That guide uses Arch Linux, which you can use on the Raspberry Pi, but I’ve chosen to use Debian, because it’s more similar to Ubuntu and I value that shred of sanity! I got most of my information from a post by Hadar Pedhazur on about a year ago on getting CrashPlan to work on a Pogoplug, another ARM-based device. The server-side maintenance like ‘compacting’ the stored data might be a lot slower – however, this isn’t something I often do, so it should do. Performance looks quite good for now – I haven’t got a lot of new files to back up as I was able to ‘adopt’ a previous backup archive, but I did run a few minutes of files at around 13MB/s over the 100Mb/s network, which seems pretty reasonable to me (about half what I get hooking the drive up directly to my desktop by USB). With a little bit of hacking, I was able to get everything running fairly easily. I want to have a backup server running all the time so that I’m always able to back up to my own device as well as to ‘the cloud’ – the Raspberry Pi is ideal for this.

it works just as well on Windows, Mac and Linux) and gives me the choice of backing up between my own computers as well as to CrashPlan’s own servers. For me, it’s greatest strength is that it’s cross-platform (i.e. This means is uses very little power and generates very little heat, but it does mean it needs different versions of software to what I’m used to.ĬrashPlan is my backup software of choice.

It’s not based around an Intel chip like a desktop or laptop (or even one from AMD), but rather an ARM chip more like what’s in a smartphone. It runs Linux, of course – though it can’t run my preferred Ubuntu. If you’ve been living under a rock or you have no interest in tech, you may not have heard of the Raspberry Pi, a tiny (pack of playing cards sized) single board computer.

Photo editing programs for raspbian