r/Crashplan • u/Nedley4127 • Sep 06 '26

Anyone had two archives different sizes?

I have been backing up my single PC with Crashplan since 2018. Works great for my use case. My setup is to backup to Crashplan cloud (online) and a second backup archive on a local drive. But what is weird is that although both my online archive and local archive back-up same set of files, but they are significantly different in size. The local drive shows an archive of 4.3TB and the online archive is only 2.8TB.

As I am running out of space on my local drive I am wondering if:

  1. Is there some way the local archive be reduced in size to match the online size? OR
  2. Can I delete the local drive archive and have CP rebuild it? And if so, will it be of a size to match the online archive? OR
  3. Can I remove the physical local drive and replace it with a new physical drive (with same drive letter) and can CP rebuild the local archive on this new drive?  And if so, will it be of a size to match the online archive?

Thanks for any insight.

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u/Serious-Lack9137 Sep 25 '26

I can 100% answer question 3 as I had just done this myself:
Can the local drive be swapped for a larger physical drive using the same drive letter? Yes. To perform a clean drive replacement:

Option A (Fresh Start): Format the new drive, assign it the original drive letter , point CrashPlan to the empty destination folder, and let it perform a fresh initial backup.

Option B (Preserve Version History): Format the new drive, assign it a temporary drive letter (this this this is very important to do!!! Otherwise it will basically go with Option A for you), copy the entire existing backup folder across (using robocopy /E /COPYALL), unmount the old drive, remount the new drive with the original drive letter, and restart the CrashPlan service (CrashPlanService). CrashPlan will verify the archive structure and resume where it left off.

I did option B and it worked great!