I’ve been happily using CrashPlan for about a year now, after publicly breaking up with MozyHome, and sleeping around on Backblaze. I’ve signed up for another 3 years or so, so I’m fairly committed at this point. I’m a big fan of the Aussie DC presence and ability to use a local seed drive. The client itself is easy to use, and the pricing has been reasonable in my experience. But enough about my opinions.
I had a weird problem the other day on my main iMac where it looked like I had to re-seed all of my data. I’d had this problem before with MozyHome (link), but with a smaller set of data, so wasn’t too keen to re-upload over 900GB again.
So I logged a case with support. A very nice gentleman named Daniel R got in contact with me and got me to send through some logs. I hadn’t realised I could clicky on the CrashPlan icon in the main window to open up a console. That’s kind of neat.
I sent through the logs and Daniel got back in touch to have me modify my settings.xml file. No dice though. He then got back to me to advise that my archive was in a “maintenance queue” and he’d removed it from that queue and advised me to restart everything and see how it went. I’m fascinated by what the “maintenance queue” might be and how my archive ended up there.
Still no go, so he had me do a full uninstall (I think with prejudice) and re-install. The instructions for this process can be found here. For a complete uninstall, the following steps need to be done (on Mac OSX).
- Open the Finder
- Press Command-Shift-G and paste /Library/Application Support/CrashPlan/Uninstall.app into the dialog
- Double-click Uninstall
- Follow the prompts to complete the uninstall process
- Remove the following directory from your system:
- Custom installation (as user): ~/Library/Application Support/CrashPlan
Once I’d re-installed everything, I could log back in with my normal credentials, and “adopt” the backup sitting in the Code42 DC that was assigned to my iMac. Simple as that. And then all I had to do was synchronize the changes. Seriously awesome, and so simple. No data loss, and smiles all round. And resolved in about 52 hours (including about 12 hours of them waiting for me to send logs through). And hence the title of the blog post. The ability to re-attach / adopt backups with new / replacement / freshly re-installed machines is a really cool feature that no doubt is saving people a fair bit of angst. It’s also not a feature you really think about until you actually need it.
So I’d like to publicly thank Daniel R at Code42 Support for his promptness and courtesy when dealing with me, as well as his ability to actually, well, resolve the issue.
