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CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

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Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#121
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.

While I'm sure there would be minor savings, the price differential is so large that the data would need to be >90% duplicate to be cost-competitive even for small data sets.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#122

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…

I'm not inclined to jump on this nickle and dimed to death for access to numerous platforms/services, model.

For backups and to avoid social media, some of my family and friends have switched to using some tools we're building together.

We're doing backups by syncing to a local to us Samba share (using Time Machine, conveniently everyone uses Macs), and Syncthing'ing in a federated style. The backups at rest on remote disk are in encrypted containers.

We can "share" messages and pictures with each other as well. Basically we just copy content outside the encrypted container to a public folder. There's a simple HTML/CSS/light JS frontend, everyone has a bookmark to http://localserver/public

I'm from a tech savvy family, engineers, old IBM mainframers, physicists, coders, and my mom the hairdresser. My friends involved are web/frontend devs. So you know, YMMV.

One could conceivably use Dropbox or something, to avoid Samba setup, but that will cost more.

No one has spent more than a couple hundred on hardware in the last 2 years. Internet and electricity costs are negligible.

Don't build habits around other people's platforms. Isn't that what they keep saying about Google, MS, etc? Seems reasonable enough to be a general life-pro-tip.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#123
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.

I've been using duplicacy and it supports a bunch of different remote endpoints. https://duplicacy.com/

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#124
post #99

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 switch to Backblaze, but you have to give them your encryption key when you restore. Use B2 with a decent client instead, you don't get an all-in-one plan for your family, but at least you keep control over your data.

I don't wish to store my families data in the cloud for a fee. Crashplan allowed me to use my own (spare) storage space to provide this for them.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#125
post #8

In my mental checklist of evaluating new products and services, Backblaze has always gone above and beyond while Crashplan irritated me enough to make me switch: * Are they one of the market leaders? * Do they have a company blog? Are they passionate about their product? (Backblaze's technical articles are always a treat; barely a word from Crashplan.) * Do they regularly interact with their users, e.g. on HN? (I oft…

I switched from Backblaze to Crashplan a few years ago, and I've been MUCH happier with Crashplan. The biggest issue is that, at least on Mac, Backblaze noticeably slowed down the machines (multiple machines, not just a problem on one), while Crashplan didn't. Any backup software that makes my computer feel slow, creates regular beachballs, etc. is not something I'm going to pay for. Then the nail in the coffin for t…

I went from Crash Plan (much too long to back up my files) to BlackBlaze (every time it would hit the end of uploading, my backups would disappear and I would have to re-upload 3 terabytes of data, BB support couldn't figure anything out) to finally just rolling my own external hard drive backups for media and using Dropbox (which I had been using anyway and love) and a hard drive for my files and pictures. I am going to upload just pictures to a cloud service in the future. Between Dropbox file restore and the external HD my files and pictures don't disappear. I don't care about my music and I have found that my media backups simply need to be made and then checked every couple of months. Turns out, TV shows, audiobooks, sporting events, and other static media are wonderful for just tossing onto a hard drive, labeling the hard drive with either a reference to a text file showing what is on it or labeling the drive itself. For example one of the HDs I have is literally labeled:

- 2014 FIFA World Cup - Brasil

- 2015-16 Penguins Stanley Cup

- 2016-17 Penguins Stanley Cup

- 2015-16 Los Angeles Lakers (Kobe's Final Season)

Every so often I go in and check that a game from each of these is playable at the start and end of a half, period, or quarter.

The TV shows and movies I have on Blu-Ray/DVD I don't even check. This is more "I'm too lazy to re-rip, but if I have to, I will" backups.

Ebooks are really the only media that I have to remember to backup, and that library is so small (and relatively static) that I just drag it to a USB stick every couple of months.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#126
post #8

In my mental checklist of evaluating new products and services, Backblaze has always gone above and beyond while Crashplan irritated me enough to make me switch: * Are they one of the market leaders? * Do they have a company blog? Are they passionate about their product? (Backblaze's technical articles are always a treat; barely a word from Crashplan.) * Do they regularly interact with their users, e.g. on HN? (I oft…

* 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 backups and moving on to B2 as their main product?

* Is their software well-built/designed, or is it annoying and bloated? - Currently is doesn't run at all on my systems.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#127
post #119

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…

Also works on Linux which Backblaze doesn't. I have Ubuntu on all the family and some extended family machines and using Crashplan currently. Anyone can recommend if a good backup alternative that works on a Linux (desktop)?

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 retrieve single files. Also, it's CLI-based, so it might not be very intuitive for desktop use. Still, a free solution with lots of utility. :-)

[1] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#128

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?

I use IDrive for this. It runs right on my Synology NAS, doing scheduled backups of the data it contains. The pricing is pretty reasonable, too.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#129
post #84

Earlier 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.

Pennies. And they have lots of them what with all that enterprise corporate schlong in their mouths. Hope that money shot tasted good, effing traitors ! Businesses over these things are stewards, they have a responsibility beyond profits and shareholders and "Put Your Biggest Customer First"

I'm guessing they're leaving the business directly because individual customers just don't cost pennies. As mentioned above, "unlimited" backup plans at a flat rate just aren't sustainable, unless you're going to cut corners. Cutting corners when it comes to backups just leads to disaster down the line eventually anyway.

Re: CrashPlan is exiting the consumer market

#130

Well, fuck. Let the suggestions begin - who should I switch to? Bonus points if moving data to a newly purchased hard drive isn't a terrifying process that looks like it's losing all of my backups, as well as Linux/Windows/Mac support.

Been using: https://duplicacy.com/
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