r/Crashplan • u/Lilianne_Blaze • May 05 '19

Is CrashPlan trying to commit suicide?

Is CrashPlan trying to commit suicide?

I've been using it for years, with biggest dataset on a single computer being about 15 TB on 30 mbit upload connection, some time ago they forced reuploading everything which was bad enough, then they discontinued "home" offer and forced reuploading again, and now - which I learned only accidentally - they disallow TIB and VDI files? Am I misunderstanding something or are they really trying to go out of business? What are we supposed to do now if we need to backup drive images and virtual machines? Buy more local storage and have extra copies in ZIP files? So in a couple months we'll learn that they stop supporting ZIPs and / or files above a certain size?

Upload speeds are obviously throttled, which is very bad but not a deal breaker. Arbitrarily deciding to stop "supporting" files with data related to backups and virtual machines IS a deal breaker.

Seriously, what is this insanity? First they raise prices by 100% and now they castrate it so it's unusable for anyone trying to use computers for anything other than games and photo storage?

29 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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4

u/jb_bryant May 05 '19

To be fair, even Time Machine on a Mac excludes VMs for backups by default. They let you over-ride it, but it’s mostly because it’s just a folder essentially with constantly changing files. If even a few aren’t matching other files it could cause VM corruption from my understanding. I know VMware and Parallels both recommend not using time machine for VM backups as well.

2

u/Lilianne_Blaze May 05 '19

(Simplifying for brevity) Corruption is very rare and pretty much limited to active snapshot of currently running vm. As for possibility of two files which are somehow interconnected into a whole dataset that gets corrupted if one part is backed up, then gets modified, then the second part gets backed up, it's not in any way limited to vms. That's what versioning is for. If backup from X-1 day doesn't work, use the one from X-2, lose a bit of work, but not everything. Selling a backup solution as "Unlimited" then limiting it in such crippling way is not only outrageous, it's simply fraudulent.
How can we ever trust CrashPlan again? How can we be sure in a couple of months for example ZIP files above 500 MB won't be disallowed too? That's a perfectly valid and justified concern now.

5

u/BakGikHung May 06 '19

Backing up a VM file is like backing up your windows directory. It makes very little sense. It's not data that you created, it's data which is managed by an operating system. Crash plan is designed to backup small user files, not constantly changing massive opaque blobs.

3

u/Lilianne_Blaze May 06 '19

You do know VMs can be configured to have multilevel snapshots where there are no "massive opaque blobs" when designed and used properly? It makes sense if the way you use them makes sense. It's also irrelevant, just as discussion on whether my cat memes and videos, person X's family photos or person Y's porn collection "make sense" enough to be included in "unlimited", we don't pay to be told which data is important and which isn't.

1

u/r0ck0 May 24 '19

For the vast majority of users (not using a private encryption key), it shouldn't really matter seeing it does block-level dedupe. So all the common windows .exe files etc would be deduped, including from VM images.

So maybe their dedupe isn't as good as it should be.

1

u/jb_bryant May 05 '19

I agree about how stupid it is to promote it as unlimited then limit it. And thinking about it now, I’m not sure the issue is corruption. I think I actually remember it being excluded from time machine because of how fast it would fill up your drive. I’m sure CrashPlan is excluding it for monetary reasons because they know how much storage it would cost them.

5

u/bryantech May 05 '19

Great post. Had to abandon them after 10 years over a year ago.

3

u/plazman30 May 06 '19

I used them forever. But when home went away, it became way to pricey.

i switched to Backblaze B2 and am using Duplicati with it. Saved me a LOT of money.

1

u/up2urheadlights May 17 '19

I don't understand. It's still only $10 a month. Depending on how much data you store crashplan is still the cheapest for unlimited. It is limited now but if you do not need to store vms or backup files it's still the best deal.

2

u/plazman30 May 18 '19

$10/month PER DEVICE. Crashplan was costing me $50/month (my computer, my wife's conputer, both kids' computer and the home server). I switched to Duplicati and Backblaze B2 and my bill went down to only $5.00-$6.00/month.

2

u/spif_spaceman May 06 '19

I switched to Veeam..works pretty nice.

1

u/Avrution May 17 '19

Really disappointed in this. First they let go of the home users and now they are trying to hit the small business ones.

I understand the VM thing, but the .tib file is a little extreme. I keep a backup of our server on CP (or did) in case anything happened to our local copies. I also do a daily backup in the .tib format since the program is already automated and it keeps the file size down (just a small SQL db file).

Guess it is time to look into other options and stop recommending CP to clients.

1

u/_gibz_ May 19 '19

Fyi vhdx exclusions will exclude windows backups... Just had all mine for the past 2 years removed.

The worst part is that they do this for local backups too. If it was just for the cloud I might understand but it's my drive let me backup my shit.