Backing up WHS to CrashPlan Central Online Backup
One of the online backup solutions for Windows Home Server which I have been using for the last several months is CrashPlan Central.
Although there are other dedicated offerings for Home Server users, such as KeepVault and CloudBerry Backup, I find that these can work out expensive for my 500GB of data which needs to be backed up the the cloud (e.g.KeepVault $432+, CloudBerry Backup $75+). CrashPlan Central allow you to back up unlimited data for a flat fee of $54 for 1 year which works out at only $4.50 per month. The only drawback is that CrashPlan do not have an add-in for Windows Home Server and network shares are not supported – But all is not lost. MSWHS reader Daniel has written a post on how to properly setup CrashPlan for WHS where the shares are mounted for backup, (which is the way Microsoft recommend for backing up the files correctly) using the Windows Home Server built in Task Scheduler and a small .bat file.
You can read Daniel’s post here.
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KeepVault for WHS simply backs-up from the shared folder on the D drive and doesn’t bother with network shares. I know Microsoft recommends only accessing files through shares, but that is not what KeepVault does. But I’m not sure how important this is since PowerPack1 was released.
To my knowledge it is still unsupported and advised not to, I haven’t seen any changes in the PowerPack documentation. It’s just a method to play it safe.