CrashPlan 3
CrashPlan 3 adds support for Mac metadata (HFS+ extended attributes and modification dates), backup sets (different source folders going to different backup destinations, with different scheduling), and schedules that vary by the day of the week. It also sounds like it’s better about handling new computers so that you no longer have to manually change the GUID. There are also some licensing and pricing changes. I don’t have the old terms handy, but it looks like the new terms do away with the extra charge for business use but remove support for multiple computers backed up to CrashPlan Central unless you have the family plan. There’s also a new 10 GB plan for $25 (1 year).
I’m quite happy with CrashPlan. Aside from the formerly lacking support for xattrs, my main complaint is its resource use. It consistently uses more than 500 MB of private memory on my Mac, and with a regular notebook hard drive its scans would significantly slow down normal operations. Now that my Mac has 8 GB of RAM and an SSD, the performance impact is negligible.
It’s already saved me twice in the last month, once when I was traveling away from my Time Machine drive and a once while the drive was unmounted for a whole afternoon as Disk Utility repaired it. Of course, the other advantage is that CrashPlan Central will keep versions going much farther back than will fit on the Time Machine drive.
