Free, Easy, Automatic Backup???

I called it. On Saturday I enrolled in CrashPlan for the 30-day free trial and so far I'm not that impressed. Their website claims "Free, Easy, Automatic Backup". So far, no.

Paul kindly offered to sign up also -- we can always backup to each others' machines with the CrashPlan GUI without charge -- and we've spent the past 48 hours attempting to connect to each others' computers without success. Too many firewalls, port settings and over-my-head troubleshooting going on here. Paul and I exchanged no less than 30 e-mails last night bouncing different ideas to make this work. Most of the ideas were his...since he's the one who does IT stuff for a living and understands it more than I do.

I guess using iChat or IM might have been easier to discuss this, but for some reason we didn't.

Until we get the point-to-point backup working, I have a batch of files uploading to "CrashPlan Central" which is their offsite server system. This is what I'd have to pay a monthly fee for if I choose to go beyond the 30-day trial.

Unfortunately, the backup to "the cloud" has been taking FOREVER. I have a 77 GB package I'm trying to upload (pictures, music, videos) and after 4 1/2 days, 7.9 GB has been uploaded.

Go ahead, do the math. About 10.5% uploaded in 4.5 days = 47.25 days to upload this batch of data. And this is only from the MacBook! This doesn't include the PC's data (another 125 GB).

One of the things I did to try to speed things up was direct-connect the Mac to the DSL modem, taking the computer off the WiFi altogether. I also closed everything this Mac was using that involved the Internet. Things like the webcam, weather station and my iPhone on the Wireless were still taking down the bandwidth periodically.

CrashPlan offers to send you an external hard drive to directly upload to, which caught my attention at first, but for $125 for that service, I figured the time would be cheaper.

I understand that once this initial upload completes, the worst of it will be over and we'll have our data in place. I'll see how this does through the weekend. If I see better progress, this might be worth keeping...but so far, I'm not quite impressed.