Crashplan is a backup tool similar to carbonite or mozy with one great exception: It allows pc to pc backup without a fee and they have clients for windows, mac and linux.

The configuration of this on a headless linux server is a little tricky but can be done.

The crashplan software is divided into two parts: The engine and the desktop. The desktop is the configuration gui and the engine does the work. To configure a headless server, you’ll need to use the desktop on another computer to connect to the headless one via port forwarding.

Check out the instructions

Their instructions are mac centric. Here is how to achieve same thing with windows and putty.

  1. Open putty
  2. Fill in the host and port info to connect to your server
  3. Under ‘Category’ on the left, click on ‘SSH’
  4. Next click on ‘Tunnels’
  5. Check both ‘Local ports accept connections…’ and ‘Remote ports do the same…’
  6. Enter ‘4243’ into the source port box
  7. Enter 127.0.0.1:4200 into the ‘Destination’ box.
  8. Select ‘Local’ and ‘Auto’
  9. Click ‘Add’
  10. Now click open and login to your server as normal.
  11. You’ll now be able to open the crashplan desktop and configure your server.

Before you can begin backing up to your linux machine, you’ll also need to configure your linux firewall to allow connections to ports 4200 and 4243. You’ll need to allow both tcp and udp connections on port 4200.

On centos, add these lines to your /etc/sysconfig/iptables

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp –dport 4200 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp –dport 4243 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp -m udp –dport 4200 -j ACCEPT
-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -p udp -m udp –dport 4243 -j ACCEPT

Right before this line:

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state –state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT

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