Wednesday, March 31, 2010

CrashPlan - A perfect home backup solution

Crashplan is a perfect backup solution for home use. It is free, but the online backup service (optional) is not expensive at all. It supports most of your OS platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows, open solaris) and is really easy to use. I use it for all my machines at home, making cross-backups locally and also for backing up my precious data to Crashplan central.

Even thou Crashplan is a GUI  based application there is no problem using it on a X-less (Headless) Linux server. you install it in the console and then connect to it from your Mac or windows machine using a ssh tunnel. Ssh tunneling basically forwards a connection from a local port on your computer to a port on a remote machine and is as easy to setup as making a ssh to your server.
Here is an example:
ssh -L 4200:localhost:4243 username@your_host
This connects to the remote server as a regular SSH connection, but as long as you are logged in it will also keep a "port forwarding" from your localmachine on port 4200 to the remote host´s 4243 port.

Then all you have to do is to locate CrashPlans ui.properties file and add this line:
servicePort=4200
When you start Crashplan locally on your computer, it will connect to localhost:4200. Your SSH connection will then forward the connection (undetected by Crashplan client) to the remote host´s crashplan service.

Just remember to comment out the servicePort line after you are done configuring the host.

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