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CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

blog.code42.com

271–280 of 348 posts

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>all that enterprise corporate schlong in their mouths. Hope that money shot tasted good, effing traitors! Holy fuck. Let's settle down a bit buddy.

No. Sick of cloud assholes offering things then taking them away. Dipshit management types apologizing for their masters' craven pursuit of money. Wealth was the worst thing that ever happened to this field. Technology shouldn't feel like indian-giving. It should be empowering, egalitarian, and eternal . Backup services promise to solve the eternality question, until one day they don't -- because PROFIT$$$$$$$$$$$$$$…

Would you please not rant on HN, regardless of how annoying you find something?

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#272
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I've tried Spideroak and I really tried to like / use it, but it never worked very well, feels unfocused and a bit unfinished. I'm probably going to just move my photos to Dropbox (I know, its not a backup program, but it works and is very simple to deal with)

Not sure how recently you tried it but the current SpiderOak One app is solid and polished (imho anyway). It just works and is brain dead simple to use. Much more so than I remember Crash Plan ever being (admittedly haven't used them in years).

Edit: I've only ever used SpiderOak's Windows app though. No idea how good/bad their Linux client is.

Edit 2: this is what the current version looks like on my windows machine: http://imgur.com/a/KfnlQ

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#273
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.

Another feature (which didn't exist the last time I checked) SHOULD be to have /append only/ accounts.

It should be a /more privileged/ instruction to delete / replace / modify already stored files. This could prevent a backup service on a compromised system from removing remote backups. (Assuming the administrative information was kept secure using other means.)

Ideally I'd like to be able to manually assign privileges to sub-accounts.

    * Modify: resume uploads older than 24 hours
    * Modify: remove/delete
    * Modify: change storage (filestream/parameters/metadata etc).
    * Append: create new buckets
    * Append: add a new file to a bucket
    * Append: add a new /version/ of a file in a bucket.
    * Append: add metadata
    * Read: all list operations
    * Read: all download operations
Note: Since the main way of racking up money on a B2 account is downloads and since compromised clients could be used to engage in a DDoS attack (by compromised legitimate customer accounts) //read// operations are actually more sensitive than might be initially guessed.

A simplified customer UI might bundle those operations together, but some advanced way of providing finely grained privileges should be created.

Edit: Fixing formatting.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you find that significantly expanding the retention limit doesn't fit within the current pricing structure (as I expect it wouldn't given how competitively priced Backblaze is), consider offering it as an add-on feature, as Dropbox does with Extended Version History (+$40/yr for 1-year retention of deleted files).

I think at a high level users might be OK with paying for their actual stored file size.

A way of improving the storage size might be to allow the user to white-list (with some defaults) folders more likely to have 'third party' files (E.G. C:\\Windows, C:\\Program*, /usr/) either excluded if they're on a list of common files or de-duplicated with a public list of common files (and check-sums). It would be useful to add-on programs and scripts if that list were public, and if a way of cloning those files in to a discounted pool were possible by 'uploading' them again (to ensure the customer actually /has/ that file and thus presumably the right to restore it).

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#275
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.

Why not allow for additional retention as a paid add-on to the existing service? I can understand why Unlimited storage combined with Unlimited retention don't work well with a fixed monthly pricing model. But couldn't you keep the Unlimited storage and marry it to a per-GB cost structure for retained versions beyond 30-days? Then it would be up to advanced users to opt-in to this paid extra so that they can take advantage as they see fit (similar to Dropbox and Extended File History). Ideally all this would fit into the standard service... but if CrashPlan couldn't make that work economically then perhaps a different approach would be best?

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#276
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For full folder backups, duplicity [1] has been great for me, does incremental backups, and has quite a few backends. You control rotation policies, full-snapshot frequency, etc, and bring your own storage (works with s3, rsync, etc.). Full-folder recovery is also pretty easy in my experience. The downside is that it's all on you to configure providers, pay for storage, and I'm not aware of any indexing or ability to…

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.

Anyone have any experience with Sia? $2 per Terabyte-month sounds really attractive.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the email, it looks like your current agreement + 60 days free subscription extension. So if you're on monthly billing, you've got about 60 - 90 days. [They renewed my annual plan just 9 days ago...]

> So if you're on monthly billing, you've got about 60 - 90 days. I got such a mail, mentioning: "We will honor your existing CrashPlan for Home subscription, keeping your data safe, as always, until your current subscription expires. To allow you time to transition to a new backup solution, we've extended your subscription (at no cost to you) by 60 days. Your new subscription expiration date is 09/13/2017." There's…

Same here! Received email today (22 Aug) saying: "we've extended your subscription (at no cost to you) by 60 days. Your new subscription expiration date is 09/14/2017."

That's not 60 days from today (or from the end of my monthly subscription)!!!

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#278
post #154
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…

$10 per device is the backup world's "per-CPU" licensing. Scenario: say I have multiple computers. I have a family's computers, plus parents and in-laws. The amount to backup on everyone else's computers is small (mine is ~1.5TB, more later). Before I covered it for free, knowing that for my peace of mind it was worth it. Now I'd be looking at $1200/yr vs the $150/yr before. Aside: Regarding deduplication, I'm frustr…

I can't say much about parents and in-laws, but for family I prefer to have a NAS that holds all the important data and run one CrashPlan instance on it. Anyone that wants their files backed up would simply use a mounted network folder.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the email I have received they state that their service continues until October 22nd in 2018, so that's more than one year left. I'm on a free account, so it has got nothing to do with a running subscription.

> I'm on a free account, so it has got nothing to do with a running subscription. This sounds like something that was mostly missed by the comments here — does that mean that people who only utilised their peer-to-peer backup system need to find another solution too, because their software needs to phone home to work? Relying on user accounts and "backup codes" [1] stored on CrashPlan's servers sounds like a scary ad…

You are right, for home usage I'm completely relying on the peer-to-peer backup system to have some kind of "distributed" backup where every machine is backed up to another machine and to an external drive. If I wanted I could even add an offsite location as well.

In combination with file watching and storage of multiple versions per file this makes a pretty unique feature set which makes it hard for me to find a replacement.

They stated a few times that the free version will also only work until that deadline. I assume the client is not going to work anymore after that.

I'd prefer they released an offline (home network) version which I would gladly pay for.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#280
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's rsync.net which very explicitly supports rsync/zfs over SSH

I use rsync.net with borg. Works great.

They have a dedicated account for borg/attic: http://rsync.net/products/attic.html

There's also restic, which works similarly, but has native support for cloud storage: https://restic.github.io/ - sadly it's claims of being efficient are rather undermined by the continued lack of compression support.

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