, my understanding is that you can still recover all your data but recovery is slow.
Thanks for the tip! I will be sure to have that backed up as well. I noticed that you can run a script after a backup, maybe I will add a robocopy batch file to my Windows machines and a rsync bash script to my parent's Mac to have this done automatically.

On a related note, do you have any experience using public/private keys with Duplicati and ssh? I have been able to get key files to work but I would prefer to have the key included with the Duplicati config. Each time I add the URL-encoded private key to my Duplicati config, I get an error stating that the key is too long. I would prefer this method if I can get it to work so that I don't have to worry about anyone accidentally deleting/moving the key file on their PC.
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codedivine
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Mon Sep 11, 2017 6:44 pm

Unfortunately don't have experience with the SSH keys issue.
 
Usacomp2k3
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Re: Crashplan for Home is going away, looking for computer to computer backup alternatives

Sat Oct 14, 2017 11:27 am

I'm finally getting around to transitioning around. I think I'm going to give backblaze a shot. Has anyone else transitioned already?

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