Crashplan is a great “free” utility to automate the backing up of all your systems. I have been using it for almost a year to backup all my computers including my cloud instances.

I had to perform some maintenance on one of my cloud computers and forgot how to connect the admin tool to it. Below I’m outlining the steps so I won’t forget again.

* Create a ssh tunnel to the machine

ssh -L 4200:localhost:4243 host

* Updated local CrashPlanDesktop to use port 4200

vi /usr/local/crashplan/conf/ui.properties (change port to 4200)

* Run CrashPlanDesktop

/usr/local/bin/CrashPlanDesktop

* Don’t forget to revert the changes to the configuration file

vi /usr/local/crashplan/conf/ui.properties (change port back to 4243)