Last month I ditched rdiff-backup (which saved my bacon on a number of occasions) for CrashPlan+ with the Family Unlimited plan so I can backup all of our computers (one Ubuntu desktop, two Macs) locally and offsite. Used their seed service. Already had to do a small restore. Love it. Works great.

The only problem I’ve had is this: it wouldn’t remember the window size and position of the desktop app on my Ubuntu machine. I installed CrashPlan as root as suggested by the installer (so that it can backup anything on the system). This put CrashPlan in /usr/local/crashplan, owned by root. Turns out that CrashPlan desktop wants to save window geometry in /usr/local/crashplan/conf. But it can’t because I run the desktop app as me, not as root.

So, the fix would be for CrashPlan to store user settings in the user’s home directory (for example ~/.crashplan/ui.properties). But the workaround until that happens is to manually create a properties file in the /usr/local/crashplan/conf folder that CrashPlan desktop has access to. Open a terminal and type:

cd /usr/local/crashplan/conf
USERNAME=`whoami`
sudo touch ui_$USERNAME.properties
sudo chown $USERNAME ui_$USERNAME.properties

That creates an empty properties file in the crashplan directory with your username that you have access to. You should be able to just copy that into a terminal. Double check the directory where CrashPlan is installed and note the backticks. My username is john so it creates a file named ui_john.properties. The next time you close CrashPlan, it will be able to write to that file so it will remember its window position and size.