I have been a major proponent of personal backups for a longtime. I have never discussed my backup strategy in detail (and will do that at some point), but I have recently been re-evaluating my backup system. I had heard about Crashplan before. It was one of the many places that offers offsite backups, but they also offer software that allows you backup to other computers, either local networked computers or remote ones. I never considered using this software to backup to my local Drobo though, until now.

Advantage of Crashplan

  1. Network supported backups - Although Time Machine supports this with a hack, there is a reason it isn’t officially supported. It’s unreliable. I have done it with secondary computers but wouldn’t trust it full-time. Crashplan lets you go to any computer, NAS, etc. no matter what OS it’s running.
  2. Space Savings - There are a number of ways CP saves space. It compresses files it backups. It does Delta Blocking so that only the actual bits of the files that changed are copied, instead the entire file each time. And it allows for quotas meaning that only a certain amount of space is used that you specify.
  3. Real-time/Scheduling - If you spring for Crashplan+ ($60 license per machine), CP will backup files in real-time (as they change). Because of the aforementioned Delta Blocking this shouldn’t impact performance. Backups can be scheduled as well, another hack-only feature of Time Machine.
  4. Smart Backups - Similar to #2, CP will only backup files that actually change, instead of just changes in date, etc.
  5. Data Integrity – CP verifies that backups are working and valid. Time Machine won’t let you know that it’s borked until you try to restore files from it.

Advantages of Time Machine

  1. Direct file access to backed up files - The best feature of TM is that you can access your backed up files from the Finder, which makes it easy to find a file or copy a file or do whatever.
  2. Restore - If your hard drive crashes and you get a new one, you can boot to the Snow Leopard DVD and restore your machine from a Time Machine backup. This is at least a time saver, and at most reliable and fast way to get up and running.
  3. Superior UI/Ease of Use – TM works out of the box on Snow Leopard. You turn it on and it goes. The UI is simple and easy to use. CP has a pretty complicated and almost confusing set of complex options and settings.
  4. Cost – Time Machine is free with Leopard (10.5) and higher. And backs up every hour with no hacks. The free version of Crashplan will only backup once a day for free.
  5. Apple Supported - It’s Apple supported, so you shouldn’t have issues with it being compatible or files not working.

To be, the three biggest advantages of Time Machine are cost, direct access to files and the ability to restore during a fresh install. With Crashplan, I would likely restore from a Carbon Copy Cloner image (which I take about once a month, but would start taking more frequently) and then use CP to restore other files. I am unsure exactly how this would work because I wonder if certain files would be locked when you are logged in. The UI for Crashplan is very complex, and browsing files to restore is not nearly as easy as Time Machine.

The ability to backed up to a networked drive means I can move my Drobo from MacBook Pro to my Airport Extreme Base Station and then be able to access my files when I am elsewhere in the house. It also means that all my machines can be backed up to one central place. Right now, my Mac mini backs up to it’s own external hard drive. The space savings means that I won’t need more space to do this. Better reliability and e-mail summaries is a big key. Regularly I right click the Time Machine icon in the menubar and find out that my backup hasn’t run in days. It would be nice to know this.

I have started using the free version of Crashplan on my main computer just to see how it works. It seems solid so far. I think I will likely use the two in parallel for a while until I get comfortable. But at the moment, all signs point to switching to Crashplan long term.