The below allows you to install CrashPlan to your WD My Cloud. This also installs Transmission for bit torrents and every time I do a firmware update I just follow the same steps. Easy!
I had CrashPlan running on my WD MBL for about a year before my MBL died. I have now had CrashPlan installed and working on my WD My Cloud for about 6 months. I was able to recover my files from CrashPlan (cloud backup) to my new WD My Cloud…this saved my life (…well all my family photos and personal docs)!!!
Some things to note:
Installing Transmission addresses some dependencies for the OpenJDK java install. If you do not install Transmission the java install will fail. I use both and therefore this installs both.
There is a replacement file (libjtux.so) that is required for the ARM processor in the WD My Cloud to work with Java. I include a link for the file and Crashplan won’t work without this replacement file.
Backup to CrashPlan’s cloud destination is quite slow. It’s better on the My Cloud than on the MBL but it is slow. You can expect 100GB to take more than a week… I recommend selecting directories/files for backup in a progressing scenario. I started by backing up a few MB’s, then a few GB’s, and gradually selecting all my directories. The last group of directoris in my initial backup set took 3-4 weeks to complete…really! Downloads/restores are much faster. Once your backup set is initialised, obviously only changes are then backed up.
You need to SSH in to your device. If you are not familiar with this then please look to other posts.
You need to download the CrashPlan for Linux software, extract the files and copy it to your My Cloud. I put it in Public/Software share and it is stored by the version name (eg 3.6.3)
You can review the critical CrashPlan logs at /usr/local/crashplan/log. For example you can check the engine log with: Cat /usr/local/crashplan/log/engine_output.log
CrashPlan runs continuously and so your My Cloud will likely not go in to sleep mode or very briefly. I have configured CrashPlan to start and stop each night via crontab and will add that example later…
I will attempt to assist you with questions however it may take me a day or two before checking posts/messages. Please be patient…
This is tested and working on the latest firmware update and latest CrashPlan v3.6.3 (at time of posting).
The following commands need to be executed from the My Cloud command line:
You can now test that java is OK by executing: java -version
With Java installed and working you can now go to the CrashPlan files and install CrashPlan (adjust to your path as necessary):
cd /shares/Public/Software/CrashPlan_3.6.3_Linux/CrashPlan-install
./install.sh
Thanks very much for taking the time to create this guide.
What actual backup speed do you have to Crashplan? I tried many different Crashplan servers and various Java versions but was unable to sustain more than 400Kbps with peaks around 1.2Mbps. This speed was too low to be useful. Crashplan predicted My initial backup of about 350G would take more than two months. Crashplan would not provide any support because the configuration was both headless and running on an ARM processor. When I switched to using an old Windows XP laptop to run Crashplan with My Cloud as a mounted drive the speed went up to a continuous 4-6Mbps connected to the same server. It works very well though I’d rather not have the PC in the middle.
I confirm that these are the speeds I have encountered using CrashPlan on the WD devices. You can adjust it mildly through the CrashPlan CPU throttle and other items (allowing those 1mb peaks) at the following link:
However, this is what I would call a “trickle” backup and 300GB of data is likely to take several weeks. Obviously the initial calculation by CrashPlan is an estimate and depending on your content type you can expect it may take 70% of that time as was my case with mostly jpg and mov files. Whilst this was a little frustrating for me personally at first, once my backup set was initialised (a few weeks) then this backup approach suits me very well as it has low impact on the device and my network connections, and has been super reliable!
Another option may be to initialise your backup set from one device (eg your PC) and once complete, adopt that backup on the WD device which would then maintain the backups. This would require that you set the paths to match accordingly possibly by copying the content to your PC for backup set intitialisation with the same path as it would be on the WD device. You could test this approach with a small data set of a few mb’s first.
That’s a good point you make about creating a backup set through another computer then adopting it on Crashplan running on the My Cloud. Though it doesn’t fit my needs, it may be a good way to go for those who have relatively small amounts of dynamic data.
I’ve used Crashplan’s adoption process in the past and it works quite well. The path changes are not an issue. Crashplan compares the data in the “new” folders against what is already on the servers and does not duplicate previously backed up files. There is still a ot of data transfer, though the data rate on a PC is much higher than when actually backing up. The process takes time to compare all the files with what is on the server. Hopefully the data rate will be high enough so it won’t take weeks to adopt on the My Cloud.
Does anyone have a detailed writeup for installing Crashplan with the new 64-bit pages on firmware version 4.x? I see some threads on building packages but that’s beyond my current skill level.
If you were running Crashplan with a headless client, what are you doing now? Did you revert back to pre-4.0 firmware?
I was excited with the idea of runing Crashplan in the My Cloud box. Initially I was running CP on my mac book pro, I had extra data in an external HD and it worked well maintaining 500GB of data in the cloud and 1T in another external drive. I moved the bulk of my data to MyCloud and tried to sync/ backup from mounting the share in my system. The access slugish even to read the files (before actually starting to sync/backup). Once the source files were read, the upload was terribly slow and often the share would disconect and the process of reading and syncing would start all over again.
**bleep**, I tought that CS run from the box and have direct access to the files in the HD it would be better. Then I could sync the files in my computer with btsync and all would be beautiful.
I decided to downgrate to a pre-4.0 release and all went fine. Then I installed transmission and java7-jre like the other guide. It worked but performance was horrible. It would also take forever to even sync and/or read the source files. The connetion with CP cloud server would often break. I reduced the backup set to a minimum and even though it woulnd work. Finally I downgraded java to java6-jre and performance was a little better but still unreliable and slow. Terminal access would be unresponsive, web console taking forever to load.
After 3 nights of this I just gave up the, adopted back my backup in my computer praying that I didnt lose any data between all file/drive swap I made. All looks fine.
I have read reports of people with the system working fine with (1) and earlier version of Crasplan and/or (2) an Oracle version of Java. Honestly I’m tired of this and if anyone can point a light in the right direction it would be great. Also I have doubts if ever the hardware is cabable of running CP satisfactory.
+1 my vote on this one. Looks like we need the 64k 64bit version of these files now for the new 4.x firmware. Subscribing to the thread, in case of updates.
I’m trying to install CrashPlan but apt-get seems not to be installed (says: -sh: apt-get: not found) on my EX2 and furthermore any intent on installing it gives me this error:
./jre/bin/java: line 1: ELF4?: not found
./jre/bin/java: line 2: syntax error: unexpected “(”
For anyone interested I have managed to install this on the v3 firmware (downgraded just for Crashplan). The one stumbling block I had was the version of Crashplan. The latest version does not seem to work with the instructions. I managed to get it running by finding CrashPlan 3.5.3.
I have not been on here for a while…which is for the same reason I post this now. My CrashPlan is up and running on the older V3 firmware. I have been using this across my WD devices for “trickle backup” as I call it for more than one year now. I have recovered portions of my data multiple times and even upgraded from a MyBook to the MyCloud and simply adopted the backup, was great.
I am going to (slowly) investigate having this running on V4 firmware…but don’t hold your breath
Subscribing to the thread, in case of updates. 
