I am hoping to gather opinions regarding the pro's and con's of various backup software. Searching the forums suggests that Crashplan, Bit Torrent Sync and rsnapshot  are very popular but I am probably missing some.

1. Bit Torrent Sync appears to be a really cool version of DropBox but I want daily, weekly and monthly backups not synced files.

2. Crashplan offers cloud storage as well as local and WAN backups. I am presuming that daily, weekly and monthly versions would be included but uncertain.

3. rsnapshot offers local and WAN backups but no cloud storage. However creating daily, weekly and monthly snapshots is easily automated. This seems to be what I want but would appreciate other opinions.

 

Any comments regarding ease of installation, upgrading, stability, usability etc. for theses (and other) options?

 

 

 

I can only comment on Crashplan because that's what I use.

 

You can make multiple backup sets in Crashplan and change the Frequency and Versioning setting for each set. See the screen grab below for an idea of what you can do with it...

 

 

Highly recommended, I've had no issues at all.

Thanks. Thinking this through it seems that the only practical way to b/u 10's of Tbytes is to another (probably off site) unRAID server. Is that what you do or something else?

Also a CrashPlan (cloud) user for more than 2 years. It fulfils my requirements of having a backup at a remote location as well as having versions of my files. Personally I see this as a “disaster recovery” alternative since I have backups on my local backup server as well as on a dedicated set of disks on my main server (but none of these handle different file versions).

 

You can use CrashPlan for local backups and it works well but the design of the app is for cloud backup and local backups is a “bonus feature”.

CrashPlan stores your files in a compressed backup archive so you will need to have the app installed to restore a backup. This is one reason why I don’t use it for local backups.

 

If you chose the “free” app (for local backups only) there is also a number of limitations that you should be aware of, one of them is having versions of files.

 

CrashPlan provides a lot of information on their support pages so have a look there and you can also have a 30-day trial to play with it the get a feel on how it works.

Thanks. Thinking this through it seems that the only practical way to b/u 10's of Tbytes is to another (probably off site) unRAID server. Is that what you do or something else?

 

I backup to the Crashplan Cloud. It takes a while, like months. But once it's done it's done.