CrashPlan Pro is supported on Windows (XP or later), Mac OS X (10.4 or later) and Linux. At present we are limiting its use to one backed-up computer per faculty member, and will backup up to 100GB of data per person (these limitations are likely to change based on feedback). It's ideal for laptops but may also be useful for standalone Mac desktop computers (for most Windows desktop computers, we recommend storing data on our Active Directory file server instead).

You can download the installer from the “crashplan” folder under “Software Downloads” in MyPhys. Please notice there are two possible installers for Windows (a standard version and a 64-bit version).

When you run the installer, it will prompt you for your name and login details. For username and password, provide your Physics username (not email address) and password.

The Mac and Linux versions will also prompt for a registration key and the backup server address (the Windows installers have been customized with this information). You can find this information in a “Crashplan_Physics_license.txt” file in the downloads area.

Once it's installed, and running, you can choose what needs to be backed up (by default it will back up your user home folder), and how often. There are a lot of settings which can be changed, but most of them should hopefully be fairly self-explanatory.

Depending on what you select, the initial backup will probably take some time, so you might want to make sure this occurs while you're on campus, rather than from a slower home internet connection.

Further backups will continue whenever a network connection is available. CrashPlan will attempt to backup any changed files as often as every hour. Our experience is that these ongoing backups are fairly unnoticeable.

You can restore files directly using the same control panel, including choosing different versions of files from points in time (so, for example, you can use this to revert to an earlier version of a file).

• You can choose exactly what gets backed up, and how often
• Backups and restores can work from anywhere (with a network connection) rather than just within Tate Lab
• Your computer remains usable during a backup
• Vastly easier to restore files when needed

though also

• older operating systems (Windows 98, Mac OS Classic) are not supported.
• we pay for a client license for each machine we back up, unlike Retrospect which was “unlimited”. This is why we are limiting the use of Crashplan for now.

If you use virtual machines on your computer (eg VMware or Parallels), you should probably exclude the VM files from your backup.