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Crashplan ditches consumers, kills off “for Home” cloud backup service

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I love the irony of their tagline. “Protect yourself from the inevitable”, which in this case is the closing down of their “for Home” service. This was a service for consumers, hobbyist photographers and the like to store their data online in the cloud. This way, when the inevitable happens, and they lose it locally, they still have a copy safe and sound floating around the Internet.

Now, users will have to find a new home for their data. Starting yesterday, CrashPlan are no longer renewing or accepting new subscriptions for their “for Home” service. They are honouring current subscriptions, but when they’re over, your data’s gone. So, you’ll want to find a new service and back up to there as quickly as you can.

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How to create a backup system that will also protect your installed programs

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Lets be honest with ourselves for a second here, computer hardware is potentially a very dangerous and/or sensitive thing to meddle with. Actually, just in general computers (mostly PCs) have the potential to become unstable in an instant, sometimes even without a catalyst. Or a warning. Of course, back-up solutions are widely available and we should always back up important stuff at least to two different places. But what about the more basic things in your computer? So here’s the question:

If your C: Drive died tomorrow, how much work would, sweat and tears will it take to restore your computer? This is not where you keep the data, mind you, this is where you install software like Adobe Creative Cloud, Capture One, Presets and Filters, Office and all the other utilities you use. There is a solution!

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Backup Workflow using BitTorrent Sync and Crashplan

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Backups! We all need them, we hardly make ‘em!

Over the years, as a digital artist, I have on occasion lost bodies of work. I lost them when building a new PC, I lost them when my drive crashed, fell, burnt, and I even lost them while watching in horror as I mistakenly said yes to “are you sure you want to format drive D”?.

Data keeps piling up, and to keep everything archived we need at least double the amount of drive space.

Luckily I don’t do animation anymore so my projects aren’t that super large anymore, but I have been photographing and editing work for a couple of years now and the data pile keeps growing. Next to that I kept running out of space locally, and kept buying new drives for my Drobo to accommodate my expanding archive. The problem with new drives to store your projects is that you need to copy your data over and over, you get sloppy, you forget projects, you ignore folders, and in the end you lost some precious pictures in the transfer process.

I’m a creative artist, and even though I have OCD tendencies, I get bored with tedious tasks and mistakes are easily made.  I needed a better backup plan to safeguard my body of work, without having to spend too much time on this task.

Now there are numerous ways to maintain a backup, but I’m going to share one that has been working for me the past few years, and makes me feel secure about my data.

here’s my hardware setup:

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