Restarting the CrashPlan Pro backup client on your computer.
Last revision January 21, 2015
The School of Earth Sciences provides a local backup system for the computers of faculty, staff, and post-docs. It runs the CrashPlan Pro software. The School also purchases the ITS cloud-based CrashPlan Pro backup service for graduate students. In either case, a CrashPlan Pro client application is installed on your computer. It communicates with the server to backup your new and changed documents frequently.
Sometimes, for unknown reasons, your CrashPlan Pro client application will get "stuck" and stop backing up your files. The server will eventually notice this and send an email to the person associated with that computer. It is configured to send that email if the client has not contacted the server in 5 days.
If you get a notice that your computer is not backing up, you can restart your CrashPlan Pro client yourself by following these directions! Faculty, staff, and post-docs also can submit a HelpSU request ( https://helpsu.stanford.edu ) and ask our CRC support technicians to do it for you.
The screenshots below were made under Mac OS X and reference the School's local CrashPlan Pro server. The application looks similar under Windows or when using the ITS cloud service.
First, find the CrashPlan client application. You should find it in the program list in the Start menu in Windows. On Mac OS X, look in the Applications folder.
CrashPlan Pro actually installs a system service that runs all the time in the background to do the backups. The CrashPlan application that you find is just used to report or control the background process. That is why it is not running all the time.
Start the CrashPlan application. It will open a "Backup" window that looks like the screenshot below:
The School's server is listed under the "Destinations" header as "SESWSBackup". It is highlighted with a red box on the screenshot above. Click on that link. It will bring up the "Destinations" window for our server that looks like the screenshot below:
The screenshot above was made on a system that is backing up normally. If your client is stuck, the "Connection status" field will probably show no connection for a long time.
To restart your background backup process, you need to bring up the CrashPlan Pro command line window. Do that by double-clicking the symbol of a building in the upper right corner of this destinations window. It is highlighted by a red box on the screenshot above. Double-clicking will open a command line window that looks like the screenshot below:
The top of this screen has a single input text field outlined in blue. The rest of the screen gives some brief explanations of the available commands. All you have to do is simply type the word
restart
as shown in the screenshot above in red type. Then press the RETURN key to run the restart command. Close this command line window. In a few minutes, your Destinations window should show that your computer is connecting to the server. When that happens, just quit this CrashPlan application. The background process will keep running and do the backups.
If this restart procedure does not work, please put in a HelpSU request.