Should your PRO Server hardware become unusable, you must have two things: the backup archives themselves and a dump of the server's internal database (orgs, users and encryption keys).
Your backup archives are where all of your backup data is stored in encrypted format. It's a good practice to have these replicated offsite. Even if your PRO Clients are backing up to multiple destinations, having your backup archives ready to go saves time if you need to recover from a server failure.
You can have each client back up to multiple destinations with at least one remote destination. This is generally your best option because you'll get archive verification and self-healing at all the destinations. If you seed the remote backup destination there shouldn't be large bandwidth requirements. A best practice is to have onsite, near offsite and far offsite backup destinations.
Every night you could copy or rsync the archives to an offsite location. You'll get more reliable snapshots if you either shutdown the PRO Server or disable the mounts points before copying/rsync-ing.
Keep in mind that copying or rsync-ing the archives are not operations that take place within CrashPlan PRO. You must devise your own process for these operations.
You could rotate the backup drive each week (for example) with a drive that is stored offsite. Use this option only if you are OK with not all versions being on all drives in the rotation.
With 2 drives in a weekly rotation, each week CrashPlan PRO resyncs with the new archive and continue backing up where it left off the week before. In other words, it will back up any new and changed files from the previous week again since the new drive will not have those changes, but you will have a relatively safe copy offsite.
If you have 3 drives in the rotation it will re-backup all the changes from the previous 2 weeks, etc.
NOTE: It is very important that you name the drives with the same volume name and drive letter as the drives you are rotating. If your external hard drives have different names, it appear as if one of the backup destinations is always offline.
The backup of the server's internal database occurs in a nightly process when CrashPlan PRO exports the data. This backup of the database is also known as a “dump.”
A database dump includes the server's internal configuration information: orgs, users, computers, encryption keys and reporting data for each account.
By default, CrashPlan PRO saves the exports with an .sql.gz extension to the internal disk and to all mount points. We recommend that you copy your database dump safely offsite in case you need to recover your system.
Your database is exported each night to folders named 'dbDumps' on each of your defined mount points. We also save a copy to a separate “dump” location as specified for each platform:
| Platform | Default Location |
|---|---|
| OS X | /Library/Application Support/CrashPlan/PROServer/dumps |
| Windows XP and Derivatives | C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\PROServer\dumps |
| Windows Vista | C:\ProgramData\PROServer\dumps |
| linux | /var/opt/proserver/dumps |
| solaris | /var/opt/proserver/dumps |
If you're using a version of PRO Server prior to 11.5.2009 it's also useful to back up the server's identity file. This will be used if you have to migrate the server to a new host.