Restoring Synology NAS Crashplan existing configuration

In addition to yesterday’s post about running Crashplan on a Synology Disk Station,I thought it was worth mentioning that the key advantage of using PC Load Letter‘s packages is that they nowadays also fully support Crashplan’s auto update feature. So once installed, there is no need to update the package anymore, Crashplan will update itself to the latest version automatically.

Unfortunately this is not visible in Synology’s Package Centre, which hapily shows an updated version of Crashplan is available whenever an updated package is available. Since it is always a good idea to have the latest package installes as it may resolve other issues (i.e. one day autoupdate support started to work now it also it seems to preserve its configuration upon reinstall), it is still a good idea to upgrade every now and then.

One of the key drawbacks of upgrading in the past was that de configuration was lost and the new installation would even become a fresh computer instead of retaining the existing configuration. I had to deal with this several times in the past, normally ending up copying back a backup of the config file manually through an SSH CLI. This did not really work like I wanted as it is manual wotk and felt like a hack, which made me look for the right way to do this. After some searching I found an article on the Crashplan support pages on reconnecting an Existing Backup, which desribes how the GUID of a Crashplan installation (the unique ID that identifies the Crashplan network) can be changes to that of the previous installation so that identity and configuration settings of the previous installation are restored. fo this semi-manual approach. To lookup the GUID of the installation to be restored, one can lookup the GUID from your Crashplan account’s computer overview and selecting the name of the computer, which will also display the GIUD. Follow the instructions to reconnect an Existing Backup.

Recently Crashplan as automated the semi-manual process for Adopting Another Computer  so that the semi-manual process is no longer needed. As described in the Crashplan support page, there is now an option available to adopt another computer after re-installation of the Crashplan client (which is exactly what will happen in case a new version of PC Load Letter‘s package is installed). With this option, restoring all settings has become very easy and since all files are still there, and since all files are still there (no need to restore any files) it only requires a check with the remote systems to ensure everything have already been backed up.