Live data from Hacker News

CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

blog.code42.com

141–150 of 348 posts

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#141
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..

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#142
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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#143
post #92
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Adding a support in for duplicati. Been running it in a docker container on my servers for a while and it's been pretty smooth sailing. Sending all backups to a gsuite business account.

Duplicati is suprisingly easy to set up for Windows -> Linux. Installed the windows client, made an account on my linux box and pointed the windows client at it.

Is it a proper service on Windows? That's a problem. I want to configure it from an admin account and have it still work when non admin/non tech savvy users login.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#144
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tarsnap.

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 reali…

[deleted]

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#145
post #2

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.

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 Backbla…

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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#146
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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#147
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reali…

I backup quite a bit and after deduplication with tarsnap it's not nearly as much.

That's kind of another problem though. No way to predict costs in advance. All you can do is know the upper bound.

I have approx 2.5tb on CrashPlan, so that gives me an upper bound of $625 per month. Maybe it might be 50% lower when deduped, maybe more, maybe less. Who knows. Not really a pricing model I can make a decision on.

Tarsnap looks great for certain use cases. But it doesn't really make sense for home users with a large amount of data.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#148

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…

> 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) 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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#149
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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#150
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.
Post reply on HN