Settings for Faster Backup

This article identifies the settings that you can adjust to speed backups. It does not address the hardware or network issues that also factor into how fast CrashPlan PRO can back up.

Keep in mind that CrashPlan's “out of the box” backup speed will never match a straight copy of files. CrashPlan performs backups that are incremental by block, de-duped, compressed and encrypted, all at low priority, deferring to I/O and network overhead of the host.

CrashPlan's default settings for these processes work great in almost all situations. There are times, however, when you might want to make some temporary adjustments to in situations when you want CrashPlan PRO to backup more quickly.

Explore these options in the order they are presented.

Before you make changes to the settings outlined in this article, be sure you are familiar with the two types of CrashPlan PRO backups:

• Initial - This is the first backup done from the client to a destination that has not been seeded.
• Incremental - These ongoing, incremental backups do the day-to-day work of protecting your files. Because only new or changed data is backed up, incremental backups take much less time than the initial required.

1. Verify that network traffic is going over a LAN.
   • If the client and PRO Server are on the same LAN, the client should use a LAN IP Address as its authority address.
   • If you are on a WAN, do not throttle the network.
2. Increase CPU throttling setting to at least 90% when the user is working and 90% when the user is away.

NOTE: If you're backing up over a WAN Adjusting the CPU and Network throttling are the only changes you should make.

NOTE: CrashPlan ignores the network throttling settings on a LAN.

For large file selections with limited CPU, compression is the main bottleneck. You can disable compression (under Advanced Backup Settings) at the expense of disk space on the destination computer.

Note: Enable compression again once the initial backup is complete.

For extremely large file selections that require multi-day backups, consider:

• Disabling real-time file watching
• Decreasing the frequency for verifying the backup file selection (change to every 3 days)

NOTE: Reset these settings to the default after initial backup is complete.

By default CrashPlan runs with a low priority setting so you are not likely to notice it while you are working. However, if CrashPlan is running on a busy server you may need to increase the priority CrashPlan gets in competing for system resources. Changing the system priority is done from within the operating system itself.

By default, PRO Servers and PRO Clients use message buffer sizes that are tuned for backing up over the internet rather than a LAN. The client has always been able to increase it's messaging buffer size but, as of the 2010-03-08 version, PRO Server administrators can also specify a larger buffer size.

The buffer size we've seen to matter most is the inbound buffer size on the destination machine. Start by doubling or quadrupling it. The only downside with having the value too high is that the PRO Client/Server will use more RAM than it needs to.

• Edit the proserver.properties file:

Win: C:\Program Files\CrashPlan PRO Server\conf
Mac: /Applications/PROServer.app//Contents/Resources/Java/conf/
Lin: /opt/proserver/conf

• And add these properties to quadruple the default values:

# 1MB for external IP addresses that usually cannot efficiently use more
b42.cpc.inboundMessageBufferSize=1048576
# 4MB for local subnet addresses 
b42.cpc.siteLocalInboundMessageBufferSize=4194304 

If you try different sizes, please let us know what you find to be optimal. Let us know both client and server hardware specs as well as network speed and amount of data you are backing up.

Changing these default configuration settings are not recommended for long-term operation:

• Encryption because it does not appreciably slow backup.
• Data de-duplication because it might actually increase the time it takes to back up if bandwidth is your bottleneck.
• However, if speed is critical for your situation, we have had a few customers report initial speed improvements when turning off de-duplication and/or encryption, especially with the larger inbound message buffer size described above.