Ask HN: Alternatives to (locally hosted) CrashPlan?

Take a look at Arq. I began switching over to it before Code42 announced they were shutting down CrashPlan, and I've been happy with it. And if you do one-day decide you want to put some of your data in a cloud, this supports that as-well.

https://www.arqbackup.com/

I have decided to go with Arq and Glacier. Although Duplicati looks pretty good too.

Have you calculated the cost of a restore scenario?

It seems it's $0.01/GB or am I missing something? Pretty new to AWS.

You get request changes, archive charges, network charges, etc.

How can you calculate these? I have around 100GB

https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

Since restoring will be a very rare occurrence I think it will be very affordable. Unless I am missing something.

The AWS calculator is pretty useful too: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

"As of 21 November, 2016, Amazon has simplified their pricing for retrieving data from Glacier. You pay a flat per-GB rate for the data you retrieve. The rate depends on which tier you've chosen -- Bulk, Standard or Expedited."

https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/pages/restoring_from...

Any idea if Glacier cheaper than Amazon Cloud Drive? I'd started using Cloud Drive when their storage was unlimited, but I'm revisiting that decision since they've added storage tiers.

Thanks, for some reason I was convinced Arq was Mac-only.

It's not clear to me whether it's a point-in-time backup, or continuous like Crashplan, do you know?

It's incremental. The default schedule is to do hourly backups, but you can customise the interval and/or set up Arq to only backup on certain Wifi networks.

Thanks, so it's not constantly monitoring the filesystem like Crashplan, right? Doesn't it take a toll on the disk performance when it's scanning?

Arq sounds interesting.

Just for completeness sake, I see in their features section:

"You can back up to your own Amazon Cloud Drive, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive accounts, or your SFTP server or NAS"

So local options are only SFTP and NAS? do you know what do they mean by NAS? i.e. they support a branded NAS like Synology, or maybe OpenNAS servers? any info on this would be great as that would save me some time downloading the trial and setting up stuff just to figure this out :)

From the documentation, it's only SFTP or whatever network volume that Windows itself can mount.

https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/pages/strategy.html

I use Arq to do both local and cloud (S3) backups. The local backup isn't limited to any particular NAS or local FTP destination; mine just goes to a cheap external USB drive I have plugged into my mac.

> So local options are only SFTP and NAS? do you know what do they mean by NAS? i.e. they support a branded NAS like Synology, or maybe OpenNAS servers? any info on this would be great as that would save me some time downloading the trial and setting up stuff just to figure this out :)

The option is called "A folder on your drive or NAS", and asks you to specify a folder, so external hard disks should work fine.

Arq has an option to backup to a local drive. This should suffice your local backup needs. They have both Windows and Mac App.

I live in India and I realized about a year back that both Backblaze and Crashplan sucks on recovery. They don't seem to have servers nearby nor the option to mail a disk quickly enough. Here is how I do my current backup setup.

Time Machine as the default option that keeps chugging along.

Carbon Copy Cloner[1] mirrors my primary computer's drive (bootable). This is scheduled to backup every day around 11:00 PM.

Arq[2] does a backup to Amazon Drive every 5 minutes but is asked to pause between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM. I'm looking for economical alternatives[3] to Amazon Drive, as they are terminating the unlimited option.

1. https://bombich.com/

2. https://www.arqbackup.com/

3. https://www.arqbackup.com/documentation/pages/strategy.html

Do you know the details for the local drive backup option?

I saw on their features list that it supports backup to a local SFTP and NAS server. Any idea what they mean by NAS? i.e. they support a branded NAS like Synology or do they support "any" NAS as in support for SSH file transfer or something?

I haven't tried the local backup with Arq but that local folder or NAS option seems straight forward to me. When I tried that as an option, it just ask me for the destination. I guess you have to just pick one (i) on a connected local drive or (ii) a folder on your NAS.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ns2mqe5ytr3dpie/Screenshot%202017-...

Awesome, thanks!

Not a client suggestion, but if you want to run your backups unattended but not keeping the server running all the time, you can use the rtcwake command to make it sleep and then wake up at a certain time automatically. My NAS (an atom board) wakes up every three hours, syncs a git annex directory with a remote node and goes back to sleep. Very efficient.

Aha!

Nice approach. I never thought of that.

I'll have to take a dive on rtcwake but that could work as a semi-automated solution.

Thanks for the tip!

> so having a NAS turned on all the time feels like overkill

It shouldn't. You probably only need a single drive NAS. Don't buy a multi-bay NAS unless you need one.

As for remote connectivity, just use a good password and SSL. Most hacks are caused by people coming up with bad passwords (eg hunter2).

But when I type my password * * * * * * *, you can't see it. Right guys?!!

Yeah, definitely only need a single drive NAS.

What I meant was that a Synology or similar product would not really be what I'm looking for, not because it's not nice, but because AFAIK it's meant to be on all the time, which wastes energy, makes noise, prone to electrical problems (I have very bad electricity where I live, so I don't want to expose my NAS unnecessarily, even with UPS/voltage protectors/etc.)

The good password + SSL is probably a good alternative and since I already use 1Password a strong password is not a problem, however I would love to have a UI for it so I Can easily select folders/files, and either I would need to build it... or get a product that supports it, which is the why of this Ask HN post :)

> It shouldn't. You probably only need a single drive NAS. Don't buy a multi-bay NAS unless you need one.

A multi-bay NAS allows one to run RAID-1 or RAID-5/6 though — I think some form of RAID is important to avoid downtime.

While this is certainly not comparable to CrashPlan, for the odd Windows System I have at Home, I just setup the builtin FileHistory backup and use my existing Linux Server/NAS as a target storage.

As a second step the Linux Server already runs a more sophisticated, encrypted etc Backup to offsite storage, and I just added those folders to that too, but you can of course skip that if you are comfortable without a secondary physical backup location.

Ah... Windows File History. Maybe I'm dense but I've never been able to figure out how that works. Even when I thought I enabled it I never could make it work. The history would just be empty every time. I'm sure I missed something, but I just never figured out what.

A follow up question is then , can I restore those files to a non-Windows machine?

With CrashPlan I could backup to a Linux server, and if I needed the files I could restore them either to a Windows or to a Linux machine. Can I do the same with File History? or do I have to restore to a Windows machine? or even worse, do I have to restore to the same instance of Windows that I used to backup?

It just saves the changed files with a timestamp in the filename, which is good enough for me manually to grab a few files when I'm in a pinch and the Windows System is down.

I also have a python script somewhere (downloaded from github) that would keep only the latest timestamp of each file and then remove the timestamp from the filename, so kind of like restoring the last backup in full or from a folder. And I could in reasonable time rewrite that to get out a specific timestamp etc, without needing to read the database and metadata files. I'm not planing to do that as the default restore method, but I'm confident to always be able to get all data I need out of the backup without _ANY_ client software.

You can restore to any Windows instance, so to a fresh install, another computer etc.

I came into Crashplan because for me these were essentials:

- Encryption before data get to the cloud

- Multi-platform support

- Versioning - saved me few times

- Deleted files backup without time limit to keep them.

- No limit for size.

- Real-time-ness.

No one else offers above. And I need 3 boxes.

$10/mo/box is more expensive than Home plan used to be - but i think i will have to bite that $360/yr bill with a good feelings - because crashplan is tested and it works on all points.

The original poster is interested in a locally hosted CrashPlan - the $10/mo CrashPlan For Small Business does not offer local backups:

CrashPlan for Small Business does not support computer-to-computer backups, including:

Backing up to another computer you own

Backing up to a friend's computer

https://support.crashplan.com/Backup/Keeping_computer-to-com...

Yeah, that's my biggest gripe with this.

Even though $10/mo is expensive for my usage, I was also very happy due to the GPs points. However not allowing a local backup is a non-starter for me.

For cloud backups I already use tarsnap (albeit for a much smaller subset of what I backup locally) which I think is a bit safer/better.

That's what made CrashPlan so nice for me. Having a no-fuss local backup strategy.

I'm really sad CP decided to go this route without offering an similar alternative :(

Did you read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15098152 from just a few days ago? Not that it should kill your plan, but perhaps it's another thing to take into consideration.

> because crashplan is tested and it works on all points.

CrashPlan lost some of my data because of a Windows Volume Shadow Services error around April 2013, which caused me to look for alternatives. I hope you test the entirety of your backup set regularly.

I use Seafile (https://www.seafile.com/en/home/) (hosted on an RPi on my home network).

Then I back up the actual Seafile data files on the server with Borg (https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/), which has the wonderful option to encrypt the backup. The Borg backup is on the same server/drive. Then I sync the entire (encrypted) borg backup to S3 every night.

This offers self-hosted file-syncing (ala Dropbox) w/ an encrypted offsite backup (make sure you keep a copy of your key in a safe place though). Honestly, was a pain to set up, but haven't had a problem with it yet, and my test restores work great.

I only pay for S3 storage.

This sounds like an interesting solution, thanks for sharing!

Do you happen to have followed any tutorials, or were you forced to hack things together on your own seeing how you found it to be a pain?

It would have been nice if Seafile had a verified client-side encryption mechanism, but after reading about how they do it, it seemed like a horrible hack. This is why I looked into borg, which does have stronger encryption, allowing the data to be synced to a 3rd party (S3).

All that said, no, there were no guides for this. I quite like Seafile as an app, but wanted to make sure it's all (somewhat securely) backed up, so I hacked all of this together myself.

https://bvckup2.com is a godsend for local replication.

It's fast, light and predictable. The UI is insanely good. Been using it for ages and it's still in active development.

I know it doesn't fulfill the local requirement, but I've been looking into the Cloudberry backup product allows you to pay a one-time fee of $30 (per computer) for their software (a free version is also available), and then choose which cloud provider to store the backup on.

So you could use Amazon S3 or some other cloud provider to store backups and pay the tiny amount per gigabyte (depending on the storage option you choose).

I'd recommend a cloud-based solution as further backup option even if you stick with the local option. I currently back up my NAS using CrashPlan in case a disaster (fire, flood, earthquake, theft, etc) wipes out my computers and NAS. My NAS doesn't need to be exposed to the Internet: the software runs on one of my computers with the NAS connected as network file shares.

One of the solutions I'm considering using is Cloudberry Backup. There's a bit of initial cost, because I want the features of the pro version, but cloud storage can be quite cheap in the long run. It can run on a computer and backup network shares just like CrashPlan can. Unfortunately, a local option is not supported.

Interestingly, I had renewed my Crashplan subscription only a couple days prior to the discontinue announcement, so I have until October of 2018 to figure out an alternative.

I'll look up into it.

But I already have a cloud solution (tarsnap) that works great for me. The thing is I only backup a subset of my stuff to the cloud due to cost issues, so less than critical files go to my local backup.

I've been using Duplicati with good success.

I also wrote a tutorial on setting it up to work with AWS S3:

https://linuxserver.io/2017/07/04/how-to-setup-duplicati-as-...

This came up on the latest episode of ATP. They discuss some alternatives/options...

http://atp.fm/episodes/236

I'm not sure where in the episode the topic is discussed. I'd guess about halfway through.

Thanks!

I'll take a look.

If you're okay with a Linux server being up all the time, then just get a NAS. I like Synology.

Back everything up to the NAS, then back up the NAS to B2 or something. Synology will do that OOTB. Can't speak to other vendors, but I'm pretty happy with my setup.

That's my next alternative if I can't find a suitable (for me) alternative.

However I would prefer not to have the NAS on all the time, mostly because I only backup seldomly (since I don't really generate that much data, so losing a month or so is not that bad. Really critical stuff I backup directly to tarsnap though), and because where I live, the quality of the electricity is really bad. I get unexpected blackouts once a month at least, if not more, and voltage/current changes a few times a week, so even though I use voltage regulators and such, I like to be extra safe with my backup hardware, so the less time they spend connected to the grid, the better for me.

Maybe I'm paranoid, but I believe (can't confirm) I've lost data over the years due to electricity issues.

Ah, you and I are in the same boat. I finally pulled the trigger and racked up all of my network equipment and put everything behind a nice NAS and power conditioner. My backups run hourly, and I have ~5 devices regularly backing up to this NAS, so my requirements are a bit higher than yours.

That aside, the Synology is just a linux box with a nice chassis. You don't necessarily need it to always be running. Shut it down when you're not using it and boot it up when you need it.

I would love to have a setup like yours, I just can't justify the cost for the type of data I have.

I mean, yeah sure, my pictures and personal stuff are very valuable, but I already have a few copies in my parent's home, etc, and I don't produce much photos or videos anymore so my space needs grow very slowly.

However I would prefer to just have one more layer just in case.

I thought Synology products were meant to be kep on so I came to believe that startup times and such would be a pain, but maybe if they are not it could work fine for my needs... I'll definitely consider it!

Also.. yeah, once I get a nice chunk of money I too would love to have a line conditioner... but dayum those things are expensive. Btw, can you recommend a particular model you like?

Thanks!

This is the one I have: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000XJLLKG

It's not a dedicated power conditioner, I guess, but it does handle voltage irregularities, and it switches to battery and back fast enough to not be an issue in brownouts.

Great!

Thanks, I'll dig into it a bit more.

> However I would prefer not to have the NAS on all the time, mostly because I only backup seldomly (since I don't really generate that much data, so losing a month or so is not that bad. Really critical stuff I backup directly to tarsnap though), and because where I live, the quality of the electricity is really bad. I get unexpected blackouts once a month at least, if not more, and voltage/current changes a few times a week, so even though I use voltage regulators and such, I like to be extra safe with my backup hardware, so the less time they spend connected to the grid, the better for me.

In this case, why not a standard external hard disk over USB?

That's basically my current setup, however since I rather have a "good" HD (currently a WD Red) as an added layer than only a run-of-the-mill USB drive (which for several reasons I've come to believe aren't as reliable), I setup a cheap Celeron-based computer for this.

I still use my USB drive, but it's used much more frequently so I fear it might break some day. That's why I opted for the NAS-rated HD as a second layer backup.

As a last resort I also use tarsnap for my very critical files though, so yeah, USB drives are good but I wanted a bit more peace of mind on top :)

What's the Celeron-based computer for?

I share the same sentiment as you regarding off-the-shelf external drives — I believe they're usually bottom-binned stuff. You could consider getting a 3.5" enclosure and installing a NAS-rated drive in it.

Duplicati rules, as long as all you need are files and folders. It's no good for SQL, Exchange, Bare Metal, etc. though.

I was recommended UrBackup[1] recently as a selfhosted backup solution.

However, i haven't tried it so far, so i can't really comment on it yet..

Feature-wise it seems it should fit the bill, however..

[1] http://www.urbackup.org/index.html

BorgBackup has been fast and painless for me, though it misses your UI goal.

I believe Duplicati is the current tool du jour

Aha!

This looks interesting.

Just to confirm, you mean this Duplicati? (https://github.com/duplicati/duplicati)

Also, it says it's a client for backups which support cloud and local servers.

On their page it says it supports:

"Amazon S3, OneDrive, Google Drive, Rackspace Cloud Files, HubiC, Backblaze (B2), Amazon Cloud Drive (AmzCD), Swift / OpenStack, WebDAV, SSH (SFTP), FTP, and more!"

Only local options I see are SFTP/FTP. Do you know of other supported ones? I can't seem to find reference to other local solutions, so if you have more info that would be great!

I mean, setting up an FTP server is pretty simple and with such a client most of the hassle of actually backing up would be solved apparently, but are there any other options for local servers that you know of (just for comparison sake)?

Any input is appreciated. Thanks!

Yeah thats the one.

SFTP is SSH (i.e. it's not FTPS), so you don't have to stand up a FTP server :)

Ah.

I always thought SFTP was FTP. Will need to read up more on that.

Thanks!

blackblaze has a backup plan now. Also I use SpiderOak One for my backups. not to bad on the pricing.

Care to elaborate on the Backblaze solution?

I just gave it a cursory look at their product page, but it seems it's a cloud backup only and I'm looking for a local one. Unless I'm wrong and it does support local as well?