CrashPlan
CrashPlan is a backup program that backs up data to remote servers, other computers, or hard drives. Backing up to the cloud servers requires a monthly subscription.
Contents
Installation
Install crashplanAUR from the AUR. There is also crashplan-proAUR and crashplan-pro-eAUR available which are the paid enterprise packages.
Basic Usage
Before accessing CrashPlan's graphical user interface, you should start the service:
# systemctl start crashplan.service
CrashPlan can be configured entirely through its graphical user interface. To start the graphical interface:
$ CrashPlanDesktop
To make CrashPlan automatically start upon system startup:
# systemctl enable crashplan.service
Running Crashplan on a headless server
Running CrashPlan on a headless server is not officially supported. However, it is possible to do so.
The CrashPlan daemon's configuration files (in /opt/crashplan/conf
) are in an obscure XML format, and they are meant to be edited programmatically by the CrashPlan client. The CrashPlan client and daemon communicate on port 4243 by default. Thus, an easy way of configuring the CrashPlan daemon on a headless server is to create an SSH tunnel:
- Start the CrashPlan daemon. On the server:
systemctl start crashplan.service
. - Create an SSH tunnel. On the client:
ssh -N -L 4243:localhost:4243 headless.example.com
. - Start the CrashPlan client. (Again, the executable is named
CrashPlanDesktop
.)
More ideas can be found on these websites:
- The CrashPlan support site details a slightly more complicated method of tunneling traffic from the client (CrashPlan Desktop) to the daemon (CrashPlan Engine) through an SSH tunnel.
- A post by Bryan Ross details how to make CrashPlan Desktop connect directly to CrashPlan Engine. Note that this method can be less secure than tunneling traffic through an SSH tunnel.
Troubleshooting
Waiting for connection
On some systems it can happen that CrashPlan does not wait until an internet connection is established. If using NetworkManager, you can install networkmanager-dispatcher-crashplan-systemdAUR which will automatically restart the CrashPlan service once a connection is successfully established.
Waiting for Backup
If the backup is stuck on «Waiting for Backup» even after you engage it manually, it might be that CrashPlan cannot access the tempdir or it is mounted as noexec
. It uses the default Java tmp dir which is normally /tmp
. You can either remove the noexec
mount option (not recommended) or change the tmpdir CrashPlan is using.
To change the tmpdir CrashPlan uses, open /opt/crashplan/bin/run.conf
and insert -Djava.io.tmpdir=/new-tempdir
to SRV_JAVA_OPTS
, for example:
SRV_JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.io.tmpdir=/var/tmp/crashplan -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 …
Make sure to create the new tmpdir and verify CrashPlan's user has access to it.
# mkdir /var/tmp/crashplan
Restart CrashPlan
# systemctl restart crashplan
Desktop GUI Crashes on startup
On systems with Gnome 3 installed, or with libwebkit-gtk installed, there may be an issue where the GUI crashes on launch. This can be fixed by following the instructions here.
Out of Memory
For backup sets containing large numbers of files (more than 100,000 or so), the default maximum heap size of 512M may be too small. If this is filled, the server will silently restart, and will usually get stuck restarting as it continually reaches the memory limit. The only sign of this happening is the creation of many small log files in /opt/crashplan/bin
for each service restart (potentially hundreds of thousands, depending on how long it takes to notice the problem). To increase the heap size limit, adjust the -Xmx
option in /opt/crashplan/bin/run.conf
to a reasonable value for your system.