On my quest for an offsite backup solution, I discovered CrashPlan. My friend and I have been using the CrashPlan trial for about 20 days now to backup our files to each other. Here are the key features that have set CrashPlan apart:

CrashPlan is a product, not a service – Although CrashPlan offers an optional service called CrashPlanCentral – an online storage facility – it itself is software product that can be purchased for a one time amount of $20.  The tradeoff to CrashPlan being a product is that it requires you and your friend to provide the storage space for your backups.  I psychologically prefer to spend money on tangible gadgets that on intangible services, so I happily purchased a LaCie 1TB NAS device to compliment both CrashPlan and Leopard’s new TimeMachine (more on this in the following post).

Multi-Platform support – At home, I have a MacBook, a Windows 2003 Server, and an Ubuntu Linux VM – each of which I have been successfully running CrashPlan on. Although the Linux version is still in beta, I have encountered no issues with it, only I had to set up my startup scripts manually as they are not yet provided.

Backup locally as well as to a friend – Instead of backing up to a cloud, in which would take days to restore, my backups go both to my local NAS device attached to my Ubuntu Linux VM and to a friend of mine also running CrashPlan. In the case of a disaster, I could simply go to his house and restore as quickly as his home network allows. One caveat regarding using NAS – NAS works only with Mac OS X or Linux. Supposedly with some uber Windows administration skills, the CrashPlan service account (default is the Local System account) can be setup to have networking privileges at boot time.