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CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

blog.code42.com

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Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#201

Post by brianwski »

SpikeDad wrote: post #164
brianwski wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I'm biased because I work at Backblaze. I'm also one of the founders. Backblaze started in my living room in Palo Alto. Backblaze is A LOT LESS LIKELY to exit out of providing consumer online backup anytime soon as it is our primary business. I don't fully understand what just occurred with CrashPlan, but they had two separate "clients" - one for consumers and one for businesses. As far as I can tell, Cra…

Thi is a nice ego boost for you but I wish you had answered some of the questions that folks have posted. What good is a backup tool if you a) can't restore using the native tool and b) you can't restore files from more than 30 days.

> What good is a backup tool if you a) can't restore using the native tool

I am so confused by your question? With Backblaze, you can get 100% of you data back in two ways: 1) you can get a free external USB hard drive sent to you with all your data on it, or 2) You can prepare a free ZIP file with all your data and download it. We provide a restartable native bzdownloader to help you download the recovered files.

> What good is a backup tool....

Isn't the goal to get all your data back? Backblaze does that. Maybe I'm mis-understanding your question?

> you can't restore files from more than 30 days.

With Backblaze, you can recover files for more than 30 days. You can ALWAYS get "the most recent version" even after 9 years. What you cannot do is get all the "intermediate versions" (like if you change a text document, we retain all versions for 30 days, then we only keep the most recent version forever). I do agree that would be a better product (retain infinite versions of every file). Unfortunately we would need to charge more for that, and many customers only want the most recent copy of all their documents.

I understand if Backblaze is not a good solution for you. I just want to be absolutely clear what we provide and what we do not provide.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#202

Post by transitionnel »

freeone3000 wrote: post #114
CharlesW wrote: post #111

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?

SyncThing, perhaps?

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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#203

Post by brianwski »

tomjen3 wrote: post #145
brianwski wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#204

Post by berdario »

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

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#205

Post by chrisper »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #96

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…

You could try using Duplicati. It has a Web GUI. You could also just create the configs at home and then export it! You could also just invoke it from CLI.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#206

Post by analogmemory »

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…

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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#207

Post by jwillmer »

berdario wrote: post #204

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 avoi…

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.urbackup.org/

edit: It's client/server backup software. Not an online service. I used CrashPlan in a similar manner.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#208

Post by domador »

brianwski wrote: post #88
blacktulip wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any chance that one day Backblaze will do the same as Crashplan does today?

Disclaimer: I'm biased because I work at Backblaze. I'm also one of the founders. Backblaze started in my living room in Palo Alto. Backblaze is A LOT LESS LIKELY to exit out of providing consumer online backup anytime soon as it is our primary business. I don't fully understand what just occurred with CrashPlan, but they had two separate "clients" - one for consumers and one for businesses. As far as I can tell, Cra…

Thanks for sharing that fascinating insider insight regarding non-zero-sum competition and advertising!

This whole CrashPlan Home episode deepens my skepticism about services that claim to offer an unlimited amount of a physical resource (atoms on a hard drive, in this case) for a fixed price. Code42 has mentioned certain reasons for exiting the home user market, but I wonder if an unmentioned reason is the cost of providing service to an excessive number of users who consume more hard drive space than is profitable. As a current Crash Plan Home customer, I might be one of those users, given my 2.2 TB data set. It's felt like a steal for me, but in the future, I'll likely seek an option where I can get a good deal, a good, fair price instead of a steal (which in the end results in pain and hassle and ends up costing more than what I bargained for).

Is the cost of disk space the reason why BackBlaze expunges files deleted on a backed-up computer from the backup on your servers after 30 days? Though I think you guys are cool, this policy is a deal breaker for me, as far as a Crash Plan Home alternative is concerned. At this point, I'd rather pay a reasonable price for the disk space I use rather than have an "unlimited" plan where I have to constantly look over my shoulder at my files, to make sure important files haven't been inadvertently deleted within the past month. If the cost is too much for me, I'd rather be the one that makes the decision as to which files to exclude from my online backup, rather than have the backup service do it for me.

P.S. and Disclaimer: I developed a backup companion utility (Bitrot Detector) that happens to be more relevant and useful to users of a service like Backblaze which performs file mirroring than one like CrashPlan Home which performs file versioning. However, I'd prefer it if every backup service did versioning rather than mirroring, as version-preservation is what allows you to set-and-forget a backup, rather than to set-and-constantly-worry. Though of course I want more customers for my product, I'd rather have relatively fewer if it meant I lived in a world where every backup service did versioning and fewer people experienced data loss and the resulting grief.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#209

Post by brianwski »

balladeer wrote: post #118
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…

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 reas…

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.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#210

Post by deanclatworthy »

chrisper wrote: post #205
deanclatworthy wrote: post #96

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…

You could try using Duplicati. It has a Web GUI. You could also just create the configs at home and then export it! You could also just invoke it from CLI.

I have looked into Duplicati, but I'm not so keen on running an SSH server on my machine and/or SFTP in order to let others back up to it. A lot of extra admin work would be involved in protecting that set up and creating the necessary port-forwards and firewalls. Whereas crashplan just works.

I'm certainly not going to go through the steps of setting up CLI tasks on my families machine members either.

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