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CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

blog.code42.com

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Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#71

Post by brianwski »

zippergz wrote: post #61
archagon wrote: post #8

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 oft…

I switched from Backblaze to Crashplan a few years ago, and I've been MUCH happier with Crashplan. The biggest issue is that, at least on Mac, Backblaze noticeably slowed down the machines (multiple machines, not just a problem on one), while Crashplan didn't. Any backup software that makes my computer feel slow, creates regular beachballs, etc. is not something I'm going to pay for. Then the nail in the coffin for t…

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze, and I'm one of the main people who writes the client.

I would encourage you to try the Backblaze client again. We JUST released the 5.0 client (last week) and we continue to make little fixes that improve the customer experience. The client team's MAIN GOAL has always been that the client run in "Continuously" mode and NOT annoy the customer.

For example, even up until a year ago we didn't realize how reading certain datastructures from disk that we need to backup were hurting performance in non-SSD based computers. As developers we tend to run with SSDs now, so it went undetected for a while. So we're in the process of making that more and more invisible for customers still on on spinning drives in their laptops. The way we do make this invisible is actually slowing down the reading of those data structures so that it doesn't interrupt what you are doing.

> and yet it STILL insisted on starting from zero and backing up everything again

If you do an "Inherit Backup State" you will not re-upload everything. However, Backblaze has to read EVERY file off of local disk and compare the checksums (SHA1) and if the files have moved it must deduplicate and record the new location, so this can appear like a massive load on your computer for a few hours. I would encourage you to open the Network control panel and notice no files are actually pushed.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#72

Post by jwong_ »

ant512 wrote: post #30
rrauenza wrote: post #21

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 wind…

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.

Wow, I had heard it was native for business. Being Electron is even less native than the Java client, no thanks.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#73

Post by Spivak »

dokument wrote: post #42
pavel_lishin wrote: post #5

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.

We need a p2p backup solution. Something like what wuala used to be but open source and distributed. Give up 1TB of local space to get ~750GB offsite, or something like that.

Isn't that FileCoin?

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#74

Post by ozmodiar »

5_minutes wrote: post #33

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, y…

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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#75

Post by lima »

DCKing wrote: post #57
NelsonMinar wrote: post #18

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 cons…

Duplicity [1] is a free software project that creates incremental backups and encrypts them using GPG. It can use Backblaze B2 [2] as a remote synchronization option, which when I looked at options last year was also the cheapest cloud storage provider anywhere (if this has changed, let me know!). Duplicity also supports a very wide array of other cloud storage services if you'd like to use another one [1]. The kille…

While it works well, Duplicity is rather slow and only supports expensive full-incremental-full backup cycles.

Modern incremental-forever backup tools like borg[1] (fork of Attic[2]) are much faster since they are based on block hashing, which also gets you deduplication for free.

Basically, a backup is a set of hashes - this means that you can selectively delete or retain old backups without having to merge them.

I built a >50 TB enterprise backup cluster with borg and it works extremely well.

[1]: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

[2]: https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#76

Post by 5_minutes »

archagon wrote: post #67
5_minutes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their 30 day file retention policy makes all these questions irrelevant. "Do they have a blog"? Really? I'm sorry but when it comes to backups I rather have them working on the product instead of having a marketing machine up and running.

There's a pronounced difference between flat-out marketing and posting interesting articles that help promote your product. It's clear to me which side of the divide Backblaze lies on. And I think Crashplan's shuttering bears this out: their tech was always a means to an end for them, and their end simply did not include power users.

There's only so much interesting posts to do about "backups". It's a boring product, like "email". So you don't use gmail because the team doesn't do enough enthousiastic posts about it?

This is typically a product you just want to work and are not busy with reading the company's blog as long as things are working fine.

You set the settings and can forget about it.

That said, your whole post seems somewhat biased.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#77

Post by Silhouette »

DCKing wrote: post #57
NelsonMinar wrote: post #18

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 cons…

Duplicity [1] is a free software project that creates incremental backups and encrypts them using GPG. It can use Backblaze B2 [2] as a remote synchronization option, which when I looked at options last year was also the cheapest cloud storage provider anywhere (if this has changed, let me know!). Duplicity also supports a very wide array of other cloud storage services if you'd like to use another one [1]. The kille…

We've handled backup with Duplicity for various things, and found it useful.

If you go with this one, do be aware that by its nature, restores when you've done a lot of incremental backups can be extremely slow. (Think hours, where other systems would retrieve the data in minutes if not seconds.)

That means you really need to be a doing a full, and therefore also slow, backup reasonably frequently to keep Duplicity usable. As a rule of thumb, we found a full backup each month and dailies each night was just about tolerable even if you needed a restore quite late in the month, but even then a 10GB backup with 30 days of incrementals on top could be looking at an hour or more to retrieve a single file.

As I understand it, Duplicity's scheme can also be vulnerable to minor corruption (e.g., due to disk error) anywhere since your last full backup taking out the entire backup, so if you're going to use it then you might like to investigate the options it provides for mitigating this risk as well.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#79

Post by seltzered_ »

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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#80

Post by gt_ »

5_minutes wrote: post #33

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, y…

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