Anyone used CrashPlan?

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houkouonchi

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Is it really unlimited? I am guessing its not gonna go through but I am currently in the process of uploading 10+TB to them. What should I expect?
 
houkouonchi said:
Is it really unlimited? I am guessing its not gonna go through but I am currently in the process of uploading 10+TB to them. What should I expect?
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Well I believe it is unlimited, however the limit quickly becomes your bandwidth. I have ~500GB backed up with Crashplan, however it probably took me 4 months to get the initial backup done. Once it is done no issues with keeping updated. One issue I ran into is with Comcast cap of 250GB/month. I basically segmented my backups so as not to exceed the cap.

With 10TB I would use the Seed option that Crashplan offers.
 
I haven't tried them personally, but I am interested in hearing people's experiences. I am also looking for a place to backup a few TB for $10 or less a month. I did test out BackBlaze, but despite their 'speed test' showing me that I could do 20-25mbps I was only getting around 8mbps. The original backup taking 4 months is something I'd like to avoid.
 
I'm using the Crashplan+ Family Unlimited plan, have about 600gb so far.

They also has the option of them sending a 1tb drive to you to seed your backup, $125.
 
Hi,
I'm actually in the process of evaluating Crashplan+ running on my Solaris11 fileserver. The experience so far is a bit mixed I must say. Currently, I'm getting around 4 megabit/s when I'm backing up the data on the fileserver but I have seen upload speeds as low as 256 kilobit/s which would disqualify Crashplan+ for my needs.

I have done some testing by re-initializing Crashplan and I found that the upload speed depends on to which server you get connected to. I have been in contact with the Crashplan-support but noone has been able to give me a clear answer of what is causing the poor upload speed.

I do understand that Crashplan must have somekind of limitation when it comes to bandwidth but it is really annoying when I have approx. 5 TB of data that I would like to backup and the speed is poor. Except from that, Crashplan+ is really a great service for a really reasonable price.

//Christer J. (Sweden)
 
How long would it take you to re-download 10TB of data in the case of a loss? Wouldn't it be better to find some other, more responsive, backup solution? That's seems like a heck of a lot of data for online backup.
 
Forceman said:
How long would it take you to re-download 10TB of data in the case of a loss? Wouldn't it be better to find some other, more responsive, backup solution? That's seems like a heck of a lot of data for online backup.
Click to expand...

People see the word unlimited at a low price and compare that the cost of a backup server. It is only natrual to take a serious look at it.


As for crashplan. I am operating 2 family plans right now (11 machines)...between them nearly 4 TB of data in the cloud. Easy peasy to work with. Problem is some people trying using the consumer plan for enterpise sized needs and then become confused when it doens't meet expectations.
 
I have around 6TB uploaded to crash plan right now. As others have said it depends on your upload and cap. If comcast in your area will tolerate you going over a bit then you can upload faster. I think it took me around 1 year to upload 6TB.
 
My connection is 300 megabits down and 150 megabits up and no limits.

Last month I uploaded 30TB of data so thats really not the issue for me. I do wish I could get faster speeds to their servers though as its only going 8-10 megabits and it this rate it will take 6 months to upload the data. Honestly I don't really care about that if it manes having an off-site backup of my data.

The actual amount I would upload to them is in the 15TB range.
 
I do have one complaint with Crashplan. There client is a memory hog. On my Win7 machine it usually sits at about 450MB of memory even when it is not backing up. Not exactly a light client.

Anyone else experience this?
 
It has been running for a few days now on my machine and the java process is using around 180 megabytes of memory on my machine (linux). which isnt *too* bad.

My machine has 48 GB of ram though (soon to be 192GB) so that kind of usage is kind of nothing for me.
 
I'm using Crashplan for my personal offsite backup. I have close to 450GB uploaded. The hard part was the initial back up. It took about a month and half for the first copy, but since then it has been smooth sailing.

I've recommended to friends and family.
 
I've been thinking about buying a subscription, but it would take forever to upload with my connection, and I have a 250GB bandwidth cap.
They have an option where they will ship you a 1TB hard drive and then you ship it back to them and they copy it to their server.
I need to backup about 4TB though.
 
EnderW said:
I've been thinking about buying a subscription, but it would take forever to upload with my connection, and I have a 250GB bandwidth cap.
They have an option where they will ship you a 1TB hard drive and then you ship it back to them and they copy it to their server.
I need to backup about 4TB though.
Click to expand...

Buy a 4TB drive...backup data but not remote = $270
4x1TB from crash plan and is remote = $500
Backup to crashplan but takes a year = $60

To the people that put TB's on crashplan..what are you putting up there?
 
I am thinking about using Crashplan also, and i will likely upload photo, and some old document files and data. hmmm.

The 4+ month it takes to upload the data doesn't sit too well with me.
 
midnkight said:
I am thinking about using Crashplan also, and i will likely upload photo, and some old document files and data. hmmm.

The 4+ month it takes to upload the data doesn't sit too well with me.
Click to expand...

Then use there mail hard drive option. The 4+ month is only if you have 500+ GB of data.
 
m1abram said:
I do have one complaint with Crashplan. There client is a memory hog. On my Win7 machine it usually sits at about 450MB of memory even when it is not backing up. Not exactly a light client.

Anyone else experience this?
Click to expand...

I have experienced this as well. I had to edit the ini file to allow crashplan to use more than 512MB I think I set it to 2GB. I found that this is set to low and if it needs to use more than what is st it will close. I contacted crashplan suport and they informed me of the problem and how to fix it, but yes it does use more memory than I like.
 
Lots of connectivity issues, my client will go days before it connects and uploads. I have 2.5TB worth of data, still hasn't gotten to 100% since November.
 
I have not had one connectivity issue with Crashplan.
After I installed a new drive and OS I was able to easily re-sync my files from my raid with the backed up data. There was no need to re upload everything.
As far as what I'm backing up, my pics, home videos, music and documents.
 
after reading all the positive things about Crashplan, i gave it a go last night with the free trial. Currently i back up my data on my web host, which is nice, but really not all that secure.

So far its been extremely easy. Loaded up the software on my WHS2011 box and added my pictures and videos to be backed up. The only quirk id like changed is the times its allowed to upload. you can set it to always connect and upload, or between a block of time on certain days. I'd like it to be more granular so i can set it to go between 12am-12pm on a couple days and 12am-8am on others so i dont crush the bandwidth when people are home.

Oh well. the current batch of pics and home movies will complete in ~7 days to toss up 67gigs. The slow upload is an excuse for me to finally go through all my files and crop out things i dont need anymore. the 400gigs of music needs to be chopped down to just the things i actually listen to. Movies that are terrible rips need to be deleted and all the 2394890283490 different versions of all the old software ive horded need to be culled. Its all for the best.
 
I've been using the CrashPlan+ free trial for the past 3 weeks and I've liked it so far. I've uploaded >300GB of data during this period, and I've got another >350GB to go. I'm running it on WHS2011, backing up all of my Shared Folders.

Just a few moments ago I purchased a 1 yr licence for $50 and I plan to see if it is worth the cost when the 12 months are up. So far, I'm happy with it, but I've never had to restore anything yet (knock on wood). I also do daily back-ups to an external drive, so if I ever needed to do a backup I could do it faster. I'm just using CrashPlan in case of a catastrophic loss of my home PC and the external backup.

 
Was actually just looking over some remote backup options just in case the external backups in the fireproof safe are lost.

My only question is that, uploading to a service such as CrashPlan, what about security? Wasn't it Google's own data warehouse that said once you upload your documents, pictures etc, they can do with it as they please and use it without your permission?

Anyone know of the type of security with CrashPlan or is it just a 'whatever' approach with security?
 
Sparkyy said:
Was actually just looking over some remote backup options just in case the external backups in the fireproof safe are lost.

My only question is that, uploading to a service such as CrashPlan, what about security? Wasn't it Google's own data warehouse that said once you upload your documents, pictures etc, they can do with it as they please and use it without your permission?

Anyone know of the type of security with CrashPlan or is it just a 'whatever' approach with security?
Click to expand...
http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/faq/security
 
I have had zero issues with them. I even run my own PROe server.

Great product overall, and to those of you complaining about *only* 4-6mb uploads....check out some of the other providers, they are way worse.

Also, bare in mind that it is doing compression and dedup too.
 
Sparkyy said:
Was actually just looking over some remote backup options just in case the external backups in the fireproof safe are lost.

My only question is that, uploading to a service such as CrashPlan, what about security? Wasn't it Google's own data warehouse that said once you upload your documents, pictures etc, they can do with it as they please and use it without your permission?

Anyone know of the type of security with CrashPlan or is it just a 'whatever' approach with security?
Click to expand...

if you're really paranoid, you could encrypt your files before uploading them
 
I used crashplan for about a year, possibly a bit longer to backup my desktop to a NAS. I stopped using it is due to their restore process, it really is abysmal. The only time i ever use restore is after a format or on a new machine, when you install crashplan it gives you an option to adopt the old machine, if you do this it DELETES all of your backup files. I did this once and only a zfs snapshot saved me.

If you do manage to import an old backup you have to restore all of the files somewhere temporarily, or hope you chose all the files you needed restored and didn't forget something because they force you to delete the entire backup archive before continuing with a new backup! (This is the only backup software i've ever seen do this) You can never just leave that old backup alone so you can go back and grab files later if something was forgotten. Anyone who has crashplan installed on windows 7, check your event viewer for administrative event's, i've had tons of strange windows logon service issues as well as a few other errors related to crashplan that seem impossible to resolve (VSS). Also, it will happily use 400MB+ of ram. Unfortunately i haven't found any stable, viable alternatives so i'm stuck using the standard windows 7 backup for now. Acronis looks promising but the 214MB installer is keep me afraid for now, i'm sick of backup software compromising the stability of my system.
 
Seems to have let me install it on my server 2008 r2 file server that I store all my profiles and document shares on. I've used keepvault for my WHS for offsite backup for years but if I can backup my fileserver shares directly maybe I can finally decom that old WHS host.
 
bleomycin said:
I used crashplan for about a year, possibly a bit longer to backup my desktop to a NAS. I stopped using it is due to their restore process, it really is abysmal. The only time i ever use restore is after a format or on a new machine, when you install crashplan it gives you an option to adopt the old machine, if you do this it DELETES all of your backup files. I did this once and only a zfs snapshot saved me.
Click to expand...

This is NOT true AT ALL.

When you adopt a computer (great for reinstalls), it will do a resync which may look like it removes all your files...but it doesnt. It will resync 50gb in a couple minutes. The trick is DO NOT change your file locations. Then it WILL delete as it warns you.

bleomycin said:
If you do manage to import an old backup you have to restore all of the files somewhere temporarily, or hope you chose all the files you needed restored and didn't forget something because they force you to delete the entire backup archive before continuing with a new backup! (This is the only backup software i've ever seen do this) You can never just leave that old backup alone so you can go back and grab files later if something was forgotten. Anyone who has crashplan installed on windows 7, check your event viewer for administrative event's, i've had tons of strange windows logon service issues as well as a few other errors related to crashplan that seem impossible to resolve (VSS). Also, it will happily use 400MB+ of ram. Unfortunately i haven't found any stable, viable alternatives so i'm stuck using the standard windows 7 backup for now. Acronis looks promising but the 214MB installer is keep me afraid for now, i'm sick of backup software compromising the stability of my system.
Click to expand...

I cant say that any of what you are saying I have experienced, and I have been using them since before they offered the online backup like they do today.


Some of you are expecting WAYYY too much from a client backup provider. Bare in mind the cloud backup options that we have at work run in the neighborhood of $200/ TB / mo....
 
I put all my data (250gb) on my work computer in the exact same directory tree, backed it all up to crash plan in a few days from my office. Then "adopted" the computer on crashplan with my solaris fileserver at home with the sames file/directory tree. Got my initial backup done quickly and easily without going over the dumb comcast cap.

Crashplan has been great, nice solaris client, backup/restore works well. Client is a bit of a memory hog but such is life.

edit: what bleomycin said is incorrect, if your files are in the same place you can adopt the computer, it resyncs and your back to the races.
 
Just purchased a 4 yr license. The trial worked out good. Decent upload speeds, 1.6 - 2 mbps, although it may have been my isp limiting it (supposed to get 3 mbps).

I mainly use it for backing up photos as they're too big for cloud storage (I shoot RAW).Only have about 70GB atm but it is growing fast since I got a DSLR.

Other files I just use dropbox/skydrive. What consumer level data is taking up TBs? Blu-ray backups?
 
Grentz said:
This is NOT true AT ALL.
When you adopt a computer (great for reinstalls), it will do a resync which may look like it removes all your files...but it doesnt. It will resync 50gb in a couple minutes. The trick is DO NOT change your file locations. Then it WILL delete as it warns you.
Click to expand...

And that is my biggest problem with it, i backup just about everything, the entire appdata/program files folders and just about everything else to be thorough and so i don't lose some tiny config file buried somewhere that i need and forgot about. On a fresh install of windows i don't want crashplan pushing hundreds of gigs of crap to my system. Any other backup software will allow you to "mount" a backup archive and restore whatever files you select, then leave that old archive alone for safe keeping so you can go back to it later and grab something you forgot, crashplan does not and it is very disappointing.

I don't use or want their cloud services, i understand them not wanting to keep multiple backup archives on their end, but let me choose on mine. If they would change that function of their restore process i would likely switch back and start recommending the software again.
 
I'm using CrashPlan on both Solaris (OpenIndiana) and Windows-clients and for me it works great.
Havn't tried any restore yet, but I have my windows-clients backup both to the CrashPlan-servers and to my OpenIndiana-server, so that if my windows-client needs restore I can do that locally, and in worst case scenario its still backed up to the cloud anyways.

Found a study from Fraunhofer Institute published in mars 2012, where they take a look at various cloud storage services. What they found out about CrashPlan is on page 69.
http://www.sit.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/sit/en/studies/Cloud-Storage-Security_a4.pdf
 
MrLie said:
Havn't tried any restore yet, but I have my windows-clients backup both to the CrashPlan-servers and to my OpenIndiana-server, so that if my windows-client needs restore I can do that locally, and in worst case scenario its still backed up to the cloud anyways.
Click to expand...

Are you also backing up your windows machines to the cloud? Or just to your OpenIndiana-server. If you are only backing up locally they are not backed up to the cloud. One thing I hate about the software. It excludes all crashplan backup files.
 
JohnYYC said:
Are you also backing up your windows machines to the cloud? Or just to your OpenIndiana-server. If you are only backing up locally they are not backed up to the cloud. One thing I hate about the software. It excludes all crashplan backup files.
Click to expand...

It excludes them because it is easier to backup directly from the machine. Doing it via 3rd person is not efficient nor easy to restore from.
 
JohnYYC said:
Are you also backing up your windows machines to the cloud? Or just to your OpenIndiana-server. If you are only backing up locally they are not backed up to the cloud. One thing I hate about the software. It excludes all crashplan backup files.
Click to expand...

Doesn't it exclude it so that you buy a family plan?
 
JohnYYC said:
Are you also backing up your windows machines to the cloud? Or just to your OpenIndiana-server. If you are only backing up locally they are not backed up to the cloud. One thing I hate about the software. It excludes all crashplan backup files.
Click to expand...

My windows-clients backup both to my server and to the cloud.
My openindiana backup only to the cloud (only certain folders on my pool).
 
4yr family plan here. No issues. Then again I'm not putting TBs upon TBs of data. Only vital data such as encrypted documents (<2mb in size), pictures, etc.

All my other stuff like music/movies are expendable and are backed up to my WHS anyway.
 
I dont trust any of my data on a cloud server without the ability to encrypt data myself with my own passphrase

ie: if the host is compromised, my data is secure. if there is a court order, my data is unviewable
 
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