David Warburton

Some time ago I started using CrashPlan with CrashPlan Central to finally start backing up my family photos and important documents off-site. It’s been working pretty well, despite my frustrations over slow upload speeds. It’s pretty much a fire and forget solution.

Recently I’ve installed FreeNAS on to an old PC to (a) start getting some stability to my storage solution, and (b) play around with ZFS and iSCSI at home. I tried OpenFiler but it pales in comparison to FreeNAS. I’ve gone against my better judgement and I’m using some of the cooler plugins including the Torrent client, Dynamic DNS and I’ve even installed SABNzbd on it. FreeNAS comes with rsync built in and even Unison which is an interesting solution to cross platform backup/synchronisation, but I’ve payed for my CrashPlan Central plan so want to make use of it!Only problem now is backing up my data!

CrashPlan doesn’t support backing up from a network share – either mapped drive or UNC path. There is a work around on the CrashPlan site which works but is a little convoluted so wanted to post a nice, quick version here.

Read on after the break… The problem is simply that CrashPlan runs as a service using the SYSTEM account. To allow us to backup a network share we have a couple of options….

1. Change the service to run as a standard user account (e.g. the one you’re logged in to your machine as)
2. Map a drive under the SYSTEM account so that it is visible to CrashPlan

I’d recommend the latter but if you just plan on using this on a desktop machine and/or want a quick and dirty solution, here’s how you change the logon account for the service…

• Open up the Services MMC and find the CrashPlan Backup Service. Double-click it to open its properties
  
• Click the Log On tab and then select the This account radio button. 
• Enter the username and password of a local/domain user account with full permissions to the network share you want to back up 
  
• Click OK and then restart the service 
  
• Relaunch the CrashPlan application and you’ll now be able to see drives that you currently have mapped as a backup selection as well as local drives

The preferred method is to map a drive as the SYSTEM account. That in itself is no big deal, the thing is getting the drive mapped as soon as the machine boots and doing it each and every time your machine restarts. To do this we simply make use of Vista/7′s Task Scheduler.

The batch script, which we’ll save as c:\mount.bat simply uses a NET USE command. The one drawback to this method is that the username and password need to be saved in the script. You must use a username which has permissions to the network share. This need not be a local username, in the case of FreeNAS, if you have it joined to a domain as I do.

Here’s the code:

net use M: \\freenas\media /USER:dave@mydomain.lan myP4ssw0rd

Once you have that saved open up the Task Scheduler…

Create a new task (I keep my tasks in a seperate folder to the default Windows ones simply for easier administration). Give your ask a name, for example Mount drive for CrashPlan. Select Run whether user is logged on or not, tick the Run with highest privileges box and then click Change User or Group…

Type system and then Check Names (it should capitalise and underline). Click OK.

Back in the Create Task window slect the Triggers tab and click New… Select At log on… from the drop down list and click OK to close the window.

Now select the Actions tab and, again, click New… leave the action as Start a program and then browse to your batch that we created above.

Click OK to close the New Action window and again for the Create Task window.

Job done! You can right click on the task and select Run to try it out.

A much more elegant solution would be to have a native FreeNAS (or just BSD) client for CrashPlan or to make use of rsync/Unison. This will do me for now though.