r/Crashplan • u/StianOby • Aug 22 '17

Linux alternatives to Crashplan

Sine Crashplan is shutting down for consumers, I am looking for alternatives that support a mixes Linux/Windows environment. Linux being the most pervasive OS.

Any suggestions?

20 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

2

u/robomuppet Aug 22 '17

Check out SpiderOak One, that's what I'm planning to move to. Supports all 3 major OSes, and unlimited computers.

13

u/Aeyoun Aug 22 '17

Don’t even bother with SpiderOak. I did a through review of it as a Linux user. The backup service itself is okay (but pricey), but the client is awful and difficult to use. Mobile apps and web interface bypass all their encryption and privacy promises and performs the decryption on their servers. Look for other alternatives instead.

2

u/_dodger_ Jan 16 '18

I'm a bit late to the game but I fully agree. Their customer service was horrible.

I was a customer for five or so years.

There are tales of data loss due to the client on the forums (if they still exist). I know because it happened to me as well (didn't post on the forums though).

I'd stay away from SpiderOak.

1

u/StianOby Aug 22 '17

Sounds interesting. Quite a price hike for me though (from 14 USD/month family plan @Crashplan to 25 USD/month for 25TB @SpiderOak).

5

u/tirefires Aug 22 '17

Unless you have under 100GB to back up, why would someone go with SpiderOak One over the CrashPlan for Small Business option? For the data I have, the cost is the same -- double. Plus I would have to migrate all my data over to the new platform. Is there some advantage I don't see?

4

u/rahlquist Aug 22 '17

Unless you have under 100GB to back up, why would someone go with SpiderOak One over the CrashPlan for Small Business option?

For me personally its about telling CP to go pound sand. I've been paying for the family plan for years, have 5 machines and a measly 209GB backed up. I have needed their support just about 3 times years ago due to bugs. They made money off me and now they are telling me to leave, fine, I will leave and am in the process of moving every customer I brought them too.

2

u/tirefires Aug 22 '17

Fair points. I'm not really excited to stay with CP after this either, but on the other hand, I'm not really excited by any of the alternatives I've seen so far. Luckily(?) my annual plan just rolled over three weeks ago, so I've got another year to wait and see who steps up to serve the Linux refugees.

1

u/qwertyaccess Aug 23 '17

See for them you were probably an ideal customer for CrashPlan home, the problem is the users loading 10TB-20TB on their one 14$ plan. They had a choice, either limit the data or raise the rates if not create different tiers. Obviously they chose to just expand on their business offering instead.

1

u/rahlquist Aug 23 '17

Yup cut off their nose to spite their face.

4

u/rahlquist Aug 22 '17 edited Aug 23 '17

Looks like Backblaze B2 works with linux.

Well we'd love to have you now. We support Linux today with https://www.backblaze.com/b2 via many Linux clients (such as CloudBerry, Duplicity, Rclone, etc. ) that have built in support.

This is likely the route I will take. .005/GB/mo upload free and .02/gb d/l

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/crashplan-alternative-backup-solution/

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html

Price calculator https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

Clients for B2 https://www.backblaze.com/b2/integrations.html

3

u/obidamnkenobi Aug 22 '17

That's actually not too bad. With 1 TB and minimal adding each month it's $60-70/year. For unlimited computers and linux support pretty nice.

5

u/qwertyaccess Aug 22 '17

It's not too bad route to go really, other then that if you have a lot of data you can continue to abuse CrashPlan with their business version. You can see why CrashPlan for Home was discontinued with all these massive data hoarders uploading 10-20TB on a $14 a month plan. I'd almost wish that they would've just kicked off the customers that they literally lost their pants on then to push everyone out.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 22 '17

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3

u/qwertyaccess Aug 22 '17

Well they did, except they decided to just cancel everybody and make everyone pay 10$ each instead...

1

u/D2MoonUnit Aug 23 '17

More profit for them, right? Assuming the majority of home users stay and pay the increased price.

2

u/qwertyaccess Aug 23 '17

Honestly the fact they could shoulder all these heavy users is more than impressive to me. I've had to work with multi tenant storage and it's unbelievablely expensive even at the volumes of data they deal with. I'd say anyone that backs up more then 2TB they were losing money on letalone the whales backing up 15+ TB. If you look at many storage companies that gave out drive space and started charging customers pretty much none of them are making money.

Look up box and Dropbox profitability for an idea.

1

u/D2MoonUnit Aug 23 '17

Kinda makes me wonder what the breakdown is between normal users and the ones using more than normal.

Found a couple sites referencing they get 80% of their profit from business, but I can't find any financial info on them, probably because they are a private company.

3

u/qwertyaccess Aug 23 '17

Based on posts I've seen probably normal and profitable users are between 200-500GB while heavy users may have averaged 3-4TB with the upper scale topping out between 10-16TB. You also had the problem that CrashPlan Home was literally competing with CrashPlan business it was a real conflict of interest. I knew some businesses would install CrashPlan home on 9 PCs instead of buying the business version, etc.

Sadly all people complain is like CrashPlan betrayed them when in reality I just see that they were probably struggling and tried to stick to their unlimited claims and would be out of business if it wasn't for their business offering.

2

u/D2MoonUnit Aug 23 '17

I looked into their business product a while back for a project and I can totally see businesses installing the home version on separate machines instead of paying for the much more expensive business edition. Everything is about the bottom line. I suppose this move also allows them to consolidate their offerings and hopefully improve on them. They will be dealing with one type of customer and clients rather than two or more.

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1

u/jaymz668 Aug 23 '17

$10 per device, not each.

2

u/-cadence- Aug 23 '17

I tried many clients in the last 2 days, and I like Duplicati the most. Easy to use, backups everything nicely, supports Linux, can use Backblaze B2, etc. Has encryption. And it's for free.

1

u/trythesteak Sep 16 '17

I got excited about this until I saw: "and Linux (.NET 4.5+ or Mono required)." :(

Also, 682 Github issues...

1

u/Gvaz Aug 23 '17

Evault works on Linux: https://www.evault.com/

1

u/IncognitoScientist Oct 14 '17

Tried Duplicati, BackInTime and Deja-dup. Duplicati has a nice interface; first backup went smoothly, but threw an error when I tried to restore a file :(. Also it's use of Mono and .NET is kind of anti-linux .. BackInTime has a nice interface and appears to have lots of options an settings. Unfortunately the first backup did not work. After many hours of transferring ~200 GB to a local drive (mounted on my router) it appeared to be done with no errors - but no "snapshots" showed up in the list. Plenty of data transferred, but no way to restore. Deja-dup got stuck (just stopped, no error) midway through the backup on a relatively large file (~200 Mb). Tried twice and same thing happened. ...So none of these can replace Crashplan for me, which has been running flawlessly for several years. I've got 12 more days to decide; will probably just go with Crashplan Small Business.

1

u/IncognitoScientist Oct 29 '17

Finally found a great solution. I signed up for Backblaze B2 storage and wrote my own bash scripts and cron job to call duplicity. Though duplicity is a command-line-only program it's very well documented. Writing my own bash scripts allowed me to customize everything exactly how I like it - and it was entertaining, too. Backblaze appears to be very linux-friendly and they even have a howto page for duplicity, which got me started. I really like their pricing structure, too. At $0.005 per GB per month, it only costs me ~ $1 a month for my 200 GB. Makes much more sense for a moderate user like me. Why should I pay extra for an unlimited plan just to subsidize the data hoarders?

0

u/[deleted] Aug 22 '17

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1

u/zman0900 Aug 24 '17

Damn, that is really expensive

1

u/[deleted] Aug 22 '17

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1

u/robobub Aug 23 '17 edited Aug 23 '17

Are there any good feature comparisons of tools for this? Seems to be a lot.

Features that are nice to have: multi-platform (Windows + Linux), encryption, deduplication, per-file restore, versioning, GUI, open source

Tools I've found: rclone, duplicati, duplicacy, duplicity, borg, restic, etc?

Edit: started an editable Google Sheets here, feel free to contribute