With the ever increasing amount of data I find myself gathering and wanting to retain there’s also the added headache of how do to backup it all up?
Backups are one of those annoying things that you know you need to do but can’t always find time to do them. On the other hand you always find that after you’ve deleted/ changed something you wish you hadn’t then spend ages hunting for a backup sometime realising that you don’t have one.
So I’ve been looking for a simple “set and forget” backup solution that backups up what I want without me having to worry about it and I think I’ve found it in CrashPlan.
After signing up for an account and installing the client on my machine it’s then just a case of telling it what I want to backup and off it goes, sitting in the System Tray on my laptop whirring away.
There are some really cool features I like about CrashPlan such as:
- The ability to tell it which Wi-Fi networks it can use for backup (last thing I want it using is my mobile broadband connection and I end up with a nasty bill at the end of it or using some hotel Wi-Fi that have data limits with extra charges).
- No data size limits – Yep you read it right. It doesn’t matter how much data you want to backup – size isn’t important.
- Versioning – This is really cool – If I modify a file the original doesn’t get overwritten on CrashPlan. Instead the original is retained and the modified file is also backed up. You have complete control over how many versions of a file are kept and for how long.
- Security – CrashPlan uses 448-bit encryption so no worries on that front.
- Ability to backup up to 10 computers from a single account – Yes like most households we’ve got more than one computer in the house and I’ve even got other family members covered from my subscription.
- Deleted files aren’t truly deleted until you tell CrashPlan – Ever deleted a file then wished you hadn’t? Well no worries with CrashPlan as you can always recover a file after you’ve deleted it (unless of course you’ve told CrashPlan to permanently delete it)
There are a host of other features I’ve not mentioned which you can find out more about at: