Online backup

[timwhit]

Yes, keep us posted.
It took a stupid long time for me to upload about 500GB; if your experience holds I won't renew my subscription.

I will post back when I get a reply from their support. I would recommend trying to restore some of your data, just to see what your speeds are like.

 

[Will Rickards]

I've only restored individual files. And I've complained before about the upload speeds to them. They have a service where they'll send you a hard drive. I think for actually restoring everything, I'd pick that. I look at it as a second level of backup after my local disk imaging.

 

[Mercutio]

It looks like I'm seeing about 900kB/sec for ~80MB of PDFs and Word documents. That's not great but if it's the difference between having that data or having nothing, I don't mind waiting.

 

[timwhit]

Has anyone used other online backup providers that offer unlimited storage?

 

[Handruin]

I tried a few of the other services a couple years back before deciding on CrashPlan and they were painful in their own ways. Things do improve over time so it's possible those issue no longer exist.

I haven't tried downloading a backed up file yet. If I have time this evening I'll see what kind of transfer rate I get. I've been dealing with the CrashPlan client crashing frequently. It just disappears from the task bar and sometimes the service also stops. I won't know until I get an email saying I've not backed up in a few days. It seems like it can't handle the several TB of data to index. I'll have to try reinstalling the tool.

 

[timwhit]

I had the same issue. You need to increase the amount of memory that Java can consume.

Here's how to do it.

 

[timwhit]

Here's the response:

Hello Tim,

Comparing speed of a straight copy to speed of a restore isn't apples to apples.

During backup, files are de-duplicated, compressed and encrypted before leaving your computer. That means they need to be reassembled, decrypted, and uncompressed when you restore. Undoing is faster than doing, but it still does consume resources and you'll never see restores at the same speed as a straight copy. Now although you have a fast internet speed, CrashPlan is a shared service and is not capable of matching your ISP's advertised download speed. Please visit www.speedtest.net for a report of your current download speeds. Keep in mind, the speed in which you download content from the internet is shared amongst other devices that may be receiving data on your network as well.

For faster restores you can purchase our restore kit here:
https://www.crashplan.com/consumer/restore-kit.vtl

Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Regards,
Tremaine W.
CrashPlan Support Team

 

[timwhit]

Forgot to mention that the restore kit won't work for me, because I'm over the limit of 3.5TB.

 

[Mercutio]

Put another way, they're willing to copy a bunch of crap and ship you a 4TB drive for $165. That still seems pretty reasonable.

 

[Howell]

I uninstalled the client recently for other reasons so I can't get more specific, but I thought this would be a good use of the buddy system they have. Is it also slow if you do this?

Multiple Backup Destinations CrashPlan lets you back up to Code 42's global data centers, other external drives and friends' computers anywhere in the world

 

[Howell]

Put another way, they're willing to copy a bunch of crap and ship you a 4TB drive for $165. That still seems pretty reasonable.

It sounds like they dump your data to an external drive and you give them their drive back when you are done. You could do the same thing with your own external drive and configuring the client properly, IIRC. That 3.5G limit is to leave room for all the encryption overhead I bet.

 

[Mercutio]

The biggest selling point for Crashplan IMO is not having to deal with managing external drives in the first place.

 

[timwhit]

I want some sort of offsite backup, I also like that it's continuous. Maybe someone that knows what they're doing should setup a server in a datacenter and everyone that wants in, can just split the cost.

 

[Handruin]

I want some sort of offsite backup, I also like that it's continuous. Maybe someone that knows what they're doing should setup a server in a datacenter and everyone that wants in, can just split the cost.

I've actually looked into doing something like this using a open source tool called OwnCloud.org since it would be self-managed (althought they have provided services). This is more like a dropbox service than CrashPlan, but I feel it could work similarly. Pair that up with an elastic service provider like https://www.digitalocean.com/ and we might a scalable solution (for a fee). I haven't yet done the numbers to see what it might cost but given the numbers listed here it might be hella-expensive. Implementing a deduplication might be helpful.

 

[Mercutio]

After a certain point, tape really does start looking like a reasonable option again.

 

[timwhit]

After a certain point, tape really does start looking like a reasonable option again.

I really need automated offsite backup, or it will never get done.

 

[timwhit]

I've actually looked into doing something like this using a open source tool called OwnCloud.org since it would be self-managed (althought they have provided services). This is more like a dropbox service than CrashPlan, but I feel it could work similarly. Pair that up with an elastic service provider like https://www.digitalocean.com/ and we might a scalable solution (for a fee). I haven't yet done the numbers to see what it might cost but given the numbers listed here it might be hella-expensive. Implementing a deduplication might be helpful.

With a dedicated server it would be easy to set it up as an rsync server. This page has some nice bash scripts to do snapshot style backups.

 

[Howell]

I want some sort of offsite backup, I also like that it's continuous. Maybe someone that knows what they're doing should setup a server in a datacenter and everyone that wants in, can just split the cost.

Honestly, I like the crash plan idea. If you keep a local external drive plugged in somewhere configured to keep a copy of your crashplan backups you have local high speed access and cloud storage for redundancy.