Ever since i started reading this blog, i have been a copycat on several issues found here… and that goes for CrashPlan as well.

I bought a 19.99$ crashplan license jan. 3. this year – that has proven to be the best spent money for a LONG time. I have had similar experiences with CrashPlan as Wonko have mentioned, and i will recomend it for anyone in the need of a reliable offsite backup solution. Now if only i could make it work together with Time Machine on my Macbook Pro :-p

Have you tested it thoroughly with Mac and PC? I just switched from a Windows Vista PC (Vista is a turd) to a MacBook Pro (Leapard). I’d love to have a good offsite backup.

Another thanks here for suggesting Crashplan. I have used Mozy (horribly experience) and JungleDisk before Crashplan, and Crashplan offers by far the most seamless backup experience. My only worry is that Crashplan stores online backups at their own backup servers, which I do not know the reliability/secuirty of. Hopefully they will add S3 support soon.

@Mike: I’ve used CrashPlan extensively on both PCs and Macs, and it works wonderfully on both.

@Will: I’m looking forward to the S3 support too. In the meantime though, you can always have CrashPlan back up to one of your own computers. That way you know your data is safe and secure.

I have seriously been considering getting a time capsule from Apple. Crashplan might be a cheaper alternative.

First time, my macbook was stolen. Thank goodness I had it backed up to my old XP box using CrashPlan! Second time? My itunes library was corrupted, I was able to go back in time and restore the library before it got corrupted, saving all my playlists, etc.

I stumbled across this post completely by accident, but I have to echo your sentiments.

When Mozy launched, I quickly signed up for a test account and was blown away by the simplicity of their software in comparison to the other backup solutions I’ve tried in the past. Over the past few years, I’ve signed up quite a few friends and family members, and even dropped Mozy’s name at a few tech conferences when talks on disaster recovery.

Fast forward a few years: I’ve been pulling my hair out for the past few months, because Mozy is stubbornly refusing to backup my 1 TB of data. Mozy backs up the first few GB and proceeds to completely choke and refuse to continue. To their credit, Mozy’s support folks found and fixed the issue on their end, but after struggling with backups for the last few months, I started to look elsewhere.

CrashPlan to the rescue! Lifehacker posted a brief blurb on the software, so I gave it a shot. In short order, I was able to install their agent on my Linux, Windows and Mac machines without any issues, and was backing up to my own storage. Shortly after installing their software, CrashPlan launched a very reasonably priced family plan for their unlimited backup service. Since signing up, I’ve had no issues whatsoever with seeings >250GB of data. Combined with their great cross-platform compatibility and local backup/restore functionality… I’m here to stay.

To their credit, Mozy has done a great service to the online backup industry by bringing awareness and driving innovation by competition. I know plenty of people — my wife included — that haven’t had any problems with Mozy. At this point, I simply think that CrashPlan has a better infrastructure and flexibility, especially for my purposes.

That said, I don’t hold grudges with technology — it changes too quickly! Maybe I’ll revisit Mozy at some point in the future… until then, CrashPlan will suffice.

i use crashplan on linux, windows, and mac, and generally find that it works ok.
but i wouldn’t go as far as to say it is trouble-free. the worst problem i’ve had with it is that
if your machine crashes and you reload it, and then reload crashplan, somehow crashplan managed to
get the account info screwed up (this may have been a user issue, as i didn’t do the initial load
of crashplan after the restore.) there was basically a duplicate account name with a different
account id, which means all the backup keys are different. essentially it rendered all the backups
created with the old account inaccessible. voila. you just lost all your data.
during the past months of using crashplan, i’ve had to uninstall it because it rendered machines
flakey (because it was hammering the disks a lot or using too much memory). on my 12GB linux box
crashplan renders the box unusable for more than 8 hours on an initial backup while it
chokes down 700,000 email messages, something other backups programs i use don’t have a problem with. probably the MOST annoying thing about crashplan is that it will totally ignore files
that are encrypted on windows (NTFS encryption i mean.) it does this more or less silently, so
until you notice what is happening those files are not backed up (ever.) this is probably
because of the way crashplan uses a daemon in the background to do the back up, which doesn’t
have your keys to access the file (the same problem arises on linux with encfs: since the
crashplan daemon runs as a different user, you have to make sure you set the “allow_other”
option in encfs, otherwise crashplan will not back them up. this leaves your files open to
snooping by root users.)

crashplan is fine for simple backups, but it suffers from a lot of problems that could
cause you data loss, so don’t get lulled into putting all your eggs in one basket.
after a few months of using it, i’ll probably return to using other backup methods for my
linux development boxes, but keep crashplan for other less critical machines.

oh, and if anyone from crashplan is reading this: your UI for the “friends” and “destinations”
area of the app are absolutely bizarre. i’m a software engineer and my gf is a techie too
and we both were scratching our heads the ways the dialog change differently depending on
what path you take through the menus… anyway. fwiw.

Oliver,
Even if you switched accounts / keys – you haven’t lost your old data or the ability to restore. They are also accessible – simply “attach” the archive and then restore from it.

We have users running CrashPlan on linux with literally thousands of users – I’m fairly confident it can handle 700,000 emails – make sure you allocate the resources you want to use – (i.e. if you don’t want it to use more than 10% of your computer’s resources, set that in settings and it wont. Linux has really bad I/O scheduling, make sure you’re using “deadline” or what is appropriate for your hardware. (e.g. noop for a raid card)

NTFS encryption is supported / works great! Read this: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/recipe/run_as_user

If you think you’ve got a bug – send it on to support, we’ll dig in. Not aware of any dialogs changing based on how you navigate.

i looked at the dialogs a little more closely today, and realized what the
problem was: if you click the side-tab “friends”, everything in that dialog is related to
other people sending backups to your machine. no problemo.
what is odd is that if you select a friend, you get a bunch of buttons and stuff
related to that user, BUT there is no indication of how to get back to the original
list (“ways to protect friends files”). there is no “go back” or “cancel” button. you have to
know that you need to click on the “friends” tab again. which is odd. its also the only way
you can get to the “import archive folder” thing.

so, now click the right tab “destinations”. then click the “friends” button (or friends tab on the top)
you are given a different list, also labeled “friends”. but these friends are actually
destinations BUT, oddly, the 1.2.3. list under the friends list describes how to protect
your friends files? huh? this dialog is supposed to be telling me how to protect MY files.
then the list under that is “is your friend already running crashplan?” and then you
get options to allow them to backup to this computer… BUT you get those options
despite the fact they are already listed as a backup SOURCE in my source list?
if they are only a target (ie, they are not backing up to me), you get a different
dialog… wtf?

now the destination-friends-list acts differently from the “source-friends-list” dialog in another subtle way.
you select AND DESELECT the destination-friend in the list, and it will toggle between the
generic dialog and the friend-specific dialog. which is odd, but ok, it more or less works.
note that this is different than the source-friends list under the main “friends” dialog (the one you can select
on the right.) in that dialog, you CANNOT DESELECT a friend in the list to revert to the
generic non-friend-specific dialog.

i’m sure this description is very confusing, which is exactly how the UI in that area
of crashplan is: bizarre and confusing. it just needs some simplification and
rewording i think.

btw: this description is for the linux version on ubuntu (seems to be similar on the mac
too.)

I am so glad I made the switch to crashplan. It is much much better than mozy. I had trouble with Mozy thinking my external hard drive was gone and then taking it off the backup. When it saw it again (it would blip for a few seconds), the backup would start doing the initial back all over again. Since I was backing up several hundred gigs of data this meant it would take MONTHS AND MONTHS to get it back up to the mozy.com servers. Crashplan does not have that issue. It also does restores on my mac and Vista machines just fine. LOVE CRASHPLAN. Mozy needs some work.

I had ordered mozy few days ago and had already uploaded few GB-s before reading your story. a hour later i had mozy uninstalled and crashplan set up and running. cannot make a verdict yet, of course, but the first impression is that mozy’s UI is somewhat easier for a beginner, but crashplan’s functionality is clearly better planned… example: crashplan starts a backup always from the latest files, so if you make a full copy just before starting crashplan, your ass is covered already. with mozy, you will have to do parallel backups (for one more month?) until the first upload is done.

I really wanted to use it – I like the idea that I can both backup to friends, my other computers and online service too.
At first – all was good; I tested backup to Crashplan Central of 100+GB; performance was more than reasonable, and I did a full restore test of all my email; it all worked as expected.
At some point, just before signing up to the full deal, I realized my backup is stuck, and the numbers are not consistent on one of the mapped drive (I know it is not officially supported).

What broke the deal was their support. I started interacting with their support to figure out what’s happening. I had to REMIND their support I have an open ticket, and ask again and again what’s up. At some point – I uploaded log file, and again reminded them to get an answer; the answer was “the developer is looking at it”. Another reminder was needed, but enough is enough.

Not professional. Nobody should nag support 4+ times.

I am off to iDrive; superb performance and support from my limited test.
Less features, more expensive for all of my data – but I need a backup and support I can trust.

(this is the 3rd service I use, after a year with memopal; I would not recommend memopal too, for other reasons)

Turns out old backup archives created with Crashplan have a bug that can leave files unrestorable. Crashplan silently fixed this (no entry in the release notes), but old archives may have corrupted files. The only solution is to wipe the archive and start from scratch, and the only way to find out is to try a restore and see if it works.

More details at http://try-dot-ch.blogspot.com/2010/03/crashplan.html

@Nik: CrashPlan representatives have responded to the data corruption allegation in your blog post (they say they haven’t heard from you since responding to your post). They admit that their support representative miscommunicated the problem, but they also clarified that CrashPlan did not corrupt your data, and that there are no known corruption issues in CrashPlan.

I’ve used Mozy (hated it) and had a REALLY BAD experience with dropbox. (They deleted all my files! And that’s on a PAID/PREMIUM account!) I’m going to give CrashPlan a shot. One thing I really like is the built-in onsite backup functionality. Then again, redundant backups from the same piece of software may not be the best idea…

First off, for me, the support team are pretty slow to respond and also happily go completely silent on you if the issue prolongs and they either get bored or stuck. They’re in no way proactive nor seem to have much desire to see the problem through. I don’t get the feeling they really care. I perhaps get the feeling that each customer has a limited amount of support time that they’re allocated and once it’s run up, they have to ignore you. Just a theory…

What happened to me:

I have been using CrashPlan for a little while and always keep 2 complete backups on 2 local external disks, just incase one dies. Well, one did and I contacted the support team to see what my options were.

They advised that i could simply copy the backup archive from my other backup disk to a new disk that i now had. I tried this and i didn’t work (i kept getting “location unavailable”). I asked for further advice and they told me it should “just work”, so i deleted the copied archive and tried again (another 12 hours of copying). It didn’t. They then told me to try again after i’d killed all CrashPlan backup processes, so i tried again and it still didn’t work. They then asked me to do this again, but to use the ‘Attach archive’ feature. I tried again and still no luck.

This activity took me a good few days in total and was completely fruitless. I was pretty fed up with the whole thing.

So, i wondered if this was a permissions issue as one disk was a USB disk and the other was a NAS. I did a whole lot of permissions resetting and ensured that all files in the backup were not locked. But, none of this worked.

What’s made me question CrashPlan is:

• Why has this issue occurred and will it happen again? If it does, i’m literally losing backup data.
• Why can’t the support team get to the bottom of the issue and why was each of their pieces of advice different and incomplete?
• Why is this documented in different places within the CrashPlan support docs, each with different solutions and why are each incomplete?
• Why couldn’t the support team try and replicate the issue? I did ask for this.
• Why were there such large gaps between the support team’s responses (days)?
• Why have the support team gone utterly silent on me now? Have they given up? Are they baffled? Don’t they care?

So, i’m left wondering how much i can trust the service and the people. I can’t see me ditching it as i’ve paid for it, but i can’t see me using it without a second backup app running as well.

Regarding my backups, I’ve decided to bin the original archive completely and start again after formatting all my backup drives. I’m wondering if there is a permissions issue that wil be fixed by starting from scratch. Let’s see…

Shame, these guys seemed so close!

I also switched from Mozy to CrashPlan. Mozy worked well for me for a couple of years, then started stalling and generating error messages on my Mac. Every time I tried to get help from Mozy tech support, they gave me instructions for their Windows client, even though I always mentioned i was using Mac OS X. After going without backup for over a month while my issue wasn’t resolved, I decided to try CrashPlan.

After a quick trial backing up one computer to another, I subscribed to the Crash Plan Central family plan for offsite backup. My initial backup took a long time (not Crash Plan’s fault — I was backing up hundreds of gigs with only 1 MB/s upload speed), but it never choked. Since then, it has been trouble-free.

As the default “IT guy” for my family, I also like that I can use one Crash Plan Central account to keep all our computers (a mix of Macs and Windows PCs) backed up with one tool for one price that I don’t have to think about and that I don’t have to teach anyone else to use.

Great product and great support. This is a no brainer for price and functionality. Interface could be better. Friends and destination type things are a bit confusing and illogical. One thing that would be helpful is sub passwords on famiy accounts so that you can only see your own data and others data would be hidden. This is helpful so that the incorrect data isnt restored by accident

Currently using Carbonite which shows the iPhoto library as a series of folders by year. This is difficult to use since there is no documentation on what determines what year events are stored in, e.g. year created, year last used etc. For example, the 2010 folder doesn’t contain events created this year and I don’t know where else to look.
How does CrashPlan display iPhoto events in it’s restore function?

How about the old fashioned way? Put stuff on an external hd then put it in a safe deposit box(along with cd/dvd backups) and then stopping in once a week, plug it in, go have lunch, blah/blah? Apple techs in South Portland just saved my stuff(12K photos,etc) when a bracket on the hd let go! Great service even if they had not been able. I would have been less happy, but believe that I believe-people were praying… I now have an external hd(seagate) will use it along with Time Machine, but I have a lot to learn.