16 ms·

CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

274 points by akulbe 9y ago

viraptor 9y ago
Will be interesting to see who's able to pick up the customers. Also, will backblaze provide some nice offer for migration, or will they try to delay / spread the influx. I wouldn't expect them to know about this coming up / have enough spare capacity. Then again, it's only home accounts, so may not be that much summed up.
- brianwski 9y ago
  Disclosure: I work at Backblaze > I wouldn't expect them to know about this coming up / have enough spare capacity. Backblaze ALWAYS has to have extra capacity for "bumpy" customer growth. We have three types of extra capacity: 1) Deployed, spinning drives accepting customer data live but not yet filled. This "live buffer" is usually 60 days or more, right now it is about 90 days (of "normal load"). Right now Backblaze's storage is growing by about 2 Petabytes per month, so we have 6+ Petabytes spinning awaiting new customers. 2) An entire month of hard drives sitting on the "loading dock" (these can be deployed and accepting customer data in maybe 24 hours in a complete panic). This is about 2 Petabytes. 3) The "contract to purchase 3 months of drives and parts" at a pre-established price from our suppliers. Under most circumstances we can accelerate orders and get drives accepting data within two weeks. This is another 6 Petabytes. If the burn rate approaches ANYWHERE NEAR that high we'll scramble and do better than that to accept the customers. If it really looks like we cannot handle the load, we have a setting that says "Members Only" that no longer allows new customers to sign up, but allows all existing members to continue backing up and doing restores. Once a customer is paying Backblaze we must honor our contract with that customer.
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    Any chance you could add the ability to store files for more than 30 days? I doubt that it is actually that much data, but I don't want to come to my computer to see that some ransomeware has been encrypting my files for 90 days and now demands to be paid.
    - brianwski 9y ago
      Based on the enormous amount of feedback we have received today, we are actively talking about increasing it. It was an arbitrary business decision, it is as easy to change as a constant in the source code. If Backblaze can afford it, we will definitely be changing it soon.
      - geostyx 9y ago
        If you can't afford it, let me pay extra for this feature.
lanbanger 9y ago
"Put the customer first" by cutting the customer off. Looking forward to seeing CrashPlan on the 2018 Startup Dead Pool.
ishbits 9y ago
This is unfortunate. I chose Crashplan initially due to great family pricing, but more importantly as it had a Linux client. Given I backup Linux home server, a Linux desktop and a Linux laptop this has been its killer feature for me.
- rrauenza 9y ago
  Me too. They suggest Carbonite, but it doesn't have a Linux client.
  - 1024core 9y ago
    Well, shit. I just switch da wife to Crashplan, touting its several advantages over Carbonite (which she was happy with). Now I'll have to eat crow and switch her back. :(
  - ajmurmann 9y ago
    I used to have Carbonite for my wife's iMac. It was a little slow to backup but worked on till we actually needed to recover all data after a HD failure. Since then I couldn't dislike Carbonite more than I do. The first ten minutes of the recovery process the disclose was fast. Then it continuously slowed down. Of course customer support blamed it on our connection which was complete BS. I then started downloading the files were needed most through their web UI which was not bottlenecked on their end. However, there seemed to be done restriction on their end on how many files you can download at once. The limit seemed to be around 100 files. If you download too many you will see a spinner minutes and then download a empty tgz. It was incredibly painful and tedious. We have up on most files. The entire idea of unlimited space is obviously not viable and something gotta give. Apparently in Carbonite's case it's the download bandwidth. Should have seen this coming. I can't dissuade against Carbonite strong enough. We now have a NAS and back up truely important data to S3 and iCloud.
- jlintz 9y ago
  Same reason I was using Crashplan, now looking for suggestions for a good cross platform solution
- 9y ago
jonathanoliver 9y ago
I would love to know of any other offerings that perform both P2P as well as cloud-based backups.
- ValentineC 9y ago
  Arq lets one back up to SFTP servers, so that's an alternative…?
pavel_lishin 9y ago
Well, fuck. Let the suggestions begin - who should I switch to? Bonus points if moving data to a newly purchased hard drive isn't a terrifying process that looks like it's losing all of my backups, as well as Linux/Windows/Mac support.
- res0nat0r 9y ago
  Been using: https://duplicacy.com/ https://duplicacy.com/
- ValentineC 9y ago
  > Let the suggestions begin - who should I switch to? Bonus points if moving data to a newly purchased hard drive isn't a terrifying process that looks like it's losing all of my backups, as well as Linux/Windows/Mac support. I'm kinda partial to Arq with your choice of cloud storage. I heard that they don't support moving backup data between destinations though so I'm going to have to re-evaluate my choices when my Amazon Drive unlimited subscription comes to an end as well.
- X86BSD 9y ago
  Tarsnap. Seriously.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I don't suppose there's a Windows client?
  - barrkel 9y ago
    Only about 1000 USD per month for what I have in Crashplan - I think I'll give it a pass.
    - X86BSD 9y ago
      GAH! How much are you storing in crash plan? 1000USD/mo seems a little insane. Is that after deduplication with tarsnap?
archagon 9y ago
In my mental checklist of evaluating new products and services, Backblaze has always gone above and beyond while Crashplan irritated me enough to make me switch: * Are they one of the market leaders? * Do they have a company blog? Are they passionate about their product? (Backblaze's technical articles are always a treat; barely a word from Crashplan.) * Do they regularly interact with their users, e.g. on HN? (I often see Backblaze commenting on relevant articles.) * Is their website user-focused, or is it aimed at the enterprise? (Crashplan's website is a confusing mess.) * Do they offer secondary products that relate to their primary offering? (B2 leverages Backblaze's fine-tuned backup architecture.) * Is their software well-built/designed, or is it annoying and bloated? (Crashplan's client forces you to wait for reindexing every time you check a new folder! The tree view is also very annoying, and Backblaze's whitelist just makes a whole lot more sense.) A shame for Crashplan users, but I hope this change ensures BB's longevity for many more years!
- marcinzm 9y ago
  Sadly Backblaze fails the main criteria of my mental checklist: * Can it backup linux machines?
  - sliken 9y ago
    Just use backblaze's B2. There's integrations with dupliciti among others.
    - brianwski 9y ago
      Disclosure: I work at Backblaze. You can see a list of integrations here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html
- rrauenza 9y ago
  My main problem with BackBlaze is a lack of a Linux solution: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-Is-Backblaze-going-to-offer-Linux-support- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-Is-Ba...
daenz 9y ago
Time to finish writing my own backup system. Crashplan filled that need for me on linux.
- viraptor 9y ago
  If you're looking for something for Linux only, you could use a generic backup app like Borg instead. Stable and tested frontend with your choice of backend(-s).
NelsonMinar 9y ago
So what's a good Linux consumer solution? We here are all capable of rolling our own hacks, sure. But I want a good clean friendly product I don't have to configure or think about. The real challenge in these things is the UX for restoring files. (For home-grown options, I've been using rsnapshot for years. But it really works best on a local disk and the rsync-over-ssh hacks I've done are the opposite of "clean consumer solution".)
- X86BSD 9y ago
  Tarsnap.
  - dixie_land 9y ago
    Haha was just typing the same thing you beat me to it
  - dchest 9y ago
    Agree! It now even has a nice GUI https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui
  - slavik81 9y ago
    Tarsnap is not reasonable alternative for most users. Consider that I was paying $5/mo for 200GB of storage from CrashPlan. From tarsnap, that would be $50/mo. And, frankly, my measly 200GB isn't much data. A 2TB HDD costs under $100 and could cost $500/mo to back up with tarsnap. It would still have been $5/mo with CrashPlan. I get that Colin is basically just charging the S3 costs plus a small margin, but the reality is that S3 is far too expensive to be used to store low-value consumer data.
    - X86BSD 9y ago
      I backup quite a bit and after deduplication with tarsnap it's not nearly as much.
      - slavik81 9y ago
Exuma 9y ago
Bummer..... just got this email. Carbonite looks like trash, I'm not sure I trust that. I will likely just pay $30/month.
jwillmer 9y ago
Really disappointed in CrashPlan. Giving the customers 3 months before the backups are worthless is not cool!
- Ragewind 9y ago
  In the email I have received they state that their service continues until October 22nd in 2018, so that's more than one year left. I'm on a free account, so it has got nothing to do with a running subscription.
  - ValentineC 9y ago
    > I'm on a free account, so it has got nothing to do with a running subscription. This sounds like something that was mostly missed by the comments here — does that mean that people who only utilised their peer-to-peer backup system need to find another solution too, because their software needs to phone home to work? Relying on user accounts and "backup codes" [1] stored on CrashPlan's servers sounds like a scary additional point of failure. Well, one more thing to add to my list of criteria for backup software: that it'll keep running, for the most part, without having to log into an account somewhere. [1] https://support.crashplan.com/Backup/Backing_Up_To_A_Friends_Computer https://support.crashplan.com/Backup/Backing_Up_To_A_Friends...
    - Ragewind 9y ago
      You are right, for home usage I'm completely relying on the peer-to-peer backup system to have some kind of "distributed" backup where every machine is backed up to another machine and to an external drive. If I wanted I could even add an offsite location as well. In combination with file watching and storage of multiple versions per file this makes a pretty unique feature set which makes it hard for me to find a replacement. They stated a few times that the free version will also only work until that deadline. I assume the client is not going to work anymore after that. I'd prefer they released an offline (home network) version which I would gladly pay for.
  - ValentineC 9y ago
rrauenza 9y ago
I think this means it is also an end to CrashPlan's peer to peer free backup solution? I don't believe their business plan offers that. Thank goodness I bought into their long service plan. I have 1.9 years to figure this out. We have one Linux NAS and a bunch of Windows clients. I could go with Crashplan Business on the NAS and then punt on the Windows clients. Or go back to BackupPC for windows... I hope their windows client solution has improved -- I used to have to install a Cygwin rsync daemon.
- ant512 9y ago
  It's worth pointing out that CrashPlan's business client app uses Electron (because the Java client app for home users wasn't bloated enough). That's reason enough for me to look elsewhere.
  - jwong_ 9y ago
    Wow, I had heard it was native for business. Being Electron is even less native than the Java client, no thanks.
  - mikevm 9y ago
    According to their website you continue using the same Java app: Do I need to install a new CrashPlan app? No. The conversion process automatically updates the CrashPlan app on your computers. Instead of the green-themed CrashPlan for Home branding, you'll see the blue-themed CrashPlan for Small Business branding. [0] https://support.crashplan.com/Subscriptions/Migrate_your_CrashPlan_for_Home_account_to_CrashPlan_for_Small_Business https://support.crashplan.com/Subscriptions/Migrate_your_Cra...
    - ant512 9y ago
      Hmm, maybe it's just the Enterprise version that's using Electron.
- syntheticnature 9y ago
  Hmm, they said end of service would be October 22nd 2018, so I'm wondering if they were only expecting one year plus sixty days, not 1.9 years plus sixty days... may need to check on your situation. In any case, it sounds like the business version drops the peer to peer free solution.
Luc 9y ago
Their email was a good reminder to watch out with date formats. "Your new subscription expiration date is 11/06/2017" had me thinking they accidentally set the expiration to last June...
5_minutes 9y ago
I actually have 3 Crashplan for Families under my hands. My mom and dads iMacs is one of them. This is literally easy money for Crashplan. But the price would double to move them to the new Small Business plan. What I liked about Crashplan, besides the unlimited space was that if files would get deleted, and you would find out about it 3 months later, you could recover them. With Backblaze, which is mentioned here, you wouldn't. Which, for me beats the whole purpose of doing backups at all. See here: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666688-What-Happens-If-I-Delete-A-File-From-My-Computer-?mobile_site=true https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666688-What-... This makes no sense to me: so if a malicious hacker, virus, Trojan or your kid deletes a folder... by the time you find out, Backblaze might already have stopped taking backups of it, itself.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- tomduncalf 9y ago
  WTF. This sucks, my main use case for Crashplan is downloading files that I long ago deleted (or left on an old machine), or downloading stuff from old external hard drives (which Backblaze also doesn't support). I might just suck it up and pay the small business price.
  - ghostly_s 9y ago
    Sounds like you're not using their backup service as a backup service, then, and perhaps part of the reason why they've discontinued it.
    - tomduncalf 9y ago
      To my mind, keeping copies of old, deleted files is an important part of a backup. Just to be clear, I wasn't using crashplan as a kind of media file store or anything - their restore experience was far too clunky for me to bother with that! I'm more concerned about old files I've accidentally or deliberately deleted that I later turn out to need. Anyway, my storage requirements are pretty low (probably 1tb) so I'm going to look into solutions like B2 with Arq (along with my existing Time Machine). Just frustrating to have to go through all this!
t0mbstone 9y ago
NoooooooOOoooo!!! Crashplan is my favorite backup engine, and I have recommended it to so many people! Don't leave me!!
jacquesm 9y ago
That's a good day for Tarsnap and BackBlaze.
joelrunyon 9y ago
> We will honor all of our existing agreements with consumers, but we will no longer renew any consumer subscriptions, nor will we sign up any new consumers for Crashplan for Home. Does that mean they will honor the next month and that's it - or they're completely done?
- SyneRyder 9y ago
  From the email, it looks like your current agreement + 60 days free subscription extension. So if you're on monthly billing, you've got about 60 - 90 days. [They renewed my annual plan just 9 days ago...]
  - jschulenklopper 9y ago
    > So if you're on monthly billing, you've got about 60 - 90 days. I got such a mail, mentioning: "We will honor your existing CrashPlan for Home subscription, keeping your data safe, as always, until your current subscription expires. To allow you time to transition to a new backup solution, we've extended your subscription (at no cost to you) by 60 days. Your new subscription expiration date is 09/13/2017." There's no way I can fit 60 days between today and Sep. 13. I was about to ask about this, only to discover that their mail came from a noreply@ address...
    - duebbert 9y ago
      Same here! Received email today (22 Aug) saying: "we've extended your subscription (at no cost to you) by 60 days. Your new subscription expiration date is 09/14/2017." That's not 60 days from today (or from the end of my monthly subscription)!!!
      - SyneRyder 9y ago
        I just checked my email again, and the subscription expiration they quoted me on my annual subscription wasn't extended either (it's exactly the 12 months I'd paid for). I assume it's a typo and that they mean it's that date + 60 days. But you're right, I wouldn't rely on it though...
IdontRememberIt 9y ago
I had Mozy and noticed by chance that it had silently stopped backuping. I needed to reupload everything. I was surprised to see how long an inital backup can be when you have a lot of data (they are capping on their side). This was a gentle reminder to use 2 tools. Today I use Crashplan and Backblaze. I will switch to the small business (love the private key and unlimited backup) but I will miss the computer-to-computer backup feature which is great for a massive restore.
- DINKDINK 9y ago
  >I will switch to the small business (love the private key[...] Are you talking about this?: https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Archive_encryption_key_security https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Archive_e... "Archive encryption key security options Your encryption key is secured in one of three ways, which is based on your security settings: -Standard: Secured with a salted and hashed version of your account password -Archive key password: Secured with a salted and hashed version of your archive key password -Custom key: Encryption key is replaced by a custom key that is never escrowed on a authority server"
  - IdontRememberIt 9y ago
    Yes. The custom key is a must have for my situation (legal requirements).
yoda_sl 9y ago
Like many I'm really disappointed by that news. Not only I have been using CrashPlan for over 7 years, I did recommend it to many family members and friends. I remember back in 2010 it took more than a month to upload / backup all my Macs at home... Since then I have added a few extra TB of data which CrashPlan uploaded without any issues. Asst one time, I even had to restore my MBP which had a drive failure and I did loose only 15 minutes of work. I need now to check all the different solutions, and start from scratch again! I wish they had offer some bridge to transfer what is already backed up to another provider; yes I know this is not a simple task but at least their customers will not be upset by that news.
wilhil 9y ago
Am I being thick, looking around their entire site and I can't see the price anywhere. Even the FAQ says to sign up to a trial, give your credit card info and then you see the price...
- ashmud 9y ago
  $10 per device per month [1]. [1] https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/business/ https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/business/
seltzered_ 9y ago
Fwiw, I've been a crashplan family user for years, here's my future plan for family backups: - Use a freenas at home - Make everyone in the family back up to it instead of crashplan. (No idea what app to use here yet but assume there's a dozen of em) - Anything that isn't already acting as an offsite backup via the freenas server (I.e. My own stuff, and server only files), upload to backblaze b2. I'm overall okay with the announcement. Was already planning to switch away since crashplan wasn't offering the great deals they had years ago (crashplan family was ~7.50/month with 4 year plan in 2014) I look forward to no longer futzing with Bhyve/Linux just to use crashplan from my server too. I don't look forward to spending more time figuring this stuff out more though.
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
Well, this sucks. CrashPlan was awesome in that it doubled as both a backup app and a cloud storage solution. Since I had my settings set to NEVER remove deleted files, I didn't need to have each of my backed up external hard-drives plugged in at all times in order to have them backed up. I could just plug them in as needed, make sure Windows assigned them a unique drive letter, and let Crashplan sync any new data up. None of the alternatives I'm looking at can do this. Carbonite lets you back up one external hard drive on the Prime membership. Backblaze seems like it would delete all of the external drives if I don't keep them constantly plugged in. And no Linux client. It's kinda sad that the market hasn't yet created something that seems fundamentally basic to data hoarders: - TRULY unlimited - BACKUP, not SYNC (that means I shouldn't need to keep three external hard-drives plugged in at all times just to ensure you don't delete it!) - Fully cross-platform (yes, Linux users exist, too)
- eli 9y ago
  I don't see how "truly unlimited" and "data hoarders" can ever be the basis of a sustainable business. Each additional terabyte costs them real money to store.
  - AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
    I think you underestimate how many people are in the "lite data hoarders" category. I don't consider myself a huge data hoarder. I have about 4 Terabytes. That's the totality of two decades of collecting music, video, pictures, ROMS, game ISOs, etc. It's enough that I can still fit it all on today's portable external hard-drives. And I don't think it's really much more than other people who might do amateur photography or videos and like to store their RAWs. However, it's more than is feasible for your standard iCloud/Google Drive/Dropbox plan can provide without significant burden. At this point there's nothing really comparable out there to what Crashplan offers. Even the services like Amazon Glacier or Backblaze's B2 start becoming way more expensive once you pass the terabyte mark or so.
    - freehunter 9y ago
tribby 9y ago
I can only imagine that they are not doing this to "put the customer first" but rather because they offered unlimited storage with a linux client. that made it a popular choice with the data-hoarding/seedbox/plex server crowds. 100TB for $13/mo doesn't scale. yet another product that has folded because its users understood "unlimited" to mean "unlimited." good riddance to these unethical companies, I hope their business offering fails.
- DINKDINK 9y ago
  >yet another product that has folded because its users understood "unlimited" to mean "unlimited." good riddance to these unethical companies, What did CrashPlan do that was unethical? Seems like they kept their word and let users backup an unlimited amount. Contrast that with AT&T who capped so-called unlimited plans. CrashPlan found that it was untenable and shuttered it. Their honoring their contracts that they sold to customers. No bait-and-switch.
org3432 9y ago
I'd like to see more mature solutions that store all my data in the cloud, revision it there, and just use my local hard disk as a workspace cache instead. I suspect that's one of the reasons CrashPlan is exiting too, they can't backup iCloud Document folders on Mac, and likely OneDrive either, so the writing is on the wall.
alkonaut 9y ago
I backup 5 computers with their unlimited family plan. ~250GB at $12.50/month (I think). Is there any service even remotely similar in price? This was super convenient because I could offer parents etc to backup to my account at no extra cost to myself. Peace of mind. I also suspect this was what made this unsustainable. Where should I go now?
deanclatworthy 9y ago
I was a heavy Crashplan user. I have around 4 family machines backing up to my machine (free), and then my machine backing up to Crashplan (paid). What are my options going forward? I can easily switch myself over to Backblaze, but are there any simple, free, GUI clients for creating incremental, encrypted backups to another machine over the internet? The great thing about crashplan has been I just install it on the family member's machine and not once have I had a single problem. It just worked and provided my family member's with reassurance that I had a backup of their data, that I couldn't touch or see, if they had problems with their own machine. And as I see that BB employees are in this thread, how about making backup folders opt-in for power users. I have sensitive files all over my machine, and who knows what crap MS is storing in User/LocalData etc. so I prefer to opt-in to folders rather than take a risk opting out and syncing a password or keyfile to your servers. The UI for exclusions is awful too.
- noja 9y ago
  You could switch to Backblaze, but you have to give them your encryption key when you restore. Use B2 with a decent client instead, you don't get an all-in-one plan for your family, but at least you keep control over your data.
  - deanclatworthy 9y ago
    I don't wish to store my families data in the cloud for a fee. Crashplan allowed me to use my own (spare) storage space to provide this for them.
    - noja 9y ago
      That was a great feature. Mind if I ask why you don't want encrypted data in the cloud?
      - deanclatworthy 9y ago
        Because it costs me money to do so. Crashplan has always been free to backup data between machines and was/is very good at it. I don't mind paying for a 1tb hard drive to back up my mother's few photos, but trying to sell her on the idea of paying a monthly fee to do so is not going to get me far :)
sumoboy 9y ago
I'm sure there tired of consumers taking advantage of the unlimited storage by storing PB's of data, and losing $$$. Amazon basically did the same thing recently removing unlimited storage. Business data is more a bit more predictable with storage needs and really makes alot more money. I dumped crashplan a few years ago due to the bandwidth restrictions and time it would take to download TB's worth of data, built my own solution with a remote Synology nas. It's a real cost issue once you have more than 1-2TB of data, otherwise it's just easier to use gdrive or dropbox for most needs.
- porker 9y ago
  > Amazon basically did the same thing recently removing unlimited storage. I'm working out what to do next since they did this. I use Arq (https://arqbackup.com https://arqbackup.com) and back up my desktop (Windows) and laptop (OSX) to Amazon Cloud Drive. Together it's approx 1.5TB of backups - and this is excluding a bunch of folders and accepting data loss on them. The doubled price doesn't appeal, but I haven't found an up-to-date storage price calculator to see what my options are in the TB range.
  - ValentineC 9y ago
    > I haven't found an up-to-date storage price calculator to see what my options are in the TB range. For pay-as-you-go storage, I found this: http://coststorage.com/ http://coststorage.com/
- mhb 9y ago
  I'm sure there tired of consumers taking advantage of the unlimited storage by storing PB's of data I don't see how this makes sense. Instead of closing the whole service they can set a limit which will probably satisfy 95% of the users who aren't using enough storage to make it unprofitable. So I assume this isn't the reason.
  - sumoboy 9y ago
    I don't know for sure why crashplan ceased but I recall reading here on HN that someone happily posted they were using like 16+ PB's on Amazon drive which is insane, I'm sure plenty more abused it but in reality that much space is quite a few average users I'm sure. Crashplan could have created some sort tiered pricing structure for those using over 5-10 TB possibly but to build up your service and brand and dump it suddenly is really un-trusting. I wouldn't be surprised they just ran out of data center capacity and decided cutting loose low revenue consumers was cheaper than building out new space.
CharlesW 9y ago
The only reason I used CrashPlan is that, on my home network, anything I'd want to back up is on my NAS. Are there alternative "consumer" solutions that support that?
- CWuestefeld 9y ago
  I use IDrive for this. It runs right on my Synology NAS, doing scheduled backups of the data it contains. The pricing is pretty reasonable, too.
  - ValentineC 9y ago
    Heads-up for anyone considering IDrive — there's a "90% off" welcome promotion for the first year that's not really obvious on their website: https://www.idrive.com/idrive/signup/el/welcome90 https://www.idrive.com/idrive/signup/el/welcome90
- freeone3000 9y ago
  SyncThing, perhaps?
  - transitionnel 9y ago
    Amen. Everyone: If you were using CrashPlan for simple p2p backups like this, use SyncThing now. It has versioning, it's open source, and it's secure. Made my day... I will enjoy donating to their project.
- sreitshamer 9y ago
  (Disclosure: I work for Arq Backup) Arq will back up files that are on your NAS, or anything else you want it to back up.
pizzetta 9y ago
Too bad Druva does not offer a home product. I believe C42 allows reselling of their product. So, someone could buy in bulk from C42 and turn around and offer the same product to end users (at some markup). The issue would be moving the data from on "server" to the other. However, I think C42 offers tools to migrate data --not sure if individual one offs at a time is doable since you don't have access to their back end.
agotterer 9y ago
The comments are littered with lots of complaints, but very little alternative suggestions. Does anyone have any recommendations for a backup solution they actually like? I like BackBlaze as a company, but like many of the other commenters I have an issue with the 30 day deletion policy.
SippinLean 9y ago
Is there a difference between the Home and Small Business plans that justifies doubling the price?
- freehunter 9y ago
  Most likely the justification is that they're not making enough money from the Home plan and instead of raising prices, they're cutting the lower plan. Their actual list of feature differences [1] doesn't show much else in the way of justification. [1] https://support.code42.com/Administrator/Small_Business/Get_started_with_CrashPlan_for_Small_Business/Compare_CrashPlan_for_Home_and_CrashPlan_for_Business https://support.code42.com/Administrator/Small_Business/Get_...
gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
Is there any open source cross platform solution that 1. encrypts stuff on the client machine 2. has a pluggable backend - i.e. can push to one (or several of) e.g. S3, equivalent commodity cloud offerings, an NFS server or an arbitrary server 3. Rotates backups 4. Depuplicates (does this conflict with clientside encryption?) 5. "Just works" (I'm happy with a config file)
- rmurri 9y ago
  Look into https://duplicacy.com/ https://duplicacy.com/. Not completely open source (commercial constraints), but may work for you.
- pjc50 9y ago
  Have a look at https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/ and see if it's suitable.
  - gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
    This solves a different problem... Looks good for syncing files though.
linopolus 9y ago
For all those complaining about Backblaze not holding deleted data forever: Do you really rely on a cloud solution as your one and only backup? I use Backblaze, and I don't worry. It's not my only backup. I additionally have a local backup, which today has files I deleted like 5 years ago, as you should to. So go get happy with Backblaze, it's a nice application, not some slow Java thing like Crashplan, and just works..
- freehunter 9y ago
  >Do you really rely on a cloud solution as your one and only backup? Most likely yes. Considering most people don't have any backups of any kind, having at least one backup, and an off-site backup at that, is infinitely better. The number of people who have any backup is small. The number of people who have two is far, far smaller. Most people just don't care about their data that much unless they're a business, which is why this thread exists to begin with.
rietta 9y ago
This sucks! I do not know of a comparable service to recommend to friends and family. The business plan is more expensive than Backblaze. This is a true blow to those of us who run Linux at home as the dearth of go-to cloud backup services is profoundly frustrating. Guess its back to the bad old days of rsyncing to a mirror at a friend's house.
mikevm 9y ago
I don't understand all the whining in this thread. Their new offer is pretty unbeatable: Back up for free until the end of your current CrashPlan for Home subscription, then enjoy a 75% discount for your next 12 months. After that, CrashPlan for Small Business costs $10 per device each month. So after the first discounted 12 months it will only cost $10 per backed up device. And you get: * Unlimited storage * Unlimited file versioning * Keep deleted files forever * Encryption * Headless Linux client I'm amazed that people here (who probably take in pretty decent salaries) cannot afford to pay $10 for a backup service that gives you all that.
- Oletros 9y ago
  Perhaps a lot of the "whining" comes from the people using the Family Plan. Going from $149/year for 2-10 computers to $240-$1200/year is not a little increase
  - mikevm 9y ago
    In my case I just have NAS that centralizes anything that is important and have only one CrashPlan instance running on it. Any computer in the house that requires backup will have to store the important data in the network attached folder.
  - fencepost 9y ago
    If I were actively whining it'd be about the apparent demise of the peer-to-peer option which is what I've been using for years. Heck, I have some old backup archives from old systems in there that I never got around to figuring out how to import. Guess there's new urgency if I want to pull anything out of those. That said, Crashplan itself has been a lot less reliable in recent months than I'd like - little things like my laptop only being able to back up to a home system when I'm NOT on the same network, even though I can access other services on the same machine. Guess it's time to move a new backup system higher on my priority list. Edit: The thing I really like(d) and will miss about Crashplan is the ease of adding another system to it. Either by signing into my account after installing the client on a new box (e.g. when I added a laptop) or by sharing a short code with my parents that they could simply enter to back up to my system with no real configuration required.
Grue3 9y ago
Damn, this came out of left field. CrashPlan was a constant pain to use for me (slow uploads, weird bugs where it wouldn't start up after updating, actually deleting all my backups when I didn't renew my 4-year old subscription over winter holidays with barely any warning). But the other services simply couldn't compare on price and backup retention. Having old versions/deleted files always available saved my ass so many times. The new business plan seems only twice as expensive as my current one, but it seems like a rip off to be charged twice as much for the same functionality. I think I'll take them for the 75% discount offer, and then wait for any reasonable competitor to pop up.
- DelightOne 9y ago
  Are you allowed to go with the business plan without having a business? What do you put in as company name then?
  - magicalhippo 9y ago
    Another bummed out Crashplan user here. They offer account migration[1]. Of course you then have to pay per computer, and you lose the computer-to-computer backup feature. [1]: https://www.crashplanpro.com/migration/ https://www.crashplanpro.com/migration/
    - DelightOne 9y ago
      Yes! It says enter company name. Question is how to proceeed there cause it is for my family and no company.
      - lsaferite 9y ago
        d/b/a <Insert Favorite Pet Name>
hkchad 9y ago
I just canceled my Crashplan about 2 weeks ago and fully switched to Backblaze B2. Mostly because I consolidated all my computers to a Synology NAS and now I upload to B2 via Synology Cloud Sync. This way I have a single on-site backup plus my offsite backup. I never liked that I had to manage Crashplan on each individual computer. Now I just setup NAS sync and upload from the NAS.
reiichiroh 9y ago
BackBlaze doesn't have any family plans from what I can find?
kentt 9y ago
Good riddance. I switched from Backblaze to crashplan because it was cheaper for families. I've regretted it ever since. The client is horrible. Right now it's consuming about 4GB of memory. I had to increase that recently, otherwise it wouldn't even start. It littered gigs of log files around my system when it did that. Often the webui would just timeout if I wanted to recover a file. Never could figure out why, so I couldn't really recover files reliably anyway. I'm glad I'm forced to find a solution that better. I'd definitely stay away from them for business solutions.
metafunctor 9y ago
Oh, what a shame! My family is a heavy user of the computer-to-computer backups that CrashPlan for Home offers. It's great knowing all of the data on our family computers is securely backed up so that I can fetch the drive from a 20 minute drive to the office or my parent's house. In case of catastrophic failure, where on-site backups would also be destroyed or corrupted, I would hate to have a drive shipped from the United States to me. It would probably take forever. Is there a alternative available that does computer-to-computer backups, and supports Mac and Linux?
SimonPStevens 9y ago
So much for the idea that paying for a product keeps it running.
- X86BSD 9y ago
  I think you can charge for something and still go broke. Perhaps they grossly under charged for storage? Or storage + employees + ... Bad business are started all the time.
turc1656 9y ago
I recently had evaluated my entire backup plan and CrashPlan was evaluated as a possible change. It was one of two finalists I was debating between. Boy am I glad I didn't go with them. I understand that they will not just cancel the existing users and are only preventing new customers from signing up. But let's be real. We know what this means. It means they will not be giving the individual consumers in any sort of priority whatsoever. The non-commercial customers have now become a legacy operation. FWIW - the reason I decided against CrashPlan was: 1) I inherently don't trust anything that is unlimited everything (storage space, versions, undelete, etc.) 2) I especially don't trust anything that gives all those unlimited features for a paltry $5 a month 3) My speed was horrendously slow. Seemingly capped at about 2 mpbs (250 kbps). 4) The application seemed to be bloated and resource heavy. 5) They have a well known issue where you can wipe your entire backup from their server if you encounter the dreaded disaster scenario (or get a new machine) and have a fresh O/S with a new installation of the software. If you don't do the steps exactly in the correct order, it will see your new installation as being the source copy and having nothing to store, and subsequently wipe everything on their servers. I see that they recently posted something on August 1, 2017 about "adoption" which seems to be migration for new machines so maybe this issue is finally addressed.
- heywire 9y ago
  I went though the "adoption" procedure in July with no issues. I was migrating from an aging Windows system to a Linux system and had no issues. I was expecting to have problems and to re-upload my ~500GB of data, but surprisingly it figured out where everything was. That even included moving the data around so I could reformat the NTFS drive to ext4. My only complaint over the years I've been using CrashPlan has been that the Java client is a bit memory hungry.
- rrauenza 9y ago
  And who was the other finalist?
  - turc1656 9y ago
    Sorry, I had split my original (long) comment into two separate ones and I thought I left a brief mention of it. The winner was pCloud. Please see my other comment for a more detailed explanation of how I have things set up and why I use them if you are interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075935
mioelnir 9y ago
Looks like neither Backblaze nor Carbonite support E2E encrypted backups where I do not have to send the password to the cloud, or the private key is in fact generated inside the cloud. Which means I have to really scramble to find something else that is compatible with computer-illiterate family. Geez, not what I needed.
- mafsedan 9y ago
  This is the most important issue for me. Last time I looked, nobody else let me hold the key and only held on to encrypted files on their end. It would be way to dangerous for me to do my PC backup any other way. If someone finds one of those other company's old disk drives and keys, they could empty all my back accounts, etc.
- sreitshamer 9y ago
  (Disclosure: I work for Arq Backup) Arq encrypts the backups before transmitting them, and the encryption key you choose never leaves your computer.
  - porker 9y ago
    Is there a way to share the encryption key between computers (manually set the key)? See my aside @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075063 for why
- hendersoon 9y ago
  Backblaze supports a user-provided passphrase, which is used to encrypt your private key. That provides E2E security. It isn't used by default, though. https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html
bluedino 9y ago
Oh the irony. At my last job, we setup 3-4 salesperson's laptops on a CrashPlan consumer account. Once we hit the storage limit, we'd buy another account, and then add a couple more laptops to it. It was marginally cheaper than buying the small business plan and WAY less of a headache. It was such a shortsighted way of setting things up and a pain to administer. We're talking $10/month for salespeople that are paid 6 digit salaries. They're going to have to migrate now.
- rrauenza 9y ago
  I considered doing that for a small non profit -- but realized I really didn't want the employees to be able to restore/see each other's data. The business plan has isolated accounts.
pjc50 9y ago
My own notes on alternative backup/sync solutions: https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-clouds.md https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... SyncThing+cloud storage seems most promising but I've not actually tried it yet.
- leipert 9y ago
  Yep. I am using syncthing since around 3 years now and never had a problem, upgrades are flawlass, really not that much CPU/RAM (<1 % and 50 MB for 18000 Files ~ 70GB). Setup is like this: 1. syncthing on PC -> syncthing on Synology NAS. 2. NAS -> Internal backup from 3-Disk RAID to additional 4th disk 3. I am thinking about additionally uploading it to Amazon Glacier or Backblaze
brango 9y ago
Looks like rclone might be the best alternative: https://github.com/ncw/rclone https://github.com/ncw/rclone
berdario 9y ago
I got a 4 year contract with Crashplan (expiring in 2018) and I'm also pissed by this news... I paid less than 4$ per month (the price would've been already higher if I renewed yesterday, but still acceptable) and stored around 130 GB of data (so not a lot, but it's already more than the 100GB threshold that some services use) I need something that would keep watch on all the files on the system (see inotify) to avoid continuous rescans of the disks, and that would work on Linux... Just these 2 simple requirements already seem to disqualify any other tool suggested here: Carbonite (no Linux) Backblaze (no Linux, and none of the 3rd party integrations with B2 seems to support live watching of files) Tarsnap (no watching) Borg (no watching) Does anyone know if it's feasible to keep the whole / under Dropbox, Google Drive or Spideroak? (I know that GDrive doesn't have an official linux client) The only solutions I know would be: Lsync (but it would be only syncing, no history), r1soft (but it seems to be only servers, haven't checked yet the features)... Are there any other tools out there? I'd really thinking that I should write my own
- jwillmer 9y ago
  I researched now for a solution that lets me backup all my family PC's and found this two solutions that I will now try out: https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.urbackup.org/ https://www.urbackup.org/ edit: It's client/server backup software. Not an online service. I used CrashPlan in a similar manner.
- brianwski 9y ago
  Brian from Backblaze here. > Backblaze ... none of the 3rd party integrations with B2 seems to support live watching of files I'm not exactly sure what you are going for, but you can "preview" files through the web interface on BOTH the Backblaze online backup and also B2. If you are specifically asking about movies, just stay tuned. The first step was allowing preview of simple images, next we want to support previewing of movies. Also, a feature we added a week ago in Backblaze Online Backup is the ability to "Share Files" (any file in your backup) with other people. For the first release we limited the file size (just so our servers did not tip over) but we plan to support the ability to share all files less than 10 GBytes.
turc1656 9y ago
I chose pCloud as my provider of choice. It's not unlimited, but it's $10/mo for 2 TB of storage and 2 TB of traffic. That is more than enough for most users, and you can increase the size in 2 TB increments at additional cost. pCloud has pretty much all the bells and whistles one would need. I certainly consider it rich in features. I also like that it can be used as a sync storage or just as a "hard drive in the cloud" where I don't have to keep the data or folder structure on my machine if I don't want to. The only downside is that the integrated encryption is an additional charge. To get around that, I decided to go with Boxcryptor, which I already had. The average user can use the free version of Boxcryptor. It is awesome and I highly recommend it. Both pCloud and Boxcryptor show up as physical drives on your computer, which I find convenient. So I have my primary source drive synced with the Boxcryptor drive/location and Boxcryptor is set up on my machine to encrypt the data on the fly as it is copied (surprisingly, this is not the default setting). Then, I have a separate process that syncs the raw Boxcryptor directory where the files show in their encrypted format (the "drive" version shows them unencrypted because everything is done on the fly both ways) to my pCloud storage. In the end, I have 3 versions - the unencrypted source, the encrypted Boxcryptor copy, and the pCloud backup which contains the encrypted copy.
jimjimjim 9y ago
bread and circuses --> food and video. these are the only consumer tech industries that will survive. everything else will eventually pivot to business/government.
Havoc 9y ago
Not sure I need a backup solution anymore to be honest. All my stuff is on something cloud-y already anyway. (Cloud =/= backup I know). Realistically my data loss risk profile is pretty low. So not sure I need to spend coin on backup... Much more scared of say Lastpass dropping dead.
- fencepost 9y ago
  The reason for backup in that case isn't so much dying hardware as it is data corruption or malicious activity. Backup needs to account for a bunch of failure modes: data failure (corruption, malware, "Windows Ate My Data," user error), hardware failure/loss (drive death, laptop legs), building failure ("all my backups are in that safe that reached 600 degrees internally....."). Used to be that for serious emergencies you could usually get data recovered by a lab, but with SSDs that's iffy at best or likely not happening at all with drive encryption.
hendersoon 9y ago
I am using Duplicati [1] to backup. It's FOSS, supports linux, windows, and MacOS, and creates block-based encrypted backups. The client works on most SOHO NAS devices too. Very happy with it. I backup to a Google Drive with unlimited storage. This costs $10 per month with a G Suite for Business [2] account. You do not need 5 users to get unlimited storage. I have just under 9TB in my GDrive. Backup services generally charge $5 to $6 per computer. My solution costs double that but can backup every computer I own and gives me a cloud drive with unlimited storage to boot. [1] https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/ [2] https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html
akulbe 9y ago
My position on this whole thing is that CrashPlan isn't just selling storage for backup. Their value is in the fact that they could be trusted to have your back if something happened locally. It was literally a set-it-and-forget-it solution. I have multiple backups, but this was my primary offsite solution. I understand the consumer market isn't as profitable as the business market, but why not opt to raise prices, and let consumers decide if it was valuable enough to them to pay the increased prices? Why just abandon that market completely? I recently opted to trial the CrashPlan Pro (which they just renamed to CrashPlan for Small Business) subscription. This move by Code42 gives me pause. It makes me wonder when they'll do the same thing to the Business segment? I went with the Business plan because was I was a happy Home customer. Now, I wonder if it was good move.
pnathan 9y ago
ok. ::signs up for business account:: CrashPlan has worked great. Not moving away from a working technical solution I already pay for. The delta between now and the new cost is pretty small; maybe $5-7 / mo. meh
- spilk 9y ago
  The big difference for me is that the old family plan supported 5 devices, the business plans are all per-device. If I back up 5 computers with the business plan this costs $600/year vs. $150/year.
Thespian2 9y ago
Like many in this thread, I'm here looking for alternatives. CrashPlan was sufficient for my family needs, and none of the other services I looked at hit the same sweet spot. Slow, saturated uploads, and their bloated client were tolerable for what I was paying, and what I got. We've got a few mentioned replacement possibilities scattered in the comments and replies below, but I'd like to put forth my "asks" for solutions, which seem to match others. I'm a tech guy, and "rolling my own" Linux solution is possible, but in this case, I'd be happy to pay someone else to worry about the details of storing a copy of my bits, so I can do other things with my time. My wish list is as follows: MUST ====== have both Linux and Windows client ability to whitelist/blacklist/select subsets of files/folders to be backed up ====== SHOULD offer as many of the following as possible (all optional) ======= some sort of "Family" pricing deal for multiple machines in one account encrypted backups with consumer controlled key not necessarily given to service option to switch out back end bulk storage infrastructure "forever" file retention / restoration of old versions (charge me for storage) user scheduled backups and/or don't bring client to crawl or saturate home line ====== Feel free to add any replies with suggestions here which might be useful to others. For my point of view, if CrashPlan found the home offering unsustainable from "abuse" of the "unlimited" feature, I would have much preferred them introduce a cap to the home plan at some "reasonable" value. They could have balanced the books, and saved 95% of their customers. Start rolling off oldest file version backups when you hit space cap and/or offer extra space at cost+profit. Done.
- corford 9y ago
  I think https://www.spideroak.com https://www.spideroak.com fits your list (specifically "One" which is their consumer solution/app). I'm a happy user who's had an account with them for years (it costs me under $10/month iirc). It has/supports: * Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android * Lets you share your quota across unlimited machines/devices * Lets you whitelist/blacklist folders & files to be backed up (by pointing and clicking and/or by specifying patterns) * Does LAN syncing * Keeps versioned file history forever (i.e. point-in-time recovery) * Has scheduling but I haven't used this, it just runs quietly in the background and I never notice it negatively impacting anything (client and accompanying background service is currently using a total of 51MB of memory). You can cap the upload speed if you want to make sure it never saturates your uplink. * Uses end to end encryption i.e. they don't have your key (important caveat: this is provided you only use their app and don't use their web interface, although even then they claim the key is never stored anywhere - just kept temporarily in the server's RAM while it auths/decrypts files for you) * Been around for ages and not likely to go out of business any time soon * Lets you share files with a self-destructing link * Uses aggressive de-duping on their backend (ZFS based I think?) so you can squeeze the most out of your quota (just checked my account and I'm using 94GB without compression & de-duplication but only being charged for 41GB) Edit: and they release a lot of opensource: https://github.com/SpiderOak https://github.com/SpiderOak
geostyx 9y ago
HashBackup[0] works well for me and works with several remote storage providers such as B2. I recently wrote a post about one of the ways I use it[1]. [0] http://www.hashbackup.com http://www.hashbackup.com [1] https://jacobhands.com/hashbackup-example-1/ https://jacobhands.com/hashbackup-example-1/
atYevP 9y ago
Yev from Backblaze -> Hey gang, been busy on Twitter, did I miss anything?
davidjnelson 9y ago
Crash plan is great for my windows computer since I can't use time machine on it. I do have a giant spinning drive with windows history backups for non catostrophic backup. As long as the transition is seamless, $10/mo seems fair.
mathw 9y ago
Well I had only just finished my first CrashPlan backup set, so thanks a lot Code 42. The software's horrendous on Linux anyway, it just seemed like my best option. Now what? Guess I'll have to write my own. Unless someone's got something supporting cloud backup that's better than Duplicity that I've not heard of.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
maxsupport 9y ago
Make your voices heard, Code42 could change the policy. There was/is an internal battle in the company. Here is a video posted by an insider while this was being decided: https://goo.gl/YEXa2L https://goo.gl/YEXa2L

274 points by akulbe 9y ago

Will be interesting to see who's able to pick up the customers. Also, will backblaze provide some nice offer for migration, or will they try to delay / spread the influx. I wouldn't expect them to know about this coming up / have enough spare capacity. Then again, it's only home accounts, so may not be that much summed up.

brianwski 9y ago
Disclosure: I work at Backblaze > I wouldn't expect them to know about this coming up / have enough spare capacity. Backblaze ALWAYS has to have extra capacity for "bumpy" customer growth. We have three types of extra capacity: 1) Deployed, spinning drives accepting customer data live but not yet filled. This "live buffer" is usually 60 days or more, right now it is about 90 days (of "normal load"). Right now Backblaze's storage is growing by about 2 Petabytes per month, so we have 6+ Petabytes spinning awaiting new customers. 2) An entire month of hard drives sitting on the "loading dock" (these can be deployed and accepting customer data in maybe 24 hours in a complete panic). This is about 2 Petabytes. 3) The "contract to purchase 3 months of drives and parts" at a pre-established price from our suppliers. Under most circumstances we can accelerate orders and get drives accepting data within two weeks. This is another 6 Petabytes. If the burn rate approaches ANYWHERE NEAR that high we'll scramble and do better than that to accept the customers. If it really looks like we cannot handle the load, we have a setting that says "Members Only" that no longer allows new customers to sign up, but allows all existing members to continue backing up and doing restores. Once a customer is paying Backblaze we must honor our contract with that customer.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  Any chance you could add the ability to store files for more than 30 days? I doubt that it is actually that much data, but I don't want to come to my computer to see that some ransomeware has been encrypting my files for 90 days and now demands to be paid.
  - brianwski 9y ago
    Based on the enormous amount of feedback we have received today, we are actively talking about increasing it. It was an arbitrary business decision, it is as easy to change as a constant in the source code. If Backblaze can afford it, we will definitely be changing it soon.
    - geostyx 9y ago
      If you can't afford it, let me pay extra for this feature.

lanbanger 9y ago

"Put the customer first" by cutting the customer off. Looking forward to seeing CrashPlan on the 2018 Startup Dead Pool.

ishbits 9y ago

This is unfortunate. I chose Crashplan initially due to great family pricing, but more importantly as it had a Linux client. Given I backup Linux home server, a Linux desktop and a Linux laptop this has been its killer feature for me.

rrauenza 9y ago
Me too. They suggest Carbonite, but it doesn't have a Linux client.
- 1024core 9y ago
  Well, shit. I just switch da wife to Crashplan, touting its several advantages over Carbonite (which she was happy with). Now I'll have to eat crow and switch her back. :(
- ajmurmann 9y ago
  I used to have Carbonite for my wife's iMac. It was a little slow to backup but worked on till we actually needed to recover all data after a HD failure. Since then I couldn't dislike Carbonite more than I do. The first ten minutes of the recovery process the disclose was fast. Then it continuously slowed down. Of course customer support blamed it on our connection which was complete BS. I then started downloading the files were needed most through their web UI which was not bottlenecked on their end. However, there seemed to be done restriction on their end on how many files you can download at once. The limit seemed to be around 100 files. If you download too many you will see a spinner minutes and then download a empty tgz. It was incredibly painful and tedious. We have up on most files. The entire idea of unlimited space is obviously not viable and something gotta give. Apparently in Carbonite's case it's the download bandwidth. Should have seen this coming. I can't dissuade against Carbonite strong enough. We now have a NAS and back up truely important data to S3 and iCloud.
jlintz 9y ago
Same reason I was using Crashplan, now looking for suggestions for a good cross platform solution
9y ago

jonathanoliver 9y ago

I would love to know of any other offerings that perform both P2P as well as cloud-based backups.

ValentineC 9y ago
Arq lets one back up to SFTP servers, so that's an alternative…?

pavel_lishin 9y ago

Well, fuck. Let the suggestions begin - who should I switch to? Bonus points if moving data to a newly purchased hard drive isn't a terrifying process that looks like it's losing all of my backups, as well as Linux/Windows/Mac support.

res0nat0r 9y ago
Been using: https://duplicacy.com/ https://duplicacy.com/
ValentineC 9y ago
> Let the suggestions begin - who should I switch to? Bonus points if moving data to a newly purchased hard drive isn't a terrifying process that looks like it's losing all of my backups, as well as Linux/Windows/Mac support. I'm kinda partial to Arq with your choice of cloud storage. I heard that they don't support moving backup data between destinations though so I'm going to have to re-evaluate my choices when my Amazon Drive unlimited subscription comes to an end as well.
X86BSD 9y ago
Tarsnap. Seriously.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I don't suppose there's a Windows client?
- barrkel 9y ago
  Only about 1000 USD per month for what I have in Crashplan - I think I'll give it a pass.
  - X86BSD 9y ago
    GAH! How much are you storing in crash plan? 1000USD/mo seems a little insane. Is that after deduplication with tarsnap?

archagon 9y ago

In my mental checklist of evaluating new products and services, Backblaze has always gone above and beyond while Crashplan irritated me enough to make me switch: * Are they one of the market leaders? * Do they have a company blog? Are they passionate about their product? (Backblaze's technical articles are always a treat; barely a word from Crashplan.) * Do they regularly interact with their users, e.g. on HN? (I often see Backblaze commenting on relevant articles.) * Is their website user-focused, or is it aimed at the enterprise? (Crashplan's website is a confusing mess.) * Do they offer secondary products that relate to their primary offering? (B2 leverages Backblaze's fine-tuned backup architecture.) * Is their software well-built/designed, or is it annoying and bloated? (Crashplan's client forces you to wait for reindexing every time you check a new folder! The tree view is also very annoying, and Backblaze's whitelist just makes a whole lot more sense.) A shame for Crashplan users, but I hope this change ensures BB's longevity for many more years!

marcinzm 9y ago
Sadly Backblaze fails the main criteria of my mental checklist: * Can it backup linux machines?
- sliken 9y ago
  Just use backblaze's B2. There's integrations with dupliciti among others.
  - brianwski 9y ago
    Disclosure: I work at Backblaze. You can see a list of integrations here: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html
rrauenza 9y ago
My main problem with BackBlaze is a lack of a Linux solution: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-Is-Backblaze-going-to-offer-Linux-support- https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-Is-Ba...

daenz 9y ago

Time to finish writing my own backup system. Crashplan filled that need for me on linux.

viraptor 9y ago
If you're looking for something for Linux only, you could use a generic backup app like Borg instead. Stable and tested frontend with your choice of backend(-s).

NelsonMinar 9y ago

So what's a good Linux consumer solution? We here are all capable of rolling our own hacks, sure. But I want a good clean friendly product I don't have to configure or think about. The real challenge in these things is the UX for restoring files. (For home-grown options, I've been using rsnapshot for years. But it really works best on a local disk and the rsync-over-ssh hacks I've done are the opposite of "clean consumer solution".)

X86BSD 9y ago
Tarsnap.
- dixie_land 9y ago
  Haha was just typing the same thing you beat me to it
- dchest 9y ago
  Agree! It now even has a nice GUI https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap-gui
- slavik81 9y ago
  Tarsnap is not reasonable alternative for most users. Consider that I was paying $5/mo for 200GB of storage from CrashPlan. From tarsnap, that would be $50/mo. And, frankly, my measly 200GB isn't much data. A 2TB HDD costs under $100 and could cost $500/mo to back up with tarsnap. It would still have been $5/mo with CrashPlan. I get that Colin is basically just charging the S3 costs plus a small margin, but the reality is that S3 is far too expensive to be used to store low-value consumer data.
  - X86BSD 9y ago
    I backup quite a bit and after deduplication with tarsnap it's not nearly as much.
    - slavik81 9y ago

Exuma 9y ago

Bummer..... just got this email. Carbonite looks like trash, I'm not sure I trust that. I will likely just pay $30/month.

jwillmer 9y ago

Really disappointed in CrashPlan. Giving the customers 3 months before the backups are worthless is not cool!

Ragewind 9y ago
In the email I have received they state that their service continues until October 22nd in 2018, so that's more than one year left. I'm on a free account, so it has got nothing to do with a running subscription.
- ValentineC 9y ago
  > I'm on a free account, so it has got nothing to do with a running subscription. This sounds like something that was mostly missed by the comments here — does that mean that people who only utilised their peer-to-peer backup system need to find another solution too, because their software needs to phone home to work? Relying on user accounts and "backup codes" [1] stored on CrashPlan's servers sounds like a scary additional point of failure. Well, one more thing to add to my list of criteria for backup software: that it'll keep running, for the most part, without having to log into an account somewhere. [1] https://support.crashplan.com/Backup/Backing_Up_To_A_Friends_Computer https://support.crashplan.com/Backup/Backing_Up_To_A_Friends...
  - Ragewind 9y ago
    You are right, for home usage I'm completely relying on the peer-to-peer backup system to have some kind of "distributed" backup where every machine is backed up to another machine and to an external drive. If I wanted I could even add an offsite location as well. In combination with file watching and storage of multiple versions per file this makes a pretty unique feature set which makes it hard for me to find a replacement. They stated a few times that the free version will also only work until that deadline. I assume the client is not going to work anymore after that. I'd prefer they released an offline (home network) version which I would gladly pay for.
- ValentineC 9y ago

rrauenza 9y ago

I think this means it is also an end to CrashPlan's peer to peer free backup solution? I don't believe their business plan offers that. Thank goodness I bought into their long service plan. I have 1.9 years to figure this out. We have one Linux NAS and a bunch of Windows clients. I could go with Crashplan Business on the NAS and then punt on the Windows clients. Or go back to BackupPC for windows... I hope their windows client solution has improved -- I used to have to install a Cygwin rsync daemon.

ant512 9y ago
It's worth pointing out that CrashPlan's business client app uses Electron (because the Java client app for home users wasn't bloated enough). That's reason enough for me to look elsewhere.
- jwong_ 9y ago
  Wow, I had heard it was native for business. Being Electron is even less native than the Java client, no thanks.
- mikevm 9y ago
  According to their website you continue using the same Java app: Do I need to install a new CrashPlan app? No. The conversion process automatically updates the CrashPlan app on your computers. Instead of the green-themed CrashPlan for Home branding, you'll see the blue-themed CrashPlan for Small Business branding. [0] https://support.crashplan.com/Subscriptions/Migrate_your_CrashPlan_for_Home_account_to_CrashPlan_for_Small_Business https://support.crashplan.com/Subscriptions/Migrate_your_Cra...
  - ant512 9y ago
    Hmm, maybe it's just the Enterprise version that's using Electron.
syntheticnature 9y ago
Hmm, they said end of service would be October 22nd 2018, so I'm wondering if they were only expecting one year plus sixty days, not 1.9 years plus sixty days... may need to check on your situation. In any case, it sounds like the business version drops the peer to peer free solution.

Luc 9y ago

Their email was a good reminder to watch out with date formats. "Your new subscription expiration date is 11/06/2017" had me thinking they accidentally set the expiration to last June...

5_minutes 9y ago

I actually have 3 Crashplan for Families under my hands. My mom and dads iMacs is one of them. This is literally easy money for Crashplan. But the price would double to move them to the new Small Business plan. What I liked about Crashplan, besides the unlimited space was that if files would get deleted, and you would find out about it 3 months later, you could recover them. With Backblaze, which is mentioned here, you wouldn't. Which, for me beats the whole purpose of doing backups at all. See here: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666688-What-Happens-If-I-Delete-A-File-From-My-Computer-?mobile_site=true https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217666688-What-... This makes no sense to me: so if a malicious hacker, virus, Trojan or your kid deletes a folder... by the time you find out, Backblaze might already have stopped taking backups of it, itself.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tomduncalf 9y ago
WTF. This sucks, my main use case for Crashplan is downloading files that I long ago deleted (or left on an old machine), or downloading stuff from old external hard drives (which Backblaze also doesn't support). I might just suck it up and pay the small business price.
- ghostly_s 9y ago
  Sounds like you're not using their backup service as a backup service, then, and perhaps part of the reason why they've discontinued it.
  - tomduncalf 9y ago
    To my mind, keeping copies of old, deleted files is an important part of a backup. Just to be clear, I wasn't using crashplan as a kind of media file store or anything - their restore experience was far too clunky for me to bother with that! I'm more concerned about old files I've accidentally or deliberately deleted that I later turn out to need. Anyway, my storage requirements are pretty low (probably 1tb) so I'm going to look into solutions like B2 with Arq (along with my existing Time Machine). Just frustrating to have to go through all this!

t0mbstone 9y ago

NoooooooOOoooo!!! Crashplan is my favorite backup engine, and I have recommended it to so many people! Don't leave me!!

jacquesm 9y ago

That's a good day for Tarsnap and BackBlaze.

joelrunyon 9y ago

> We will honor all of our existing agreements with consumers, but we will no longer renew any consumer subscriptions, nor will we sign up any new consumers for Crashplan for Home. Does that mean they will honor the next month and that's it - or they're completely done?

SyneRyder 9y ago
From the email, it looks like your current agreement + 60 days free subscription extension. So if you're on monthly billing, you've got about 60 - 90 days. [They renewed my annual plan just 9 days ago...]
- jschulenklopper 9y ago
  > So if you're on monthly billing, you've got about 60 - 90 days. I got such a mail, mentioning: "We will honor your existing CrashPlan for Home subscription, keeping your data safe, as always, until your current subscription expires. To allow you time to transition to a new backup solution, we've extended your subscription (at no cost to you) by 60 days. Your new subscription expiration date is 09/13/2017." There's no way I can fit 60 days between today and Sep. 13. I was about to ask about this, only to discover that their mail came from a noreply@ address...
  - duebbert 9y ago
    Same here! Received email today (22 Aug) saying: "we've extended your subscription (at no cost to you) by 60 days. Your new subscription expiration date is 09/14/2017." That's not 60 days from today (or from the end of my monthly subscription)!!!
    - SyneRyder 9y ago
      I just checked my email again, and the subscription expiration they quoted me on my annual subscription wasn't extended either (it's exactly the 12 months I'd paid for). I assume it's a typo and that they mean it's that date + 60 days. But you're right, I wouldn't rely on it though...

IdontRememberIt 9y ago

I had Mozy and noticed by chance that it had silently stopped backuping. I needed to reupload everything. I was surprised to see how long an inital backup can be when you have a lot of data (they are capping on their side). This was a gentle reminder to use 2 tools. Today I use Crashplan and Backblaze. I will switch to the small business (love the private key and unlimited backup) but I will miss the computer-to-computer backup feature which is great for a massive restore.

DINKDINK 9y ago
>I will switch to the small business (love the private key[...] Are you talking about this?: https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Archive_encryption_key_security https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Archive_e... "Archive encryption key security options Your encryption key is secured in one of three ways, which is based on your security settings: -Standard: Secured with a salted and hashed version of your account password -Archive key password: Secured with a salted and hashed version of your archive key password -Custom key: Encryption key is replaced by a custom key that is never escrowed on a authority server"
- IdontRememberIt 9y ago
  Yes. The custom key is a must have for my situation (legal requirements).

yoda_sl 9y ago

Like many I'm really disappointed by that news. Not only I have been using CrashPlan for over 7 years, I did recommend it to many family members and friends. I remember back in 2010 it took more than a month to upload / backup all my Macs at home... Since then I have added a few extra TB of data which CrashPlan uploaded without any issues. Asst one time, I even had to restore my MBP which had a drive failure and I did loose only 15 minutes of work. I need now to check all the different solutions, and start from scratch again! I wish they had offer some bridge to transfer what is already backed up to another provider; yes I know this is not a simple task but at least their customers will not be upset by that news.

wilhil 9y ago

Am I being thick, looking around their entire site and I can't see the price anywhere. Even the FAQ says to sign up to a trial, give your credit card info and then you see the price...

ashmud 9y ago
$10 per device per month [1]. [1] https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/business/ https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/business/

seltzered_ 9y ago

Fwiw, I've been a crashplan family user for years, here's my future plan for family backups: - Use a freenas at home - Make everyone in the family back up to it instead of crashplan. (No idea what app to use here yet but assume there's a dozen of em) - Anything that isn't already acting as an offsite backup via the freenas server (I.e. My own stuff, and server only files), upload to backblaze b2. I'm overall okay with the announcement. Was already planning to switch away since crashplan wasn't offering the great deals they had years ago (crashplan family was ~7.50/month with 4 year plan in 2014) I look forward to no longer futzing with Bhyve/Linux just to use crashplan from my server too. I don't look forward to spending more time figuring this stuff out more though.

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

Well, this sucks. CrashPlan was awesome in that it doubled as both a backup app and a cloud storage solution. Since I had my settings set to NEVER remove deleted files, I didn't need to have each of my backed up external hard-drives plugged in at all times in order to have them backed up. I could just plug them in as needed, make sure Windows assigned them a unique drive letter, and let Crashplan sync any new data up. None of the alternatives I'm looking at can do this. Carbonite lets you back up one external hard drive on the Prime membership. Backblaze seems like it would delete all of the external drives if I don't keep them constantly plugged in. And no Linux client. It's kinda sad that the market hasn't yet created something that seems fundamentally basic to data hoarders: - TRULY unlimited - BACKUP, not SYNC (that means I shouldn't need to keep three external hard-drives plugged in at all times just to ensure you don't delete it!) - Fully cross-platform (yes, Linux users exist, too)

eli 9y ago
I don't see how "truly unlimited" and "data hoarders" can ever be the basis of a sustainable business. Each additional terabyte costs them real money to store.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
  I think you underestimate how many people are in the "lite data hoarders" category. I don't consider myself a huge data hoarder. I have about 4 Terabytes. That's the totality of two decades of collecting music, video, pictures, ROMS, game ISOs, etc. It's enough that I can still fit it all on today's portable external hard-drives. And I don't think it's really much more than other people who might do amateur photography or videos and like to store their RAWs. However, it's more than is feasible for your standard iCloud/Google Drive/Dropbox plan can provide without significant burden. At this point there's nothing really comparable out there to what Crashplan offers. Even the services like Amazon Glacier or Backblaze's B2 start becoming way more expensive once you pass the terabyte mark or so.
  - freehunter 9y ago

tribby 9y ago

I can only imagine that they are not doing this to "put the customer first" but rather because they offered unlimited storage with a linux client. that made it a popular choice with the data-hoarding/seedbox/plex server crowds. 100TB for $13/mo doesn't scale. yet another product that has folded because its users understood "unlimited" to mean "unlimited." good riddance to these unethical companies, I hope their business offering fails.

DINKDINK 9y ago
>yet another product that has folded because its users understood "unlimited" to mean "unlimited." good riddance to these unethical companies, What did CrashPlan do that was unethical? Seems like they kept their word and let users backup an unlimited amount. Contrast that with AT&T who capped so-called unlimited plans. CrashPlan found that it was untenable and shuttered it. Their honoring their contracts that they sold to customers. No bait-and-switch.

org3432 9y ago

I'd like to see more mature solutions that store all my data in the cloud, revision it there, and just use my local hard disk as a workspace cache instead. I suspect that's one of the reasons CrashPlan is exiting too, they can't backup iCloud Document folders on Mac, and likely OneDrive either, so the writing is on the wall.

alkonaut 9y ago

I backup 5 computers with their unlimited family plan. ~250GB at $12.50/month (I think). Is there any service even remotely similar in price? This was super convenient because I could offer parents etc to backup to my account at no extra cost to myself. Peace of mind. I also suspect this was what made this unsustainable. Where should I go now?

deanclatworthy 9y ago

I was a heavy Crashplan user. I have around 4 family machines backing up to my machine (free), and then my machine backing up to Crashplan (paid). What are my options going forward? I can easily switch myself over to Backblaze, but are there any simple, free, GUI clients for creating incremental, encrypted backups to another machine over the internet? The great thing about crashplan has been I just install it on the family member's machine and not once have I had a single problem. It just worked and provided my family member's with reassurance that I had a backup of their data, that I couldn't touch or see, if they had problems with their own machine. And as I see that BB employees are in this thread, how about making backup folders opt-in for power users. I have sensitive files all over my machine, and who knows what crap MS is storing in User/LocalData etc. so I prefer to opt-in to folders rather than take a risk opting out and syncing a password or keyfile to your servers. The UI for exclusions is awful too.

noja 9y ago
You could switch to Backblaze, but you have to give them your encryption key when you restore. Use B2 with a decent client instead, you don't get an all-in-one plan for your family, but at least you keep control over your data.
- deanclatworthy 9y ago
  I don't wish to store my families data in the cloud for a fee. Crashplan allowed me to use my own (spare) storage space to provide this for them.
  - noja 9y ago
    That was a great feature. Mind if I ask why you don't want encrypted data in the cloud?
    - deanclatworthy 9y ago
      Because it costs me money to do so. Crashplan has always been free to backup data between machines and was/is very good at it. I don't mind paying for a 1tb hard drive to back up my mother's few photos, but trying to sell her on the idea of paying a monthly fee to do so is not going to get me far :)

sumoboy 9y ago

I'm sure there tired of consumers taking advantage of the unlimited storage by storing PB's of data, and losing $$$. Amazon basically did the same thing recently removing unlimited storage. Business data is more a bit more predictable with storage needs and really makes alot more money. I dumped crashplan a few years ago due to the bandwidth restrictions and time it would take to download TB's worth of data, built my own solution with a remote Synology nas. It's a real cost issue once you have more than 1-2TB of data, otherwise it's just easier to use gdrive or dropbox for most needs.

porker 9y ago
> Amazon basically did the same thing recently removing unlimited storage. I'm working out what to do next since they did this. I use Arq (https://arqbackup.com https://arqbackup.com) and back up my desktop (Windows) and laptop (OSX) to Amazon Cloud Drive. Together it's approx 1.5TB of backups - and this is excluding a bunch of folders and accepting data loss on them. The doubled price doesn't appeal, but I haven't found an up-to-date storage price calculator to see what my options are in the TB range.
- ValentineC 9y ago
  > I haven't found an up-to-date storage price calculator to see what my options are in the TB range. For pay-as-you-go storage, I found this: http://coststorage.com/ http://coststorage.com/
mhb 9y ago
I'm sure there tired of consumers taking advantage of the unlimited storage by storing PB's of data I don't see how this makes sense. Instead of closing the whole service they can set a limit which will probably satisfy 95% of the users who aren't using enough storage to make it unprofitable. So I assume this isn't the reason.
- sumoboy 9y ago
  I don't know for sure why crashplan ceased but I recall reading here on HN that someone happily posted they were using like 16+ PB's on Amazon drive which is insane, I'm sure plenty more abused it but in reality that much space is quite a few average users I'm sure. Crashplan could have created some sort tiered pricing structure for those using over 5-10 TB possibly but to build up your service and brand and dump it suddenly is really un-trusting. I wouldn't be surprised they just ran out of data center capacity and decided cutting loose low revenue consumers was cheaper than building out new space.

CharlesW 9y ago

The only reason I used CrashPlan is that, on my home network, anything I'd want to back up is on my NAS. Are there alternative "consumer" solutions that support that?

CWuestefeld 9y ago
I use IDrive for this. It runs right on my Synology NAS, doing scheduled backups of the data it contains. The pricing is pretty reasonable, too.
- ValentineC 9y ago
  Heads-up for anyone considering IDrive — there's a "90% off" welcome promotion for the first year that's not really obvious on their website: https://www.idrive.com/idrive/signup/el/welcome90 https://www.idrive.com/idrive/signup/el/welcome90
freeone3000 9y ago
SyncThing, perhaps?
- transitionnel 9y ago
  Amen. Everyone: If you were using CrashPlan for simple p2p backups like this, use SyncThing now. It has versioning, it's open source, and it's secure. Made my day... I will enjoy donating to their project.
sreitshamer 9y ago
(Disclosure: I work for Arq Backup) Arq will back up files that are on your NAS, or anything else you want it to back up.

pizzetta 9y ago

Too bad Druva does not offer a home product. I believe C42 allows reselling of their product. So, someone could buy in bulk from C42 and turn around and offer the same product to end users (at some markup). The issue would be moving the data from on "server" to the other. However, I think C42 offers tools to migrate data --not sure if individual one offs at a time is doable since you don't have access to their back end.

agotterer 9y ago

The comments are littered with lots of complaints, but very little alternative suggestions. Does anyone have any recommendations for a backup solution they actually like? I like BackBlaze as a company, but like many of the other commenters I have an issue with the 30 day deletion policy.

SippinLean 9y ago

Is there a difference between the Home and Small Business plans that justifies doubling the price?

freehunter 9y ago
Most likely the justification is that they're not making enough money from the Home plan and instead of raising prices, they're cutting the lower plan. Their actual list of feature differences [1] doesn't show much else in the way of justification. [1] https://support.code42.com/Administrator/Small_Business/Get_started_with_CrashPlan_for_Small_Business/Compare_CrashPlan_for_Home_and_CrashPlan_for_Business https://support.code42.com/Administrator/Small_Business/Get_...

gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago

Is there any open source cross platform solution that 1. encrypts stuff on the client machine 2. has a pluggable backend - i.e. can push to one (or several of) e.g. S3, equivalent commodity cloud offerings, an NFS server or an arbitrary server 3. Rotates backups 4. Depuplicates (does this conflict with clientside encryption?) 5. "Just works" (I'm happy with a config file)

rmurri 9y ago
Look into https://duplicacy.com/ https://duplicacy.com/. Not completely open source (commercial constraints), but may work for you.
pjc50 9y ago
Have a look at https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/ and see if it's suitable.
- gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
  This solves a different problem... Looks good for syncing files though.

linopolus 9y ago

For all those complaining about Backblaze not holding deleted data forever: Do you really rely on a cloud solution as your one and only backup? I use Backblaze, and I don't worry. It's not my only backup. I additionally have a local backup, which today has files I deleted like 5 years ago, as you should to. So go get happy with Backblaze, it's a nice application, not some slow Java thing like Crashplan, and just works..

freehunter 9y ago
>Do you really rely on a cloud solution as your one and only backup? Most likely yes. Considering most people don't have any backups of any kind, having at least one backup, and an off-site backup at that, is infinitely better. The number of people who have any backup is small. The number of people who have two is far, far smaller. Most people just don't care about their data that much unless they're a business, which is why this thread exists to begin with.

rietta 9y ago

This sucks! I do not know of a comparable service to recommend to friends and family. The business plan is more expensive than Backblaze. This is a true blow to those of us who run Linux at home as the dearth of go-to cloud backup services is profoundly frustrating. Guess its back to the bad old days of rsyncing to a mirror at a friend's house.

mikevm 9y ago

I don't understand all the whining in this thread. Their new offer is pretty unbeatable: Back up for free until the end of your current CrashPlan for Home subscription, then enjoy a 75% discount for your next 12 months. After that, CrashPlan for Small Business costs $10 per device each month. So after the first discounted 12 months it will only cost $10 per backed up device. And you get: * Unlimited storage * Unlimited file versioning * Keep deleted files forever * Encryption * Headless Linux client I'm amazed that people here (who probably take in pretty decent salaries) cannot afford to pay $10 for a backup service that gives you all that.

Oletros 9y ago
Perhaps a lot of the "whining" comes from the people using the Family Plan. Going from $149/year for 2-10 computers to $240-$1200/year is not a little increase
- mikevm 9y ago
  In my case I just have NAS that centralizes anything that is important and have only one CrashPlan instance running on it. Any computer in the house that requires backup will have to store the important data in the network attached folder.
- fencepost 9y ago
  If I were actively whining it'd be about the apparent demise of the peer-to-peer option which is what I've been using for years. Heck, I have some old backup archives from old systems in there that I never got around to figuring out how to import. Guess there's new urgency if I want to pull anything out of those. That said, Crashplan itself has been a lot less reliable in recent months than I'd like - little things like my laptop only being able to back up to a home system when I'm NOT on the same network, even though I can access other services on the same machine. Guess it's time to move a new backup system higher on my priority list. Edit: The thing I really like(d) and will miss about Crashplan is the ease of adding another system to it. Either by signing into my account after installing the client on a new box (e.g. when I added a laptop) or by sharing a short code with my parents that they could simply enter to back up to my system with no real configuration required.

Grue3 9y ago

Damn, this came out of left field. CrashPlan was a constant pain to use for me (slow uploads, weird bugs where it wouldn't start up after updating, actually deleting all my backups when I didn't renew my 4-year old subscription over winter holidays with barely any warning). But the other services simply couldn't compare on price and backup retention. Having old versions/deleted files always available saved my ass so many times. The new business plan seems only twice as expensive as my current one, but it seems like a rip off to be charged twice as much for the same functionality. I think I'll take them for the 75% discount offer, and then wait for any reasonable competitor to pop up.

DelightOne 9y ago
Are you allowed to go with the business plan without having a business? What do you put in as company name then?
- magicalhippo 9y ago
  Another bummed out Crashplan user here. They offer account migration[1]. Of course you then have to pay per computer, and you lose the computer-to-computer backup feature. [1]: https://www.crashplanpro.com/migration/ https://www.crashplanpro.com/migration/
  - DelightOne 9y ago
    Yes! It says enter company name. Question is how to proceeed there cause it is for my family and no company.
    - lsaferite 9y ago
      d/b/a <Insert Favorite Pet Name>

hkchad 9y ago

I just canceled my Crashplan about 2 weeks ago and fully switched to Backblaze B2. Mostly because I consolidated all my computers to a Synology NAS and now I upload to B2 via Synology Cloud Sync. This way I have a single on-site backup plus my offsite backup. I never liked that I had to manage Crashplan on each individual computer. Now I just setup NAS sync and upload from the NAS.

reiichiroh 9y ago

BackBlaze doesn't have any family plans from what I can find?

kentt 9y ago

Good riddance. I switched from Backblaze to crashplan because it was cheaper for families. I've regretted it ever since. The client is horrible. Right now it's consuming about 4GB of memory. I had to increase that recently, otherwise it wouldn't even start. It littered gigs of log files around my system when it did that. Often the webui would just timeout if I wanted to recover a file. Never could figure out why, so I couldn't really recover files reliably anyway. I'm glad I'm forced to find a solution that better. I'd definitely stay away from them for business solutions.

metafunctor 9y ago

Oh, what a shame! My family is a heavy user of the computer-to-computer backups that CrashPlan for Home offers. It's great knowing all of the data on our family computers is securely backed up so that I can fetch the drive from a 20 minute drive to the office or my parent's house. In case of catastrophic failure, where on-site backups would also be destroyed or corrupted, I would hate to have a drive shipped from the United States to me. It would probably take forever. Is there a alternative available that does computer-to-computer backups, and supports Mac and Linux?

SimonPStevens 9y ago

So much for the idea that paying for a product keeps it running.

X86BSD 9y ago
I think you can charge for something and still go broke. Perhaps they grossly under charged for storage? Or storage + employees + ... Bad business are started all the time.

turc1656 9y ago

I recently had evaluated my entire backup plan and CrashPlan was evaluated as a possible change. It was one of two finalists I was debating between. Boy am I glad I didn't go with them. I understand that they will not just cancel the existing users and are only preventing new customers from signing up. But let's be real. We know what this means. It means they will not be giving the individual consumers in any sort of priority whatsoever. The non-commercial customers have now become a legacy operation. FWIW - the reason I decided against CrashPlan was: 1) I inherently don't trust anything that is unlimited everything (storage space, versions, undelete, etc.) 2) I especially don't trust anything that gives all those unlimited features for a paltry $5 a month 3) My speed was horrendously slow. Seemingly capped at about 2 mpbs (250 kbps). 4) The application seemed to be bloated and resource heavy. 5) They have a well known issue where you can wipe your entire backup from their server if you encounter the dreaded disaster scenario (or get a new machine) and have a fresh O/S with a new installation of the software. If you don't do the steps exactly in the correct order, it will see your new installation as being the source copy and having nothing to store, and subsequently wipe everything on their servers. I see that they recently posted something on August 1, 2017 about "adoption" which seems to be migration for new machines so maybe this issue is finally addressed.

heywire 9y ago
I went though the "adoption" procedure in July with no issues. I was migrating from an aging Windows system to a Linux system and had no issues. I was expecting to have problems and to re-upload my ~500GB of data, but surprisingly it figured out where everything was. That even included moving the data around so I could reformat the NTFS drive to ext4. My only complaint over the years I've been using CrashPlan has been that the Java client is a bit memory hungry.
rrauenza 9y ago
And who was the other finalist?
- turc1656 9y ago
  Sorry, I had split my original (long) comment into two separate ones and I thought I left a brief mention of it. The winner was pCloud. Please see my other comment for a more detailed explanation of how I have things set up and why I use them if you are interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075935

mioelnir 9y ago

Looks like neither Backblaze nor Carbonite support E2E encrypted backups where I do not have to send the password to the cloud, or the private key is in fact generated inside the cloud. Which means I have to really scramble to find something else that is compatible with computer-illiterate family. Geez, not what I needed.

mafsedan 9y ago
This is the most important issue for me. Last time I looked, nobody else let me hold the key and only held on to encrypted files on their end. It would be way to dangerous for me to do my PC backup any other way. If someone finds one of those other company's old disk drives and keys, they could empty all my back accounts, etc.
sreitshamer 9y ago
(Disclosure: I work for Arq Backup) Arq encrypts the backups before transmitting them, and the encryption key you choose never leaves your computer.
- porker 9y ago
  Is there a way to share the encryption key between computers (manually set the key)? See my aside @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15075063 for why
hendersoon 9y ago
Backblaze supports a user-provided passphrase, which is used to encrypt your private key. That provides E2E security. It isn't used by default, though. https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html

bluedino 9y ago

Oh the irony. At my last job, we setup 3-4 salesperson's laptops on a CrashPlan consumer account. Once we hit the storage limit, we'd buy another account, and then add a couple more laptops to it. It was marginally cheaper than buying the small business plan and WAY less of a headache. It was such a shortsighted way of setting things up and a pain to administer. We're talking $10/month for salespeople that are paid 6 digit salaries. They're going to have to migrate now.

rrauenza 9y ago
I considered doing that for a small non profit -- but realized I really didn't want the employees to be able to restore/see each other's data. The business plan has isolated accounts.

pjc50 9y ago

My own notes on alternative backup/sync solutions: https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-clouds.md https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/secure-... SyncThing+cloud storage seems most promising but I've not actually tried it yet.

leipert 9y ago
Yep. I am using syncthing since around 3 years now and never had a problem, upgrades are flawlass, really not that much CPU/RAM (<1 % and 50 MB for 18000 Files ~ 70GB). Setup is like this: 1. syncthing on PC -> syncthing on Synology NAS. 2. NAS -> Internal backup from 3-Disk RAID to additional 4th disk 3. I am thinking about additionally uploading it to Amazon Glacier or Backblaze

brango 9y ago

Looks like rclone might be the best alternative: https://github.com/ncw/rclone https://github.com/ncw/rclone

berdario 9y ago

I got a 4 year contract with Crashplan (expiring in 2018) and I'm also pissed by this news... I paid less than 4$ per month (the price would've been already higher if I renewed yesterday, but still acceptable) and stored around 130 GB of data (so not a lot, but it's already more than the 100GB threshold that some services use) I need something that would keep watch on all the files on the system (see inotify) to avoid continuous rescans of the disks, and that would work on Linux... Just these 2 simple requirements already seem to disqualify any other tool suggested here: Carbonite (no Linux) Backblaze (no Linux, and none of the 3rd party integrations with B2 seems to support live watching of files) Tarsnap (no watching) Borg (no watching) Does anyone know if it's feasible to keep the whole / under Dropbox, Google Drive or Spideroak? (I know that GDrive doesn't have an official linux client) The only solutions I know would be: Lsync (but it would be only syncing, no history), r1soft (but it seems to be only servers, haven't checked yet the features)... Are there any other tools out there? I'd really thinking that I should write my own

jwillmer 9y ago
I researched now for a solution that lets me backup all my family PC's and found this two solutions that I will now try out: https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.urbackup.org/ https://www.urbackup.org/ edit: It's client/server backup software. Not an online service. I used CrashPlan in a similar manner.
brianwski 9y ago
Brian from Backblaze here. > Backblaze ... none of the 3rd party integrations with B2 seems to support live watching of files I'm not exactly sure what you are going for, but you can "preview" files through the web interface on BOTH the Backblaze online backup and also B2. If you are specifically asking about movies, just stay tuned. The first step was allowing preview of simple images, next we want to support previewing of movies. Also, a feature we added a week ago in Backblaze Online Backup is the ability to "Share Files" (any file in your backup) with other people. For the first release we limited the file size (just so our servers did not tip over) but we plan to support the ability to share all files less than 10 GBytes.

turc1656 9y ago

I chose pCloud as my provider of choice. It's not unlimited, but it's $10/mo for 2 TB of storage and 2 TB of traffic. That is more than enough for most users, and you can increase the size in 2 TB increments at additional cost. pCloud has pretty much all the bells and whistles one would need. I certainly consider it rich in features. I also like that it can be used as a sync storage or just as a "hard drive in the cloud" where I don't have to keep the data or folder structure on my machine if I don't want to. The only downside is that the integrated encryption is an additional charge. To get around that, I decided to go with Boxcryptor, which I already had. The average user can use the free version of Boxcryptor. It is awesome and I highly recommend it. Both pCloud and Boxcryptor show up as physical drives on your computer, which I find convenient. So I have my primary source drive synced with the Boxcryptor drive/location and Boxcryptor is set up on my machine to encrypt the data on the fly as it is copied (surprisingly, this is not the default setting). Then, I have a separate process that syncs the raw Boxcryptor directory where the files show in their encrypted format (the "drive" version shows them unencrypted because everything is done on the fly both ways) to my pCloud storage. In the end, I have 3 versions - the unencrypted source, the encrypted Boxcryptor copy, and the pCloud backup which contains the encrypted copy.

jimjimjim 9y ago

bread and circuses --> food and video. these are the only consumer tech industries that will survive. everything else will eventually pivot to business/government.

Havoc 9y ago

Not sure I need a backup solution anymore to be honest. All my stuff is on something cloud-y already anyway. (Cloud =/= backup I know). Realistically my data loss risk profile is pretty low. So not sure I need to spend coin on backup... Much more scared of say Lastpass dropping dead.

fencepost 9y ago
The reason for backup in that case isn't so much dying hardware as it is data corruption or malicious activity. Backup needs to account for a bunch of failure modes: data failure (corruption, malware, "Windows Ate My Data," user error), hardware failure/loss (drive death, laptop legs), building failure ("all my backups are in that safe that reached 600 degrees internally....."). Used to be that for serious emergencies you could usually get data recovered by a lab, but with SSDs that's iffy at best or likely not happening at all with drive encryption.

hendersoon 9y ago

I am using Duplicati [1] to backup. It's FOSS, supports linux, windows, and MacOS, and creates block-based encrypted backups. The client works on most SOHO NAS devices too. Very happy with it. I backup to a Google Drive with unlimited storage. This costs $10 per month with a G Suite for Business [2] account. You do not need 5 users to get unlimited storage. I have just under 9TB in my GDrive. Backup services generally charge $5 to $6 per computer. My solution costs double that but can backup every computer I own and gives me a cloud drive with unlimited storage to boot. [1] https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/ [2] https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html

akulbe 9y ago

My position on this whole thing is that CrashPlan isn't just selling storage for backup. Their value is in the fact that they could be trusted to have your back if something happened locally. It was literally a set-it-and-forget-it solution. I have multiple backups, but this was my primary offsite solution. I understand the consumer market isn't as profitable as the business market, but why not opt to raise prices, and let consumers decide if it was valuable enough to them to pay the increased prices? Why just abandon that market completely? I recently opted to trial the CrashPlan Pro (which they just renamed to CrashPlan for Small Business) subscription. This move by Code42 gives me pause. It makes me wonder when they'll do the same thing to the Business segment? I went with the Business plan because was I was a happy Home customer. Now, I wonder if it was good move.

pnathan 9y ago

ok. ::signs up for business account:: CrashPlan has worked great. Not moving away from a working technical solution I already pay for. The delta between now and the new cost is pretty small; maybe $5-7 / mo. meh

spilk 9y ago
The big difference for me is that the old family plan supported 5 devices, the business plans are all per-device. If I back up 5 computers with the business plan this costs $600/year vs. $150/year.

Thespian2 9y ago

Like many in this thread, I'm here looking for alternatives. CrashPlan was sufficient for my family needs, and none of the other services I looked at hit the same sweet spot. Slow, saturated uploads, and their bloated client were tolerable for what I was paying, and what I got. We've got a few mentioned replacement possibilities scattered in the comments and replies below, but I'd like to put forth my "asks" for solutions, which seem to match others. I'm a tech guy, and "rolling my own" Linux solution is possible, but in this case, I'd be happy to pay someone else to worry about the details of storing a copy of my bits, so I can do other things with my time. My wish list is as follows: MUST ====== have both Linux and Windows client ability to whitelist/blacklist/select subsets of files/folders to be backed up ====== SHOULD offer as many of the following as possible (all optional) ======= some sort of "Family" pricing deal for multiple machines in one account encrypted backups with consumer controlled key not necessarily given to service option to switch out back end bulk storage infrastructure "forever" file retention / restoration of old versions (charge me for storage) user scheduled backups and/or don't bring client to crawl or saturate home line ====== Feel free to add any replies with suggestions here which might be useful to others. For my point of view, if CrashPlan found the home offering unsustainable from "abuse" of the "unlimited" feature, I would have much preferred them introduce a cap to the home plan at some "reasonable" value. They could have balanced the books, and saved 95% of their customers. Start rolling off oldest file version backups when you hit space cap and/or offer extra space at cost+profit. Done.

corford 9y ago
I think https://www.spideroak.com https://www.spideroak.com fits your list (specifically "One" which is their consumer solution/app). I'm a happy user who's had an account with them for years (it costs me under $10/month iirc). It has/supports: * Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android * Lets you share your quota across unlimited machines/devices * Lets you whitelist/blacklist folders & files to be backed up (by pointing and clicking and/or by specifying patterns) * Does LAN syncing * Keeps versioned file history forever (i.e. point-in-time recovery) * Has scheduling but I haven't used this, it just runs quietly in the background and I never notice it negatively impacting anything (client and accompanying background service is currently using a total of 51MB of memory). You can cap the upload speed if you want to make sure it never saturates your uplink. * Uses end to end encryption i.e. they don't have your key (important caveat: this is provided you only use their app and don't use their web interface, although even then they claim the key is never stored anywhere - just kept temporarily in the server's RAM while it auths/decrypts files for you) * Been around for ages and not likely to go out of business any time soon * Lets you share files with a self-destructing link * Uses aggressive de-duping on their backend (ZFS based I think?) so you can squeeze the most out of your quota (just checked my account and I'm using 94GB without compression & de-duplication but only being charged for 41GB) Edit: and they release a lot of opensource: https://github.com/SpiderOak https://github.com/SpiderOak

geostyx 9y ago

HashBackup[0] works well for me and works with several remote storage providers such as B2. I recently wrote a post about one of the ways I use it[1]. [0] http://www.hashbackup.com http://www.hashbackup.com [1] https://jacobhands.com/hashbackup-example-1/ https://jacobhands.com/hashbackup-example-1/

atYevP 9y ago

Yev from Backblaze -> Hey gang, been busy on Twitter, did I miss anything?

davidjnelson 9y ago

Crash plan is great for my windows computer since I can't use time machine on it. I do have a giant spinning drive with windows history backups for non catostrophic backup. As long as the transition is seamless, $10/mo seems fair.

mathw 9y ago

Well I had only just finished my first CrashPlan backup set, so thanks a lot Code 42. The software's horrendous on Linux anyway, it just seemed like my best option. Now what? Guess I'll have to write my own. Unless someone's got something supporting cloud backup that's better than Duplicity that I've not heard of.

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maxsupport 9y ago

Make your voices heard, Code42 could change the policy. There was/is an internal battle in the company. Here is a video posted by an insider while this was being decided: https://goo.gl/YEXa2L https://goo.gl/YEXa2L