Hello, I’ve been using Crashplan Home to backup my family’s computers for the last 2 or 3 years. With Crashplan discontinuing its Home service, I’ve begun arranging UrBackup as my replacement. I’ve already set it up within our home network and its working great. However, I’m also planning to backup another computer outside the network via the internet only – this computer is my sister’s and it is currently 9 hrs away so I can’t access it physically. I’ve read a couple forum posts about seeding initial backups with an external drive, which got me thinking: I already have my sister’s files backed up locally via Crashplan, could I restore the most recent Crashplan backup to a local folder on my server and use that as my initial seed?
I’m asking here because I know little about how hashes work. I don’t know if these restored files would work the same way as files copied to an external drive then connected to the server directly. If any of you could lend insight regarding this I would appreciate it greatly. It could save me from days/weeks of backing up solely via internet.
I don’t know if it matters, but I’m hosting the server on a Windows 7 PC, and the remote laptop is a Macbook Pro, although I’m fairly certain the restored files would be in NTFS because I’d restore to the Windows 7 PC.
Here’s an update in case people find this thread searching for an answer. Yes: restoring a file backup from another program such as Crashplan works fine as a seed for a new backup in UrBackup.
I’ve learned a bit about file hashing now – even the smallest change to a file will result in a completely different hash, so UrBackup will recognize unchanged files between the Crashplan (or other program) file restore and the original files on the client computer, and as a result, UrBackup will know it already has backed up these unchanged files.
Other than using a file restore from Crashplan as my backup path for a local backup on my server, my process was exactly the same as seeding with an external drive, which other threads describe in more detail.
I just finished the process and the Internet full file backup only took ten minutes, which was mostly indexing and copying whichever files had been created since the last Crashplan backup, i.e., the backup I restored from.
An excellent way to save time for people transitioning away from other backup systems.
Thank you @tfastg for the info. I came here to search for your exact same question. I am coming from crashplan as well and I even got a remote sister whose machine needs to be backed up over the internet
Just a short note for all those people intending to replace Crashplan with Urbackup, as I stumbled over this: The UrBackup Server does not support IPv6 (Does UrBackup offer ipv6 support?)!
