Question to Crashplan Users Regarding Retention

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hey all,

I posted a long question in the Crashplan user support forum a couple of days ago, and decided to go back in and see if they replied, but the post has completely vanished. No evidence that it ever existed. I mist have asked an uncomfortable question! Companies really need to realize that if they opt to run a support forum, they have to be comfortable with anything that is posted, even if it is negative to their business. Corsair is great like this. Others like FitBit and apparently Crashplan are not.

Anyway, on to the Question:

So I have the crashplan client running on my system at home. I accidentally disconnected the mount point where all my storage resides for a few days without noticing. I noticed when I received the regular Crashplan email with my backup summary, that said that I now had 0 bytes and 0 files backed up. (!?)

So I went to investigate. I discovered the Crashplan client doing some sort of deep purge analysis, which was kind of concerning. It looks like it had decided that it was now OK to remove my files.

I realized the problem, fixed the mount point and restarted Crashplan. My expectation was that my files would still be there, and it would only have to upload any changes that had happened since the mountpoint was broken. I was wrong. A Massive amount of data now needs to be re-uploaded, which - even on my relatively fast 150mbit upstream connection will take several days.

Then I cam to thinking. What if instead of just being a bad mountpoint, my drive had failed, or I had accidentally deleted all of my data. Would all this data that apparently needs to be uploaded again be gone? Would I ahve lost my data? If that is the case, why am I backing it up to Crashplan at all?

This whole experience has left me rather concerned with using Crashplan for my backups. Does anyone know how they handle their data retention in the case it goes missing from the client, and what may have gone wrong in my case?

 

[Megalith]

Backups are deleted after six months of inactivity. You would also lose your data if you remove file directories (backup > files) or change your archive encryption.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Backups are deleted after six months of inactivity. You would also lose your data if you remove file directories (backup > files) or change your archive encryption.

Yeah, that is what I thought.

I wonder why then, Crashplan started purging my files after only a few ( < 5 ) days of my folders being empty.

In this case it is a minor inconvenience of using my upstream bandwidth for a few days, but if I had experienced actual data loss, I would have been screwed. This must have been some sort of error.

 

[jordan12]

Yeah, that is what I thought.

I wonder why then, Crashplan started purging my files after only a few ( < 5 ) days of my folders being empty.

In this case it is a minor inconvenience of using my upstream bandwidth for a few days, but if I had experienced actual data loss, I would have been screwed. This must have been some sort of error.

I went back to crashplan, but it sure worries me now after reading about your issue.

 

[Phantum]

I think there's an option in the client that dictates file versioning and retention, but by default both are set to something that doesn't particularly jive well with periods of inactivity (however short or long that may be). Google around for it and I'm fairly certain you'll stumble upon what I did some months ago. Hopefully that'll get you fixed up, unfortunately this is after your re-upload (same thing happened to me).

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hopefully that'll get you fixed up, unfortunately this is after your re-upload (same thing happened to me).

Well, at least it's better than discovering it after data loss!