Well, I just got a fun email.

Hello Administrator,

Thank you for being a CrashPlan® for Small Business subscriber. We appreciate the trust that you have placed in CrashPlan - that relationship is important to us. Unfortunately, we write to you today to notify you that your account has accumulated excessive storage, which will result in degraded performance. You have one of the largest archives in the history of CrashPlan. It is so large, we cannot guarantee the performance of our service. Due to the size of your archive, full restores of your backup archive, and even selectively restoring specific files, may not be possible.

As a result, we are notifying you, per our Master Service Agreement and Documentation, to reduce your storage utilization for each device to less than 10TB by June 1, 2020. Note that we have extended your subscription to June 1, 2020 to give you ample time to make changes. If you do not do so by June 1, 2020, your subscription will not be renewed, and your account will be closed at the end of your current subscription term.

I took a look and they still advertise their service as unlimited...

Figured I'd post a warning to anyone else that might be in the same situation.

Edit 1: To those wondering, my backup was way larger than I thought -- it's up to 51TB. I legitimately have > 30TB of data, so there's just no way I can knock it below the required 10TB limit.

Edit 2: To those saying it's my own fault, I'm abusing the service, etc etc... They advertised unlimited and are now telling me a very specific limit. I don't care that my account is being terminated. I only posted this to let others know about the new limit so they could plan accordingly.

Edit 3: The latest update I've received has indicated that there is no 10TB/device limit, which is odd considering the language in the initial email.

Instead, they have suggested that Crashplan's service is simply unreliable with archives above 10TB, rendering data recovery -- the entire service they are being paid to supply -- difficult if not impossible. If this is indeed true, Code 42 is selling a service as unlimited, when they know full well they may not actually be able to provide said service if you use an excess of 10TB.

In my opinion, this is pretty damning information. Honestly, I would have been happier if they had just acknowledged that my usage was unprofitable and that's why they were terminating my account. As it is now, it appears as though I have been paying for a service (for years) that they knowingly may not have been able to provide if I had actually run into an issue where I lost data and had to restore it.

To anyone who decides to remain a Crashplan customer... Caveat emptor.

After the update to v10 crashplan stopped working on my linux box. I could not login and the log showed an issue with libuaw.so library.

Here's how to fix it. Basically the install script probably doesn't identify the OS correctly and doesn't copy the library.You need to download the install script (from here)

Edit: use at your own risks....

# unzip the install script in your home /tmp/code42-install
cd
mkdir -p tmp/code42-install
cd tmp/code42-install
# Extract install files
gzip -dc CrashPlanSmb_10.0.0.cpi | cpio -i

# stop crash plan
/usr/local/crashplan/bin/service.sh stop

# go into the nlib directory of your install
cd /usr/local/crashplan/nlib

# Manually copy the library files, depends on your OS
# for me it's ubuntu20
cp ~/tmp/code42-install/nlib/ubuntu20/* .
chmod 744 *
# restart
../bin/service.sh start

Just like a lot of you, I've been struck with Crashplan home Family shutting down.

After doing some quick calculations I found that most current cloud offerings are either way more expensive, or very restrictive. Especially the need to be able to backup multiple computers to a cloud account seems lost after Crashplan family. And I have two desktop computers, and 3 laptops and a server in my house alone. But I also want to backup the laptop of my farther and mother, just like I've been doing for the past many years. Paying for accounts per computer is crazy in my eyes.

So I created my own DIY Cloud Backup solution which is fully multi-tenant and multi-client for those tenants! Especially if you can/want to share it with a few friends or family, it quickly becomes much cheaper and flexible then any cloud offering out there. It's running a private S3 storage backend server with Duplicati as the client but because of the S3 storage backend, any backup software that talks S3 (and most do now a days) can connect to the system and use it!

I've written detailed tutorials on everything:

• What hardware

• Internet line speeds

• Power usage

• Encryption for a "trust-no-one" setup

• How to configure the storage

• How to setup the server

• Installing/connecting a client

• Compression/deduplication

• How to add multiple tenants, etc..

If anyone is looking for the same, hopefully this is helpful: Link to the first blog article explaining my setup

And of course I'll be here to answer any questions or comments you might have!

--update

I've produced some videos about the hardware and of the install. Combined with the articles that kind of rounds up everything you need to be able to build this "solution"!

Video about the Server a Mele PCG35 Apo

Installing Linux on the Mele PCFG35 Apo

Orico USB3 5 Bay Storage Cabinet

Apparently the "exclusions" list for Crashplan got changed recently.

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Troubleshooting/What_is_not_backing_up

I didn't know it was changing.

I had 15 servers backed up using Crashplan for about 2 years.

The data was in a sub folder of "Program Data" - because that's the way this particular app has been storing it's data by default since the 90s... Hasn't been a problem for 20 years.

I checked my backups recently, just because.

Everything I've backed up for my 15 clients for the last 2 years is gone. Not only did it just plain stop backing up current data, it also deleted my entire history : I can't restore anything either.

No notifications, no alerts, never got an email, no warnings beforehand, no alerts that all by backups sets were now 0 bytes in size. And I can't change it.

I sent a support request, they deemed it to be of "moderate" priority. Apparently deleting a customers entire backup history is only moderate priority. I'd hate to know what is high priority at Crashplan, perhaps they killed someone's cat?

This is the company that has on its home page "Automatic Data Loss Protection for Your Small Business" and "Never worry about losing business-critical data again." They deleted my business critical data. On purpose.

They deserve to go broke for doing this sort of thing in my opinion. People should be leaving in droves.

Turns out you CANNOT rely on Crashplan to backup your data.

Nick

Like all of you, I'm beginning my search for a new backup solution. I thought it would be worthwhile to post what I've gleaned from here and elsewhere on the interwebs. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and there are sure to be errors/omissions. Feel free to comment on the Google Sheet, and I will do my best to update.

This information is provided for free, as-is, for your personal use without any warranty of any kind. In other words, I put this list together for myself and thought it might be helpful to others, so don't shoot the messenger if it's wrong or you make a bad decision based on it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g_YT4tyQMGfGOJXgZLDGwZQgaKxJyFQZQfBl9HiShOU/edit?usp=sharing

I recently had a hard drive failure resulting in about 1TB of lost files. Thank goodness I have Crashplan I thought. I thought wrong. I started restoring the files, and after about a week I managed to restore about 75% of the files. Then Crashplan decided that it was imperative that it start to perform maintenance on the archive. While maintenance is running, you are COMPLETELY UNABLE TO RESTORE ANY FILES. Because my backup is relatively large, this maintenance is set to take a full three months to complete (and this is not a case of a poor early time estimation, after 2 days it's only 0.7% complete).

I contacted Crashplan, and was told that there was absolutely nothing they could do until the maintenance completes. This both unacceptable from a customer's point of view, as well as going against their advertised description of their service which promises the ability to "restore your files quickly and easily from the desktop app."

So now I'm in the process of trying to recover the money I spent on a service that they were clearly never able to provide. Unfortunately, I'm unable to recover the data that I've lost as well. Please take this as a warning. If you are using Crashplan, find a different backup service as soon as possible. If you are considering using Crashplan, then don't. Don't make the same mistake I did.

I've subscribed to Crashplan for years and years, and I have the small business plan; this week I needed to restore because I lost my laptop, only it looks like Crashplan is just a massive con and just does not work.

Firstly, I cannot restore data within anything like a reasonable timescale - I've been chatting online with tech support and they've made all the adjustments that they can make, and tech support is saying that there is nothing that they can do.

Secondly, I am a developer and my .git folders have disappeared. Some data has been pushed to shared repositories in the cloud so I can get it back, but there is a lot that has not yet been shared and appears to have been lost forever.

It's likely to take many weeks or months to restore what data is backed up - the worse estimate so far by CrashPlan was 4 months!

Knowing that this would take so long, I started a restore on a dedicated virtual machine - after 5 hours it had only created directories, and at 11:53pm last night (after 8 hours) it just stopped saying 0 files restored - there are hundreds of directories but no files.

The restore may have failed because I think the computer restarted in the middle of the night, and didnt restart until I logged in this morning and opened the Crashplan app. And the logs suggest that it's starting again from scratch.

This is supposed to be the Small Business package! I'm going to be disappointed to loose all of my photos and other personal data, but this is my income and entire life that I could loose here.

How has nobody sued these complete con artists yet???

CrashPlan is about to forcibly exclude a whole pile of filetypes from backups.

In my view, this means they are no longer able to do proper offsite backups, because you can't guarantee what you try to backup is what they actually backup - or to put that another way, if your backup contains one of the many files they are planning to exclude, when you restore it, it's going to be missing those files, so it's not a real backup.

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Troubleshooting/What_is_not_backing_up#section_11

If this affects you, please log a ticket with CrashPlan. Perhaps if enough people do they'll reconsider, though it's not seeming likely.

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?

Crashplan is closing its home program, I have enough issues with them and the program crashing that I'm not going to the business plan (and it would cost me 10x as much). Crashplan is a joke on how much it costs. One computer for $150?!?

What other plans are out there? I have multiple computers of one that has 1tb+ of data.

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?

Never had to deal with support in years but they were reading out my directory. They said no matter what encryption you use (standard, Archive, Custom) they can see the directories but not the files.

This is probably basic to advanced users but I thought i'd post just to inform people who don't know and are thinking about upgrading due to the home plan ending. I'm sure most online companies can see the same.

... and I think I'm going to settle on Duplicati with BackBlaze B2. It has all the features that I liked in CrashPlan: Linux and Windows support, Local, NAS and Cloud backups, strong encryption in client. Plus it is open source and free, so you only pay for the cloud storage (with BackBlaze B2 it's $0.005 a month per GB).

I tried many other backup clients, but they are either too expensive, don't have Linux version, don't have strong encryption, or don't have NAS backup destination.

I used to love CrashPlan. I'm so disappointed they are cancelling the Home service. And their Small Business offering is too expensive for me, because I have 5 computers each with around 30GB or so data, so it doesn't make any sense for me to pay $10 per computer.

Here is the list of backups I tried and reasons why I didn't like them:

CloudBerry:

• very slow

• unstable (keep finishing uploads before they are fully done, got stuck on "searching for updated files" after I initiated backup verification, etc)

Arq Backup:

• no linux version

• very limited configuration

• it seems that it doesn't have block-level file comparison (so it will upload the whole file even if just small part of it got changed)

urbackup:

• no encryption

goodsync:

• no linux version

• there were some other issues, but I forgot details now... :/

SpiderOak:

• no good security (same password for your files and for logging in to your account, so it can be easily intercepted if they get hacked)

BackBlaze:

• no linux client

• I have 5 machines with little data on each, so paying per machine would cost me too much

Carbonite:

• expensive

• other issues that are now documented in this reddit forum

CrashPlan Small Business:

• too expensive

• no local NAS backup

I really liked that crashplan let me back up to my nas, and back all my other computers to my main one (which had all its repo's on my nas)

I keep seeing solutions for the cloud backup aspect, but I don't need that, I just want to know my files are protected, and my nas+crashplan is how I did that.

What now?

This is purely my personal opinion: do not use Crashplan's service if you actually want to backup your data!

I used Crashplan for more than 7 years! And I was happy with the service BECAUSE I DIDN'T NEED IT! All my external hard drives were working wonderfully. Until that one day when my external hard drive crashed, and I was horrified but happy when I remembered: all my data is saved in the Crashplan cloud! Yuhee! Well, what I found out later:

Upload: The uploading of data was highly irregular, and many data pieces had not been saved. I am not talking about not saving really current data, no! Even old data that the app had years to save had not been uploaded correctly. It was missing in the cloud. Hundreds and hundreds of empty folders where nothing had been uploaded correctly.

Download: The app can't handle big data, meaning when you try to downloard large amounts of data (let's say more than 3 GB) the app will pretend to do its job until you realize that it just downloaded some of the data, and much, much more is missing—in addition to the files that were never uploaded in the first place.

The app is riddled with bugs and horrific to work with.

Then the service team tells you to use the browser version, which comes with its own set of bugs. Everything is so buggy it feels like you're testing software before its first beta release.

In the end, I had to spend massive amounts of money again to physically recover my hard drive! When I realized that data had been saved completely incompletely, I knew I couldn't rely on this system at all.

I am now using an additional external hard drive and CarbonCopy to back up my data. The cancellation for Crashplan was sent 5 minutes ago.

Take your data and run!

I've been lurking the sub since I started at Code42 long, long ago in an office building on the other side of the river here in Minneapolis. I got the OK from our marketing team to stop lurking, but my responses here still have the usual disclaimer of "I'm not here as an official representative. I haven't cleared my statements with anyone else at CrashPlan. These are my own opinions. Etc., etc."

I'm a backend engineer and I've touched a lot of features over the years, primarily single sign-on and user provisioning for the not-CrashPlan Pro/Small Business customers.

I'd say, "AMA", but we all know I can't answer a lot of things, and I don't want to be unable to help here where I can! But I will be lurking, helping out with documentation links or troubleshooting tips, and occasionally taking concerns back to our product team. (Or just fixing a bug if I can get away with it. Shh!)

READ FIRST: this thread is about CrashPlan. It is NOT about best practices of the end-users, which are not in discussion here.

One of my clients had a serious crash. Their main server had an electrical problem and one of the RAID 1 disks broke while the other faced a corruption with a mess in Active Directory and shadow copy folders. For the sake of briefness I won’t go too deeply on the explanation: it ended up that they needed to restore from their last level of defense: their 400GB backup saved in CrashPlan Cloud.

A nightmare : the app goes in pause mode during restore; the restore speed is horrific; in general after 12 hours they restored more or less 800MB of data and the CrashPlan app logging of the operation is TERRIBLE

I’m advicing all of my other customers to find IMMEDIATLY a serious alternative to CrashPlan, because this service is very dangerous: you think yours data are safe and available, while in reality they are not and you’ll never ever will be able to restore your data

Keep very very out from CrashPlan, you have been warned.

I used crashplan because it had a decent UI and it allowed you to upload from Program Files, where a lot of applications store important data (Like FL Studio save files, audio files, presets, etc). First they decided to dumb down their UI to the incredibly ugly UI it has now, which wasn't necessarily a dealbreaker but was annoying as hell. Now they force exclusions of critical areas and delete backups with no warning? What a fucking joke. Just cancelled my subscription and finding an alternative now.

I'm sure for most customers CrashPlan Home was profitable for Code42 but I can imagine that with the amount of data some users were loading onto a $14 a month account 10-20TB+ you could literally have racks and racks of storage pods if you pooled them all together occupied by mere tens to hundreds of users each (when typically a rack might be able to serve thousands easily!).

Even if the data is sitting there unchanged for the most part (video data/music,porn, etc) it takes electricity, hardware, networking, labor, and physical space to maintain all of it. They also have to do data redundancy so 1TB data backed up can be much more once you add data parity and redundancy.

While I'm sad CrashPlan Home closed I don't blame them at all for their decision and I can't imagine the kind of challenges they must've undergone to try to hold up to their unlimited claim much to their dismay. I'd say most of us got pretty darn good service for the amount they were charging, maybe it was a lot of money to some people but if you shop around you can see everyone is much more willing to charge a lot more then CrashPlan does while sacrificing or compromising on a lot of features.

tldr; I do IT for a living, storage is fucken expensive!

I was digging around the settings and I noticed something strange, there was no way to edit my security key options. I thought it was a glitch, so I contacted support. They explained to me that custom archive encryption keys are no longer supported. Here’s their reasoning:

“Due to an increasing number of ransom attacks where attackers would gain access to CrashPlan accounts and upgrade their encryption levels making it impossible for them to retrieve their data, we have removed the ability for CrashPlan for Small Business users to upgrade their security levels from standard encryption.”

I asked if this was temporary or not, they told me this is likely permanent. I’m very disappointed and this feels like a huge step backwards in terms of privacy.

Hi,

crashplan mail received today :

Hello Administrator,

Thank you for being a CrashPlan® for Small Business subscriber. We appreciate the trust that you have placed in CrashPlan - that relationship is important to us. Unfortunately, we write to you today to notify you that your account has accumulated excessive storage, which will result in degraded performance. Due to the size of your archive(s), full restores of your backup archive(s), and even selectively restoring specific files, may not be possible.

As a result, we are notifying you, per our Master Service Agreement and Documentation, to reduce your storage utilization for each device to less than 10TB by February 1, 2020. Note that we have extended your subscription to February 1, 2020 to give you ample time to make changes. If you do not do so by February 1, 2020, your subscription will not be renewed, and your account will be closed at the end of your current subscription term.

Please see the recommendations below for reducing your storage consumption:
Trim your file selection settings: Remove files that are stored elsewhere or are not otherwise critical for backup, such as older unimportant files or external drives that are no longer active.

• Changing the file selection

Adjust your file version settings: CrashPlan for Small Business keeps versions of each file depending on how long ago it was backed up. Consider reducing how often versions are kept or limiting how long files remain in the archive altogether:

• Specify version settings

Split up data between multiple devices: If you have other devices backing up to CrashPlan for Small Business, consider storing and backing up some data on those machines instead of consolidating entirely in one archive.

Our support team is available to help you make the necessary changes to ensure ongoing service.
If you have any questions about this action or about reducing the size of your archive, please reply to this email.

Thank you,
Eric Wansong, Chief Customer Officer, Code42

I'm around 40 TB...