CrashPlan for backups and color laser printers


Our department at the university has started looking into doing remote backups for desktop users, and I, of course, had to look for the open source alternatives after pricing commercial products like Retrospect. The usual suspects showed up on my google search such as Amanda, Bacula and BackupPC. But since I was also looking at commercial online providers like Mozy, I ran into CrashPlan which sounded very intriguing. Whereas CrashPlan makes money like Mozy does providing online backup services, you can actually use their software completely for free so every computer where you install the software becomes either a client or a server or both. They have downloads for Windows, Mac and Linux (and Solaris if anyone cares anymore), so I tested it by installing the Windows software on one XP system and putting the Linux version on two Ubuntu systems. It appears to run as a Java service in Ubuntu, and I bet it does the same for Mac OSX and Solaris. On Windows it runs as two processes, the small Tray interface (CrashPlanTray.exe) which is only eating up 3MB on my old Pentium 4 XP box, and the service (CrashPlanService.exe) which is using about 44MB, not too bad by today's standards. It has been running for a week now with both the PC and my Ubuntu desktop backing up to an Ubuntu system running elsewhere in the building and it was both trivially easy to set up and barely noticeable on any of the systems. The backup Ubuntu server involved runs various web servers, a squid proxy server and a file server, and I believe the CrashPlan Java service taxes the system less than the other services. On my own Ubuntu desktop, I had forgotten it was even installed until I noticed the little Icon on the system tray on my XP box and checked the app on my Ubuntu box by running CrashPlanDesktop. Sure enough, by checking the history I can see when and what it backed up on both systems, and it even e-mailed me a log as well each week. This is a very slick package for a "free" system, and since we have lots of machines with lots of extra disk space this can make backups for us very easy and inexpensive. Thank you, CrashPlan!

Speaking of inexpensive things, I was perusing my new PROVANTAGE catalog I received in the mail and came to the color laser printers and noticed there were offerings by both HP and Brother in the $200 range. They were not only compact looking color lasers but they both had wired and wireless networking built into them. I remember just a few years ago when we spent $200 just on a single color cartridge for our Color LaserJet 4600 when it first came out! Of course the printer companies are willing to sell these printers themselves for basically nothing since they want to get you on the cartridges long term. I checked over at NewEgg.com and noticed they had the Samsung Wireless CLP-315W color laser printer for an amazing $149.99 with free shipping. Yes, that is with wireless and wired networking capabilities built in and most likely some teeny, tiny starter cartridges. It takes 4 cartridges and you can get a "value pack" of all four of them for, you guessed it, about $140 which is rated to print 1,000 color pages . The math is easy on that one, it is about 14 cents a page. So the printer is dirt cheap and you are paying through the nose for each page. By comparison our current 3.5 year-old Brother HL-2040 at home takes one TN350 for $30+$3 S/H that is rated to print 2500 pages which is about 1.3 cents or less than one tenth of the cost (until the drum dies, but that is rated at 12,000 pages). I think I can deal with just black and white at home for now. Plus my son would just abuse a color printer if we had one. It also helps that to print he has to carry his laptop to the printer and physically plug in a USB cable. If the printer were actually on our home network he would print as much as some of our graduate students here do. (i.e. way too much!) I tell my son if he needs color prints that badly for school to put the document on a flash drive and I'll take him to Kinko's where he can pay for them out of his allowance.

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