Comments on: On backups

By: Frank Farm

Frank Farm — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:02:10 +0000

Matthew, thanks for being so responsive and for soliciting more feedback on the UI. Please send me an email — my email address can be found on my website. I would be happy to provide constructive feedback on the UI.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:19:19 +0000

Hi! Thrilled to read you liked CrashPlan. In regards to our UI not being as good as it should be – we very much want to improve it.
Can you remember any task that you felt was cumbersome due to our UI? You know, things that should have been easy, but were hard do to our bad design?
I’ll take info back to UI engineers.

You’re right – we’re free in January for personal use, CrashPlan+ has a lot of nice features. Best is support & backup within a minute of change.
For the free version, you can manually kick off a backup whenever you want, it’s only automatic once per 24 hours.

By: Frank Farm

Frank Farm — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:10:12 +0000

Wysz, just fyi, after much research, I believe that http://crashplan.com is likely to be a really great similar long-term offsite storage solution. I’ve been testing out the home version and the user interface is not as simple as it could be, but it works and it’s much less expensive than Transport if your requirements fit. As with Transport, you can use CrashPlan to do a local external hard drive backup then send the drive to your backup buddy and have it continue incrementals across the internet. The home version of CrashPlan became free in (I think) January 2009. You pay for the CrashPlan Plus (CrashPlan+) version if you want backups more frequently than nightly.

By: Wysz

Wysz — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 03:38:42 +0000

Hi Frank, I wrote a followup to this in September. Short answer: It's not really worth it at this time, and I never got it to work well. For now, I'd recommend just using Time Machine locally and then copying your backup to a third drive on a regular basis and keeping it at an offsite location (friend, family, office). When my year of paid service is up, I'll be canceling my Transport service.

By: Frank Farm

Frank Farm — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 00:41:26 +0000

Hey Wysz, how’s it going with Transport? I’ve been pondering the same questions about offsite personal backup as you did in May. I tried Mozy and it works mostly very well on Windows and sometimes works well on Mac. Eventually I stopped using them because for 2 months they were unable to resolve a problem in which starting Mozy would cause the application to crash. I think Mozy is mostly reliable, but when it’s not sometimes they can’t fix the problem at all. Transport seems really too pricey to me. It seems that one should be able to duplicate much of Transport’s features on my own with a trusted friend or family member using a Time Capsule or Mac Mini set up with Screen Sharing over SSH, and that would be a lot cheaper than Transport. How did your 5 family-member setup go with Transport?

By: nbradley

nbradley — Wed, 21 May 2008 05:04:24 +0000

if by watching you mean reading, then you’re welcome.