Overview
Designed to make minimal demands on your computer's resources, the CrashPlan app default settings favor quiet, background operation over outright speed. However, during your initial backup or after adding a large number of files to your backup selection, you may decide speed is more important.
This article outlines some of the factors affecting backup speed and some temporary adjustments to help backup complete more quickly, as well as some items to consider before changing any settings.
Considerations
- Even under ideal conditions, the initial upload process can take a while. Backup times may range anywhere from a few days to a month or more, depending on your upload speed and the total size of the files you have selected to back up.
- The adjustments described here are meant to be temporary. Once the backup is completed, the CrashPlan app only uploads the changes made to files, so you can return to the default backup settings and allow the CrashPlan app to back up continuously and quietly. See How CrashPlan backup works for more information.
- Results of changing settings may not be immediately apparent. You may need to wait a day or so before noticing improvements.
Factors affecting backup speed
The CrashPlan app does more behind the scenes during backup than simply transfer your files. The CrashPlan app de-duplicates, analyzes, compresses, and encrypts your data before sending it to your backup destinations. By taking these steps before sending your data to your backup destinations, the CrashPlan app:
- Decreases file size, increasing your effective transfer rate, which makes both backing up and restoring files faster.
- Reduces the amount of storage space needed at the destination.
- Ensures your data is secure at all stages of the process, even during transmission.
Additional factors can affect backup speed, including your individual hardware and network components and configuration. For more information, see Backup speed does not match available bandwidth .
Before you begin
Disable your computer's default sleep settings for the duration of any large backup job. This allows the CrashPlan app to run uninterrupted and complete the backup more quickly.
Steps
If upload speeds are slower than you expect, adjust the default CrashPlan app settings that prevent it from using too many system resources. Changing these settings increases the system resources available to the CrashPlan app to help speed up your backup.
Explore the options below in the order presented. If you see adequate improvement in speed after one or two changes, avoid making additional changes.
Performance settings
Performance settings apply to the amount of system resources dedicated to CrashPlan app work, not to the total system resources. Therefore, while % may be set at 20, for example, a system monitor may show that 70% of the system's resources are being used for the CrashPlan app at a particular point in time. For more information, see Configure app performance in the CrashPlan console.
- Open the CrashPlan app.
- Select
Settings.
- Select Usage.
- Increase the amount of performance to 90 - 100% when the user is both away and present. You can always scale back if the CrashPlan app interferes with your work. Learn more about how the CrashPlan app detects away and present settings.
Frequency settings
The CrashPlan app assumes that what you're working on now is most important so prioritizes your most recently changed files and backs them up first. The default setting is to back up new information every 15 minutes. This offers great protection and allows you to easily revert to a previous version of a file.
However, frequently backing up new work delays the CrashPlan app's opportunity for initial backup of old files.
To promote backup of old files, reduce the frequency for new versions of new files. This trade off can be beneficial until your backup is complete.
Changing the backup frequency settings is most helpful for large backups and for file selections with very large files.
Steps for the CrashPlan console
To increase the time between backups:
- Sign in to the CrashPlan console.
- Choose Devices.
- From Device Overview, click on the name of the device.
- Select the action menu.
- Choose Edit.
- Select Backup.
- Navigate to Frequency and Versions.
- Move the slider to change the Backup new version interval to a longer period, such as 8 hours or more.
- Click Save.
Network settings
- Open the CrashPlan app.
- Select
- Select Network.
- In Bandwidth Settings, increase the allowed transfer rate. WAN is for transferring data over the Internet and LAN is for transferring data over your computer's local network. Start by setting the limits to None. If this slows down your network, try dropping it back down to 1 Mbps, or lower if needed.