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Comment by rossng | Hacker News Reader

I use Crashplan, but it's a bit rubbish. Backblaze is much better if you don't need to use it on Linux.

What issues have you had with Crashplan, out of curiosity? One thing about Backblaze is that they do not keep backups of files that do not exist on your computer, and that you need to connect your computer to the internet at least once every 90 days (or was it 30?)

The desktop interface is unpleasant and clunky. The web interface is significantly worse than Backblaze, and they clearly don't care about the home product as compared to their enterprise product (which I get the impression is kept much more up to date).

I've also found it occasionally forgets my encryption key for unknown reasons and just silently stops backing up. I get an email about it after a few days, but it's a bit of a rubbish solution.

I also like the BackBlaze team - they share lots with the community and they're open about how they work. CrashPlan feels like more of an enterprisey black hole by comparison. Their blog (https://blog.code42.com/) is one of those weird things that feels more like it's being automatically generated by a Markov chain than written by a human.

On the other hand, CrashPlan does work. That's more than I can say about a lot of the solutions that I tried a few years back (looking at you, Mozy).

Crashplan requires you to connect your computer once every six months. I found this out the hard way when I got a notice that I had 5 days to back up all of my files from an old computer elsewhere before they erased them.

Just wanted to clarify this policy.

CrashPlan requires a device to connect to it's backup at least once within a 6 month period. This is to ensure the integrity of the data we're storing. Part of CrashPlan’s ability to maintain the backup health and integrity relies upon regular connection from the device. CrashPlan is able to routinely perform maintenance on the backup by comparing checksums between both device and CrashPlan Central. If you are unable to connect the device to the backup within a 6 month period, you can also perform a restore from the backup as this qualifies as recent backup activity.

What if there was corruption on the local file system, what would happen then?

Also, what happens to files that were deleted from the local file system. I was under the impression that they would remain indefinitely available to restore.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

On linux just use Backblaze B2 [0] and Duplicity [1]

  [0]: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html
  [1]: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

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