Getting crashplan working on Lubuntu

Update inotify Watchers

This is basically copied from the Crashplan website:

CrashPlan on Linux depends on the inotify kernel module to know when files are added or edited in real-time. Is the inotify kernel module installed? If not, you'll need to install it. If inotify is installed, you may need to increase the number of watches that can be created.

The inotify module is govered by a property called max_user_watches. If you attempt to exceed the max number you'll get the following error in the engine_error.log (but the process lives on).

inotify_add_watch: No space left on device

Any file not covered by a watch does not have real-time backup protection. Incidentally a “watch” could be a file, directory or any other filesystem element. A given watch can catch multiple types of events or just 1, so how efficient the watch creation is depends on the library used. The bad news is that the max number by default is 8192, which is pretty darned low for our customers running clients with a 100k backup file selection.

Updating the Watch Value

You can temporarily update the value with:

echo 1048576 > /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

You can update the value permanently by putting the following value in /etc/sysctl.conf and restarting:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches=1048576

Fix Crashing At Start-up

If the ui_output.log file (default location: /usr/local/crashplan/log) displays an error similar to the following:

#
# A fatal error has been detected by the Java Runtime Environment:
#
#  SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x00007f1d89bd7009, pid=14960, tid=139766130898688
#
# JRE version: 6.0_25-b06
# Java VM: Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (20.0-b11 mixed mode linux-amd64 compressed oops)
# Problematic frame:
# C  [libsoup-2.4.so.1+0x6e009]  short+0x19
#
# An error report file with more information is saved as:
# /tmp/hs_err_pid14960.log
#
# If you would like to submit a bug report, please visit:
#   http://java.sun.com/webapps/bugreport/crash.jsp
# The crash happened outside the Java Virtual Machine in native code.
# See problematic frame for where to report the bug.
#

then edit run.conf (default location: /usr/local/crashplan/bin/) in your Crashplan app directory. Navigate to the end of the GUI_JAVA_OPTS section and add this line, inside the quotes:

-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=mozilla

If it still crashes, run:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-3.0-0

For more than 1M files or 1TB of files, press Ctrl+Shift+C in the Crashplan app and enter:

java mx 1536, restart

details here.

links