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CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

blog.code42.com

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Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#251

Post by Thespian2 »

Like many in this thread, I'm here looking for alternatives. CrashPlan was sufficient for my family needs, and none of the other services I looked at hit the same sweet spot. Slow, saturated uploads, and their bloated client were tolerable for what I was paying, and what I got. We've got a few mentioned replacement possibilities scattered in the comments and replies below, but I'd like to put forth my "asks" for solutions, which seem to match others.

I'm a tech guy, and "rolling my own" Linux solution is possible, but in this case, I'd be happy to pay someone else to worry about the details of storing a copy of my bits, so I can do other things with my time.

My wish list is as follows:

MUST

======

have both Linux and Windows client

ability to whitelist/blacklist/select subsets of files/folders to be backed up

======

SHOULD offer as many of the following as possible (all optional)

=======

some sort of "Family" pricing deal for multiple machines in one account

encrypted backups with consumer controlled key not necessarily given to service

option to switch out back end bulk storage infrastructure

"forever" file retention / restoration of old versions (charge me for storage)

user scheduled backups and/or don't bring client to crawl or saturate home line

======

Feel free to add any replies with suggestions here which might be useful to others.

For my point of view, if CrashPlan found the home offering unsustainable from "abuse" of the "unlimited" feature, I would have much preferred them introduce a cap to the home plan at some "reasonable" value. They could have balanced the books, and saved 95% of their customers. Start rolling off oldest file version backups when you hit space cap and/or offer extra space at cost+profit. Done.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#252

Post by berdario »

confounded wrote: post #215
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…

Can you explain what you mean by "watching", and why it's important to you?

> I need something that would keep watch on all the files on the system (see inotify) to avoid continuous rescans of the disks

Inotify (on Linux, and fanotify wouldn't be enough, since the backup tool would have to track file deletions as well) is the only way to have seamless background backups

I tried to use other tools in the past, like duplicity... But having a scan every hour that takes several minutes and has noticeable CPU usage is a deal breaker

(and having a backup scheduled less frequently than that is also a dealbreaker, since you cannot rely that the laptop would be up an running at a certain time during the day)

(Crashplan also does a full rescan, but it's not strictly necessary... It's basically needed if the backup daemon crashed or was shutdown, or stuff had been changed on the filesystem while the OS was off, so that sanity check rescan can actually wait a few days)

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#253

Post by hendersoon »

mikevm wrote: post #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 * Unlimit…

I could easily afford to pay $100/month for it. I just don't want to, because the perceived value isn't there.

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg is willing to pay $1000 for a Big Mac? He has the money. He can easily afford it. What difference does it make to him?

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#254

Post by rrauenza »

brianwski wrote: post #233
gt_ wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear in the comments here that all efforts other than solving the 30 day file retention limit are going to be a waste of time until you address this. It simply reduces the utility of the product to the point that you need yet another product that will almost inherently render yor product unnecessary. Until you address this, I can't reason investing time, processor performance, or the tiny monthly payment…

> all efforts other than solving the 30 day file retention limit Trust me, that message has come through loud and clear! :-) We are going to do some analysis to see if we can afford it, but we'll need at least a week or two to figure that out.

With the prevalence of crypto ransom ware ... I'd really like more than 30 days.

Speaking of which -- possibly simple feature request -- when a files' entropy suddenly goes high from low, alert the user and keep the files longer.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#255

Post by domador »

brianwski wrote: post #222
domador wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> Is the cost of disk space the reason why BackBlaze expunges files deleted on a backed-up computer fromthe backup on your servers after 30 days? The original reason was to prevent customers who owned a single 1 TByte hard drive from filling it with content, backing it up to Backblaze, writing down the date, then emptying the hard drive and filling it with DIFFERENT content, backing up to Backblaze, writing down the…

I'm not sure I understand the use case you mention. Is it in essence the idea of someone abusing an unlimited plan to back up more data that you'd reasonably expect them to? Can it be boiled down to Backblaze's cost of hard drive space and whether users pay enough to cover Backblaze's costs?

The use case you mention seems to be very exotic, but who knows, maybe it's not as rare as I would expect. To me, expunging deleted files because of this rare, somewhat-malicious case seems like it would cause undesirable collateral damage among your service's typical users.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#256

Post by hendersoon »

eli wrote: post #84
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #81

Well, this sucks. CrashPlan was awesome in that it doubled as both a backup app and a cloud storage solution. Since I had my settings set to NEVER remove deleted files, I didn't need to have each of my backed up external hard-drives plugged in at all times in order to have them backed up. I could just plug them in as needed, make sure Windows assigned them a unique drive letter, and let Crashplan sync any new data up…

I don't see how "truly unlimited" and "data hoarders" can ever be the basis of a sustainable business. Each additional terabyte costs them real money to store.

With deduplication, that is feasible.

With E2E encryption, not so much.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#257

Post by ValentineC »

y4mi wrote: post #234
ATsch wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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-bandwi...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/4o9tm2/psa_hub...

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#258

Post by extra88 »

confounded wrote: post #215
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…

Can you explain what you mean by "watching", and why it's important to you?

I think there are a couple of variants. First is watching for files to change and then uploading them when they do (possibly waiting a short period and collecting a set of changed files before uploading). This is what folder syncing programs like Dropbox do and probably what berdario is seeking.

Second is watching for files to change and saving that list until the next scheduled backup is run. This is what macOS's Time Machine does, the OS's fsevents continuously keeps track of changes and Time Machine just asks it for the list of changed files since a given time (the last time Time Machine ran). This is an alternative to a backup client scanning the filesystem itself on a schedule.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#260

Post by corford »

Thespian2 wrote: post #251

Like many in this thread, I'm here looking for alternatives. CrashPlan was sufficient for my family needs, and none of the other services I looked at hit the same sweet spot. Slow, saturated uploads, and their bloated client were tolerable for what I was paying, and what I got. We've got a few mentioned replacement possibilities scattered in the comments and replies below, but I'd like to put forth my "asks" for solu…

I think https://www.spideroak.com fits your list (specifically "One" which is their consumer solution/app). I'm a happy user who's had an account with them for years (it costs me under $10/month iirc).

It has/supports:

* Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android

* Lets you share your quota across unlimited machines/devices

* Lets you whitelist/blacklist folders & files to be backed up (by pointing and clicking and/or by specifying patterns)

* Does LAN syncing

* Keeps versioned file history forever (i.e. point-in-time recovery)

* Has scheduling but I haven't used this, it just runs quietly in the background and I never notice it negatively impacting anything (client and accompanying background service is currently using a total of 51MB of memory). You can cap the upload speed if you want to make sure it never saturates your uplink.

* Uses end to end encryption i.e. they don't have your key (important caveat: this is provided you only use their app and don't use their web interface, although even then they claim the key is never stored anywhere - just kept temporarily in the server's RAM while it auths/decrypts files for you)

* Been around for ages and not likely to go out of business any time soon

* Lets you share files with a self-destructing link

* Uses aggressive de-duping on their backend (ZFS based I think?) so you can squeeze the most out of your quota (just checked my account and I'm using 94GB without compression & de-duplication but only being charged for 41GB)

Edit: and they release a lot of opensource: https://github.com/SpiderOak

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