Introduction to CrashPlan
CrashPlan (previously known as Code42) is the recommended tool for securing backups of university data on personal, single-user computers like your desktop and laptop at work and at home. It is a GUI-based product that backs up to the Cloud with many benefits including frequent automated backups in the background, unlimited storage and multiple file versioning allowing point-in-time restores.
The CrashPlan Cloud backup service is best suited to backing up single-user machines, or machines where a single user can take ownership of the backups (the HFS Storage Protect Backup Service may offer an alternative solution, subject to its own qualifying criteria).
System requirements
CrashPlan is fully supported by the vendor on reasonably recent versions of Windows, macOS, Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Note however that there is a difference between fully supported and whether it works. In practice CrashPlan will continue to work, at least for a while, on older operating systems when they fall out of support although you may not get upgraded to the latest version of the software, and it will work on many more distributions of Linux. New operating system releases are often supported within a month, but are unlikely to be supported immediately. If you are considering upgrading your operating system we suggest you check here whether it is yet supported.
CrashPlan publish an official list of supported operating systems which may be more up to date or detailed than the information below so do consult it.
CrashPlan generally works best when installed with admin rights so it has access to all files. However if you do not have admin rights on your computer you can install for your own user only.
Windows
Windows 11 and 10 are supported while the operating systems are supported by Microsoft. This means if you are more than a couple of years out of date in updates neither Windows nor CrashPlan will be supported though CrashPlan may well continue to work. CrashPlan is a desktop/laptop backup product so Windows Server versions are not supported.
CrashPlan is known to still work on Windows 8.1 and the last supported version (which is branded as Code42) can be installed on these using the HFS Hub.
macOS
CrashPlan is supported on both Intel and Apple Silicon processors on systems running currently supported versions of macOS. Currently these are Tahoe, Sequoia, and Sonoma.
CrashPlan is known to still work on Ventura, Big Sur and Catalina and the last supported version can be installed on these using the HFS Hub.
CrashPlan is also known to still work on Mojave and High Sierra and the last supported version (which is branded as Code42) can be installed on these using the HFS Hub.
Linux
As always Linux is more complicated due to the enormous number and variety of distributions some of which are more similar to each other than others. In common with other vendors (including IBM with Storage Protect) CrashPlan officially support only certain 64-bit distributions which are Ubuntu long term support versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), both of these for still supported versions of the distribution. Currently this is Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 and RHEL 8, 9 and 10. As regards other distributions:
- Distributions that are based on RHEL such as CentOS, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux are likely to work
- Distributions based on Ubuntu such as Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Elementary OS are likely to work
- We have found that it also works on various other distributions based on Debian or RPM packaging
If CrashPlan support is a priority for you, you may wish to take that into account in your choice of distribution. If you find that CrashPlan will not work on your choice of distribution you may have better luck with Storage Protect. Although it has a similar limited official support list we find that in practice it does work on a wide range of newer and older distributions.
Installing and getting started with the HFS CrashPlan App
To install the CrashPlan app see the CrashPlan Quick Start Guide. A brief introduction to the CrashPlan interface is available on our Getting Started with CrashPlan page. Extensive online support on using the CrashPlan app is available from the CrashPlan support pages. Common questions around the Oxford implementation of CrashPlan backup may be answered on our HFS FAQ page.
