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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

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!
ozmodiar 9y ago
I'm in this same predicament. I used to have to do constant backup/restore on family member computers, and Crashplan really made that painless. This transition is going to be a real pain. So far it doesn't look like they're keeping the free peer-to-peer backups, which I was using for the less important computers, so this would more than double the price if I went for the SB plans.
- ValentineC 9y ago
  > So far it doesn't look like they're keeping the free peer-to-peer backups, which I was using for the less important computers, so this would more than double the price if I went for the SB plans. Yeah, it seems that not only would the peer-to-peer backup process stop working, the already-backed-up files would be rendered useless too. Relying on user accounts and "backup codes" stored on CrashPlan's servers sounds like it was an additional point of failure.
gt_ 9y ago
The same point about file recovery was why I chose Crash Plan and why I did not believe their plan could be sustainable. :(
- 5_minutes 9y ago
  There was probably a lot of abuse going on with the "unlimited" disk space aspect of it. I can imagine some people backing up their entire movie collection to their servers.
  - freeone3000 9y ago
    It's not "abuse" if you claim it's unlimited and people use it as if it were.
    - cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
      I have a feeling (if this has not already happened) that someone is going to sue over the use of the term 'unlimited' and some court is going to rule that 'unlimited' does not mean 'without limits' but 'an reasonable amount based on the average expected use'.
      - sbarre 9y ago
        This was sorted out back in the dial-up days when providers (including the one I worked for) offered "unlimited" dial-up service. Customers sometimes argued that they should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long because that's "unlimited". Our definition (that we indicated in our terms) was "you will never be billed a surcharge for usage during a month", but there was no guarantee of being able to use a certain number of hours. So we reserved the right to de-prioritize (i.e. disconnect) high-usage users during peak times to allow other users to get on when our lines got full. I'm sure somewhere in Crash Plan's terms of service they define what the term "unlimited" means in the context of their offering, and I would bet it means "there will never be a surcharge for usage of storage". So they will never ding you for using more than X storage, but there's no guarantee that you can store a specific amount of data on the service.
balladeer 9y ago
After we are done talking about Backblaze as a snappy app (yes, it has always been many times faster than CrashPlan), cleaner and simpler interface (no doubt here), a lot faster speed (this has been my experience and seems to be the case with a lot of people), it really isn't much good as a backup service choice. I have mentioned before, I think here on HN too, the data retention policy is just too bad and their reasoning for it, that "it's not an archiving tool", is beyond ridiculous. And then their interface for restoring files is only from the website. Yes, even if you have to download a 15GB file you do it in the browser or ask them to ship the hard disk to you. I guess it's tough luck if you are in a different country, or different continent altogether. I will stick to CrashPlan for the time being and go for the 1 year Small Business plan (at 75% discount for existing Home customers) but beyond that or maybe even before that I am looking at something solid and self-hosted. I already backup my Dropbox folder to Tarsnap (which has a kind of okay GUI now), I will look at Glacier or a VPS and backup using something like Attic or Borg. Sad they have no GUI. I feel confident about backup apps with a GUI - I find it intuitive to customize and can see in one look (or maybe keep seeing) what's happening if I want to.
- brianwski 9y ago
  Brian from Backblaze here. > I guess it's tough luck if you are in a different country, or different continent altogether. Backblaze sends USB hard drive restores to other continents every day! Today we have one restore shipping to Finland and one to Great Britain. And to be clear, we absorb 100% of the cost: it is $189 USD deposit and we absolutely absorb 100% of the shipping cost whether it is Texas or Finland. Also remember that the USB hard drive restores are "free" to customers if they return the USB hard drive to our office within 60 days. The only thing the customer has to pay for is "return shipping" and that can be on a super slow service and we're talking about 3.5" drives here that weigh just a few ounces. Of you can keep the 4 TByte drive for the $189 deposit (turns into "purchase price") which includes shipping and the hard drive and the service.
  - geostyx 9y ago
    I've done this. Cost me like $15 to get all my data back in 2 days :D
rdtsc 9y ago
Also works on Linux which Backblaze doesn't. I have Ubuntu on all the family and some extended family machines and using Crashplan currently. Anyone can recommend if a good backup alternative that works on a Linux (desktop)?
- andrewstuart2 9y ago
  For full folder backups, duplicity [1] has been great for me, does incremental backups, and has quite a few backends. You control rotation policies, full-snapshot frequency, etc, and bring your own storage (works with s3, rsync, etc.). Full-folder recovery is also pretty easy in my experience. The downside is that it's all on you to configure providers, pay for storage, and I'm not aware of any indexing or ability to retrieve single files. Also, it's CLI-based, so it might not be very intuitive for desktop use. Still, a free solution with lots of utility. :-) [1] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
  - ATsch 9y ago
    The issue with these for me is that with the common cloud storage providers, even just backing up my Documents folder raises it above the price of BackBlaze or a similar offering.
    - y4mi 9y ago
      if you're willing to pay 50€/year, you could get a hubic[1] subscription for a 10TB cloud storage. i haven't tested it myself though, just heard about it. Its supposidly possible to share this account with friends, because duplicity backups are GPG encrypted. [1] https://hubic.com/en/offers/storage-10tb https://hubic.com/en/offers/storage-10tb
      - ValentineC 9y ago
        Hubic has an unpublished 10Mbps upload speed limit [1][2], which should be sufficient for most backups, but is still something worth taking note of. [1] https://forums.hubic.com/showthread.php?173782-10Mbps-bandwidth-limitation https://forums.hubic.com/showthread.php?173782-10Mbps-bandwi... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4o9tm2/psa_hubic_is_now_limited_to_10mbps_transfer_speeds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4o9tm2/psa_hub...
asdfffsdjnn78 9y ago
I'm not inclined to jump on this nickle and dimed to death for access to numerous platforms/services, model. For backups and to avoid social media, some of my family and friends have switched to using some tools we're building together. We're doing backups by syncing to a local to us Samba share (using Time Machine, conveniently everyone uses Macs), and Syncthing'ing in a federated style. The backups at rest on remote disk are in encrypted containers. We can "share" messages and pictures with each other as well. Basically we just copy content outside the encrypted container to a public folder. There's a simple HTML/CSS/light JS frontend, everyone has a bookmark to http://localserver/public http://localserver/public I'm from a tech savvy family, engineers, old IBM mainframers, physicists, coders, and my mom the hairdresser. My friends involved are web/frontend devs. So you know, YMMV. One could conceivably use Dropbox or something, to avoid Samba setup, but that will cost more. No one has spent more than a couple hundred on hardware in the last 2 years. Internet and electricity costs are negligible. Don't build habits around other people's platforms. Isn't that what they keep saying about Google, MS, etc? Seems reasonable enough to be a general life-pro-tip.
analogmemory 9y ago
If you're looking to recover a file 3 months later, have you tried set them all up with TimeMachine as the first layer of backup? Cloud backup services should really just be for catastrophic.
ksajadi 9y ago
While I like Backblaze's storage offering, they really have an extremely inferior management platform for their system. Management of devices is manual and reports are sent manually in Excel format. Cancellations and device reallocation are also done manually and over email.
simonh 9y ago
I agree it's a concern. If you're in a Mac I'd recommend doing time machine backups as well. I consider those my first resort backups for file recovery and such. My Backblaze backups are a worst case scenario, belt and braces off site option. Even my time machine backups only go back about a year though due to capacity limitations on the backup drive. My most critical files are also on Dropbox, which I know isn't really backup but it's nice to have as an extra recovery option.
- j45 9y ago
  Agreed, it's not a backup if it only exists in one form, or one space. After purchasing the eventual death and exit of your 10th or 15th laptop, you kind of want to spend less time doing those transfers, especially with complex installs that can't be trivialized to the cloud. For Mac users, I like the backup practice of using two drives in two locations, Time Machine for incremental backups, and Carbon Copy Cloner for bootable backups, and then bump one of those images up to the cloud. One drive on a desk at home, one at the office, offsite, or a family member's house. Additionally, keeping a third hard drive in rotation elsewhere, or use a local NAS that bumps up to the cloud for you as well. The bootable backups tools like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper provide are priceless in my mind.. you can simply plugin your HD into another mac and boot off the external drive not missing a beat while your hardware may be getting attention.
  - simonh 9y ago
    I don't have bootable backups at the moment but it does sound like a good idea. I'll look into that, thanks.
    - mturmon 9y ago
      The bootable backup is key. As the commenter above said, that will be the thing that lets you get back up and address any other missing data and find long-term replacement hardware. SuperDuper has saved me and my family a couple of times.
abrookewood 9y ago
Yeah, I'm bummed about this as well. One answer to your accidentally deleted file might be to do snapshots at home (I do them using ZFS). That way, you can recover those locally if required and then use your external backup provider for true disasters. But I agree it's a shitty compromise.

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!

ozmodiar 9y ago

I'm in this same predicament. I used to have to do constant backup/restore on family member computers, and Crashplan really made that painless. This transition is going to be a real pain. So far it doesn't look like they're keeping the free peer-to-peer backups, which I was using for the less important computers, so this would more than double the price if I went for the SB plans.

ValentineC 9y ago
> So far it doesn't look like they're keeping the free peer-to-peer backups, which I was using for the less important computers, so this would more than double the price if I went for the SB plans. Yeah, it seems that not only would the peer-to-peer backup process stop working, the already-backed-up files would be rendered useless too. Relying on user accounts and "backup codes" stored on CrashPlan's servers sounds like it was an additional point of failure.

gt_ 9y ago

The same point about file recovery was why I chose Crash Plan and why I did not believe their plan could be sustainable. :(

5_minutes 9y ago
There was probably a lot of abuse going on with the "unlimited" disk space aspect of it. I can imagine some people backing up their entire movie collection to their servers.
- freeone3000 9y ago
  It's not "abuse" if you claim it's unlimited and people use it as if it were.
  - cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
    I have a feeling (if this has not already happened) that someone is going to sue over the use of the term 'unlimited' and some court is going to rule that 'unlimited' does not mean 'without limits' but 'an reasonable amount based on the average expected use'.
    - sbarre 9y ago
      This was sorted out back in the dial-up days when providers (including the one I worked for) offered "unlimited" dial-up service. Customers sometimes argued that they should be able to stay connected 24/7 all month long because that's "unlimited". Our definition (that we indicated in our terms) was "you will never be billed a surcharge for usage during a month", but there was no guarantee of being able to use a certain number of hours. So we reserved the right to de-prioritize (i.e. disconnect) high-usage users during peak times to allow other users to get on when our lines got full. I'm sure somewhere in Crash Plan's terms of service they define what the term "unlimited" means in the context of their offering, and I would bet it means "there will never be a surcharge for usage of storage". So they will never ding you for using more than X storage, but there's no guarantee that you can store a specific amount of data on the service.

balladeer 9y ago

After we are done talking about Backblaze as a snappy app (yes, it has always been many times faster than CrashPlan), cleaner and simpler interface (no doubt here), a lot faster speed (this has been my experience and seems to be the case with a lot of people), it really isn't much good as a backup service choice. I have mentioned before, I think here on HN too, the data retention policy is just too bad and their reasoning for it, that "it's not an archiving tool", is beyond ridiculous. And then their interface for restoring files is only from the website. Yes, even if you have to download a 15GB file you do it in the browser or ask them to ship the hard disk to you. I guess it's tough luck if you are in a different country, or different continent altogether. I will stick to CrashPlan for the time being and go for the 1 year Small Business plan (at 75% discount for existing Home customers) but beyond that or maybe even before that I am looking at something solid and self-hosted. I already backup my Dropbox folder to Tarsnap (which has a kind of okay GUI now), I will look at Glacier or a VPS and backup using something like Attic or Borg. Sad they have no GUI. I feel confident about backup apps with a GUI - I find it intuitive to customize and can see in one look (or maybe keep seeing) what's happening if I want to.

brianwski 9y ago
Brian from Backblaze here. > I guess it's tough luck if you are in a different country, or different continent altogether. Backblaze sends USB hard drive restores to other continents every day! Today we have one restore shipping to Finland and one to Great Britain. And to be clear, we absorb 100% of the cost: it is $189 USD deposit and we absolutely absorb 100% of the shipping cost whether it is Texas or Finland. Also remember that the USB hard drive restores are "free" to customers if they return the USB hard drive to our office within 60 days. The only thing the customer has to pay for is "return shipping" and that can be on a super slow service and we're talking about 3.5" drives here that weigh just a few ounces. Of you can keep the 4 TByte drive for the $189 deposit (turns into "purchase price") which includes shipping and the hard drive and the service.
- geostyx 9y ago
  I've done this. Cost me like $15 to get all my data back in 2 days :D

rdtsc 9y ago

Also works on Linux which Backblaze doesn't. I have Ubuntu on all the family and some extended family machines and using Crashplan currently. Anyone can recommend if a good backup alternative that works on a Linux (desktop)?

andrewstuart2 9y ago
For full folder backups, duplicity [1] has been great for me, does incremental backups, and has quite a few backends. You control rotation policies, full-snapshot frequency, etc, and bring your own storage (works with s3, rsync, etc.). Full-folder recovery is also pretty easy in my experience. The downside is that it's all on you to configure providers, pay for storage, and I'm not aware of any indexing or ability to retrieve single files. Also, it's CLI-based, so it might not be very intuitive for desktop use. Still, a free solution with lots of utility. :-) [1] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
- ATsch 9y ago
  The issue with these for me is that with the common cloud storage providers, even just backing up my Documents folder raises it above the price of BackBlaze or a similar offering.
  - y4mi 9y ago
    if you're willing to pay 50€/year, you could get a hubic[1] subscription for a 10TB cloud storage. i haven't tested it myself though, just heard about it. Its supposidly possible to share this account with friends, because duplicity backups are GPG encrypted. [1] https://hubic.com/en/offers/storage-10tb https://hubic.com/en/offers/storage-10tb
    - ValentineC 9y ago
      Hubic has an unpublished 10Mbps upload speed limit [1][2], which should be sufficient for most backups, but is still something worth taking note of. [1] https://forums.hubic.com/showthread.php?173782-10Mbps-bandwidth-limitation https://forums.hubic.com/showthread.php?173782-10Mbps-bandwi... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4o9tm2/psa_hubic_is_now_limited_to_10mbps_transfer_speeds/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4o9tm2/psa_hub...

asdfffsdjnn78 9y ago

I'm not inclined to jump on this nickle and dimed to death for access to numerous platforms/services, model. For backups and to avoid social media, some of my family and friends have switched to using some tools we're building together. We're doing backups by syncing to a local to us Samba share (using Time Machine, conveniently everyone uses Macs), and Syncthing'ing in a federated style. The backups at rest on remote disk are in encrypted containers. We can "share" messages and pictures with each other as well. Basically we just copy content outside the encrypted container to a public folder. There's a simple HTML/CSS/light JS frontend, everyone has a bookmark to http://localserver/public http://localserver/public I'm from a tech savvy family, engineers, old IBM mainframers, physicists, coders, and my mom the hairdresser. My friends involved are web/frontend devs. So you know, YMMV. One could conceivably use Dropbox or something, to avoid Samba setup, but that will cost more. No one has spent more than a couple hundred on hardware in the last 2 years. Internet and electricity costs are negligible. Don't build habits around other people's platforms. Isn't that what they keep saying about Google, MS, etc? Seems reasonable enough to be a general life-pro-tip.

analogmemory 9y ago

If you're looking to recover a file 3 months later, have you tried set them all up with TimeMachine as the first layer of backup? Cloud backup services should really just be for catastrophic.

ksajadi 9y ago

While I like Backblaze's storage offering, they really have an extremely inferior management platform for their system. Management of devices is manual and reports are sent manually in Excel format. Cancellations and device reallocation are also done manually and over email.

simonh 9y ago

I agree it's a concern. If you're in a Mac I'd recommend doing time machine backups as well. I consider those my first resort backups for file recovery and such. My Backblaze backups are a worst case scenario, belt and braces off site option. Even my time machine backups only go back about a year though due to capacity limitations on the backup drive. My most critical files are also on Dropbox, which I know isn't really backup but it's nice to have as an extra recovery option.

j45 9y ago
Agreed, it's not a backup if it only exists in one form, or one space. After purchasing the eventual death and exit of your 10th or 15th laptop, you kind of want to spend less time doing those transfers, especially with complex installs that can't be trivialized to the cloud. For Mac users, I like the backup practice of using two drives in two locations, Time Machine for incremental backups, and Carbon Copy Cloner for bootable backups, and then bump one of those images up to the cloud. One drive on a desk at home, one at the office, offsite, or a family member's house. Additionally, keeping a third hard drive in rotation elsewhere, or use a local NAS that bumps up to the cloud for you as well. The bootable backups tools like Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper provide are priceless in my mind.. you can simply plugin your HD into another mac and boot off the external drive not missing a beat while your hardware may be getting attention.
- simonh 9y ago
  I don't have bootable backups at the moment but it does sound like a good idea. I'll look into that, thanks.
  - mturmon 9y ago
    The bootable backup is key. As the commenter above said, that will be the thing that lets you get back up and address any other missing data and find long-term replacement hardware. SuperDuper has saved me and my family a couple of times.

abrookewood 9y ago

Yeah, I'm bummed about this as well. One answer to your accidentally deleted file might be to do snapshots at home (I do them using ZFS). That way, you can recover those locally if required and then use your external backup provider for true disasters. But I agree it's a shitty compromise.