We have been using CrashPlan for our home computer backups for nearly 8 years. During that time, it has come in handy on a couple of occasions when I needed to restore a file, or was transferring data to a new computer. Mostly, it sits in the background unnoticed. Backup software is like that. It’s like homeowners insurance for data. You have it and you hope that you don’t have to use it.
This weekend, I was making my way through a bunch of tasks that I’d been meaning to take care of for a while. I was getting my new Mac Mini setup the way I wanted it. I also knew that Kelly’s MacBook Air was behind on its system updates. So on Saturday evening, I set about running an update on her laptop.
By Sunday morning, I knew something had gone wrong. The OS upgrade to BigSur kept getting stuck at the “Less than a minute remaining” mark, and would sit there for hours. Everything I found online said this had happened to many people. Of course it would happen when I was upgrading Kelly’s laptop instead of my own. The only solution was a clean install.
I already had a bootable thumb drive with Big Sur, so I booted from the thumb drive and did the clean installation. It finished smoothly. I keep a set of “bootstrapping” notes in Apple’s Notes1 app and the first thing I did after the installation completed was go to my bootstrapping checklist. The first thing on my list after completing a clean install is to install CrashPlan and restore data, if necessary. I got CrashPlan installed, and started a restore of data, and a couple of hours later, all Kelly’s data was back, she had Big Sur running on her laptop and was ready to go.
And I breathed a sigh of relief.
Back in 2017, CrashPlan did away with their individual plans. If you stuck with them, you moved to CrashPlan Pro. At the time, I decided to stick with CrashPlan for a several reasons, and this weekend proved out the value of that decision. We currently have 3 computers that are backing up to CrashPlan2 and I feel good that the data is there if I need it, or if something goes wrong. CrashPlan has always been easy to use, easy to restore data when I need it, and once again, it came to the rescue for me this weekend when I needed to do a clean install and full data-recovery. It also helps to have a fast fiber optics Internet connection so that it doesn’t take long to restore all that data.
So, nearly 8 years after first starting with CrashPlan, it is still proving its value. I’m glad I stuck with it, and I still recommend it to others looking for cloud backup solutions.
- Why Apple Notes and not Evernote? Apple Notes is part of a clean system install, and once my iCloud account is connected, the notes are there. I don’t need to install any other software at this point, so I have access to what I need to finish bootstrapping the rest of the installation. ↩
- As my new Mac Mini acts as a kind of home server, in addition to backing up to CrashPlan, I have an external drive on the machine that is setup with Time Machine backups so that I can restore locally, if needed. That external drive is not backed up to CrashPlan, but the rest of the system is, so is provides a level of redundancy in data protection. ↩
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