So you may have noticed, I use Crashplan for my backups. Even though many people complain about it’s slow upload speeds (mainly in the US). It’s one of the few cloud backup services that actually has a presence in Australia. Since Australia is more or less known for it’s backwater internet speeds, there isn’t much more you can expect living here. Fortunately, I am lucky enough to live in an area where I can get fibre and the upload speeds really aren’t anything to complain about.

The short is Crashplan is a great choice despite the limited choices I do have. But enough about that.

As you may have gathered from the title, I run my Crashplan instance on my Synology NAS. This has the benefit of providing a local backup for all my family’s machines and also a way for me to backup the data on the NAS to Crashplan’s cloud.

Unfortunately, this isn’t exactly a supported configuration for Crashplan. One of the brilliant members of the Synology user community, namely PC Load Letter (patters), has packaged the Linux version of Crashplan that we may all reap the benefits. He even regularly updates it too.

However, being an unsupported configuration, sometimes updating the instance gets a bit tricky. There are three main points I need to remember.

The Short List

1. Java needs to be either installed separately or downloaded separately.
2. After installation, Crashplan will likely download an upgrade and it will fail causing the package to stop running. The upgrade will need to be run manually from the Synology’s shell.
3. A new UI token will probably be generated and I’ll need to update the VM where I manage the NAS’s instance in order to connect to it again.

This is the short list. If you remember what you need to do from this, you need read no further. Otherwise, detailed steps will follow. Continue reading “Updating Crashplan on the Synology” →