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CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
331–340 of 348 posts
Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
#332Earlier 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…
A couple of years ago I went to use GPG for the first time in a long time. My private key didn't work. I looked at the file, and its size was 0 bytes. Cosmic ray? GPG crash? System crash while the file was being written? How it got truncated, I'll never know.
No problem, I'll just restore from backup. I have CrashPlan online backups, and local backups with Obnam, so I'll just recover it from one of them.
Every snapshot in CrashPlan and Obnam had the truncated file, going all the way back to the first snapshots. I thought I had lost my GPG key forever.
Then I remembered that I had some old CD-R/RW backups from years ago. I started going through them. Some of the discs were unreadable. Finally I found one that was readable and had the untruncated private key file.
Lesson learned: always keep your old backups. You never know which files on your system have suffered from bitrot or accidental truncation or accidental deletion--until you try to access them. It's very likely that some of them will have been destroyed more than 30 days ago.
Now keeping old backups doesn't mean keeping every snapshot, ever. CrashPlan takes 15-minute snapshots by default, so obviously I don't need every one of those going back years. But I definitely want to keep at least one snapshot for every year I've used the system, at least one for each of the last 12 months, etc.
Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. >…
Without some form of versioning, there's always the risk that the only backed-up copy of a file is a corrupted, useless version. This is the best summary of everything else I've said here.
Indeed, I nearly lost my GPG key due to undetected corruption, because the corrupted file had been backed up for a long time. I only recovered it from a very old CD-R backup I made years earlier.
Keeping old snapshots (e.g. one or two per year) is an absolute must.
Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. >…
> if I delete a file will you retain it forever No. We consider a file deletion as "the final version of the file you wish to retain". In that case you can get the deleted version for 30 days, then it is gone forever.
I'm sorry but this is a complete no-go. As much as I like Backblaze's attitude and pricing plans, this is unacceptable for a backup service. It's way too easy for files to be accidentally, unknowingly deleted, and for this to not be noticed for months or years. Any backup system that deletes missing files is not a backup but a mirror.
Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
#335So 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…
I have a strong suspicion Linux support doesn't exist, because that user category are going to buy 1 unlimited plan, put it on their 20TB home SAN, and well...20TB of cloud storage is not cheap (price it out on backblaze business).
Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
#336Make your voices heard, Code42 could change the policy. There was/is an internal battle in the company. Here is a video posted by an insider while this was being decided: https://goo.gl/YEXa2L
Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You could compromise and use something like MaidSafe does, where the data is encrypted using a key based on the contents of the file itself (self-encryption), so you need to know the key for the file in order to decrypt it but deduplication is still possible.
Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
#338Like 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 s…
I've used them for a few years, not been particularly impressed with their speed. I'm also currently fighting a problem with the client quietly wedging on upload (not sure how long ago it stopped, but the upload queue was past 6GB), and the re-syndication process just sitting there seemingly doing nothing.
> Uses aggressive de-duping on their backend (ZFS based I think?)
Err, I hope not. Pretty sure they sync a database of seen blocks between clients and they collectively dedupe based on that - their backend simply shouldn't have the information necessary to dedupe itself.
Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
#339Earlier 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 used them for a few years, not been particularly impressed with their speed. I'm also currently fighting a problem with the client quietly wedging on upload (not sure how long ago it stopped, but the upload queue was past 6GB), and the re-syndication process just sitting there seemingly doing nothing. > Uses aggressive de-duping on their backend (ZFS based I think?) Err, I hope not. Pretty sure they sync a datab…
>Err, I hope not. Pretty sure they sync a database of seen blocks between clients and they collectively dedupe based on that - their backend simply shouldn't have the information necessary to dedupe itself.
Think you're right based on reading: https://spideroak.com/faq/what-is-deduplication
I assumed they'd use both techniques (i.e. de-dup client side when possible to save on upload) but that the way in which encrypted blocks were produced before uploading was deterministic (a bit like a hash function) so that if the same file was marked for backup on a different device the resulting blocks would be the same and could be de-duped server side.
Providing a unique salt was used client side (shared across all devices and not known by Spideroak) while making the block, it should be possible to end up with deterministic encrypted blocks that are still unique outside of your account (I think anyway... barely know what I'm talking about when it comes to the intricacies of crypto!)
Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
* Do they have a Linux client? -No * Do they allow you to recover deleted files? -No (I have used this a few times, it saved some of the digitized family photos which I blew away with an rsync --delete flag) * Do they offer secondary products that relate to their primary offering? Ok, I can read that as they are stretching too thin not focusing on backups enough. Will they announce they are dropping out of consumer b…
* Do they allow a data restore without you giving them your encryption password? - No: https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html
Ha, that was surprising indeed:
" we decrypt your data on our secure restore servers and we then zip it and send "
That seems shady to me