I recently had a ReadyNAS Pro Business Edition fail and lost about 8TB of information.  Approximately 3TB of this data was held with Crashplan and was critical.  This would take about 25-50 days to restore, necessitating a “Restore to your Door” service with Crashplan.  In short, you can call them and they will send you a drive at some cost that depends on your plan. A co-worker suggested I sneakernet the data which led to a fun comic about sending massive data over the internet.

Luckily Crashplan has an adopt a computer option which is intended primarily for replacement devices.  This means I won’t have to go through all of the settings and options again after the restore process is complete, this ReadyNAS should pick up where the old one left off.  The quick steps in short are to install crashplan, restore the files then adopt the old computer.

It took me some time and effort to install Crashplan on a ReadyNAS the first time around a few years ago and I intended to publicly document the process but never did.  This time around I was happy to see that a forum member at the ReadyNAS forums created a fantastic step by step document here.

Once crashplan was installed, I used the crashplan gui at my local station and started the restore process. My local station also has crashplan installed, so I keep the “C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\conf\ui.properties” file with a shortcut on my desktop to change the port and added the following comment to the file “for local access, servicePort=4200 for remote access.” Once the restore process is completed, I will adopt the old ReadyNAS profile using these instructions.