(no subject)

I purchased a subscription to CrashPlan+ this past weekend. We have been fairly good about backing up data in the past ten years. I was burned by bad drives in the late 90s -- i suppose this could fall under "things i've lost" -- and have since followed a moderate discipline of backing up to another disk at home.

Our server in Nevada, however, has not been backed up, and that's been on my worry list for a long time. As Christine and i started talking about our coding project, getting a software version control repository set up seemed an important step. Christine wanted it on the Nevada server, so this is my motivation to start making sure that system is backed up.

Thus my purchase of CrashPlan+.

Now i am backing up my laptop off site, so not only am i protected in the case of hard drive failure, but if there's a fire or such and i loose the local disk copies, there's an off site back up.

What's interesting, though, is CrashPlan's business plan:they give away the fully featured software and charge for the back up storage. Their software, however, would allow you to back up to a friend's computer over the network. Theoretically, we could use their software to back up to the Nevada server and back the Nevada server to the house.

It seems from my initial use of the software that it is designed to support a group of friends sharing diskspace and bandwidth and copying to one another.

I think the key is the bandwidth: when i was running the back up during the day it really slowed down our network access.

I can imagine two friends living at a distance, who could get together and back up on the same local network, making the copies as fast as possible. Then, apart, allowing each other to back up to the other's machine. I suspect this would not be full system back up (backing up to a disk at hand seems best for that), but those files one would hate to loose.