Protecting Stanford data is a requirement for endpoint compliance; the central CrashPlan offering is the recommended solution. Our licensing agreement allows home computers with personal data, plus work computers with Stanford data, to be protected.
As we in the Bay Area continue to shelter in place, many people have brought their office computers home to continue working. Most residential internet service providers offer much faster download speeds than upload speeds. As a result, data backups will take longer to perform at home than on the campus network.
Because the default configuration allows CrashPlan to use all available network throughput to complete a backup, if you have substantial volumes of data to protect at home you might find your streaming services, Voice over IP (VoIP) calls or video conferencing sessions disrupted during backups.
How to have a better backup experience
What CrashPlan will do
- If an initial backup is still pending, the default compression makes network usage more efficient.
- If you already have a full backup, CrashPlan will back up only the changed bytes of any given file, plus newly created data.
What you can do
- To reduce network disruption, you can tell CrashPlan to use your home network only during certain hours, such as overnight. However, CrashPlan won’t keep your computer awake if you system is configured to fall asleep after being idle. Check your operating system’s energy settings and consider leaving the system awake but with a dimmed screen while plugged in during the backup. Learn how to change your backup schedule and how to disable your device's sleep settings.
- You can cap the amount of data throughput consumed by CrashPlan to provide greater capacity for other services. For more information, visit how to use CrashPlan with limited bandwidth.
- You can set CrashPlan to behave differently when you’re actively working on your laptop versus when you’re idle. Learn how to pause backups for a specified time.
Resources for administrators
- Optimize bandwidth with the CrashPlan Bandwidth management methods and resources.
- Connect with other CrashPlan users and admins at #cop-crashplan Slack channel that’s shared across the Stanford Enterprise Slack Grid.
