By Philip Churchill on October 07th, 2011
Setup WHS with CrashPlan
Using Windows Home Server with CrashPlan?
No, then you should do as it is presently one of the cheapest and best solutions for backing up Windows Home Server to the cloud.
Although CrashPlan does not have a dedicated add-in for Home Server users it is very easy to set up:
- For v1 users just follow this guide.
- WHS 2011 users just need to choose the drive letters to backup (since WHS 2011 does not use Drive Extender there will not be any corruption issues with using this method)
Finally do NOT use v1 of WHS as a backup destination for CrashPlan as this could cause file corruption issues.
Share this WHS Article with Others:
I have been backing up WHS 2011 with Crash Plan for a couple of months now without any problems. They even have a mobile app now.
I have been using WHS 2011 and Crashplan for several months now and it works great. The initial setup of Crashplan is weird just because of their interface. I did have a bumpy road using a USB drive on the other end (work pc). I have since put an internal drive into my work pc and it has worked flawlessly. If you have a lot of data, you will want to do an inital backup locally from the WHS, then re-attach the backup set to your remote Crashplan machine. That way you do not have to wait weeks/months for the backup to initially complete. Great peace of mind to know you have a backup copy of your data offsite! The best thing is, no cost other than your hard drive at the remote end.
@jdog I don’t understand how you did the initial backup. Could you explain more. I want to use CrashPlan+, but I certainly don’t want to have to wait over a week to backup my 3Tb.
I had the destination be an external hard drive on the WHS, then transported to work and copied the crashplan backup folder to the internal harddrive at work. I then used the Attach an Archive option in Crashplan. Hope that helps.
Actually, I haven’t had any issues with corruption when I use my WHS v1 as my backup with crashplan. This said, I didn’t use the D:\ drive directly, as I have stated before in my guide (http://www.mylifewired.com/686/properly-setting-up-crashplan-for-whs/)
I currently have two people backing up to my WHS v1, and currently had to recover some info with no problems.
Question, if crashplan should not be directed at D: directly, but use the server/share pathway instead, how do you restore if needed?
Same as you would recover normally on crashplan, just open up the program and choose what to restore.
So I guess read operations from D:\shares is fine and will not corrupt the file system, but write operations won’t. I’m working with CrashPlan V3 and I see a back up to folder option for the application. So I’m guessing that creating a folder on the UNC path and backing up to that location will work fine. I’m guessing…
It works fine using UNC path outlined by my guide. I have 3 computers backing up to my WHS v1