A backup system using Crashplan software is available from CSE.

Essential information

• Physics has a pool of licenses in CSE crashplan. While we have these available, there is no startup cost; after they are exhausted, the startup cost is $55
• The per-year cost is $30 for each user (starting 7/2015)
• Must use non-sponsored funds
• The user is “tied” to your university x.500 account (ie this is intended as backup of individual data, not for a shared research group).
• Each user can backup up to 4 devices
• The size limit of backed-up data is not yet defined but should be “reasonable” (eg a few TB).

If you are interested in using this system, send email to us at net@physics.umn.edu, with the account string to charge annually, and we will get you set up.

<note> 10/2014 - This page is retained for historical reference only. Our crashplan server is now in a “frozen” state and we are not accepting new backup clients. We expect it to shut down before the end of 2014. </note>

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).

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