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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

CrashPlan. Dirt cheap for unlimited storage for generational backups for 10 machines. Whole extended family fits in one subscription.

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Tried restoring from it yet?

/r/datahoarders have a long list of horror stories about that. Admittedly, these guys operate in TBs, but the general feeling on the sub towards CrashPlan is to avoid it at all costs (no pun intended).

Yes, it has saved my behind several times.

My requirements are pretty simple: has to work well on windows + mac, has to be cloud based, have decent bandwidth, unlimited storage, unlimited retention, and has to and require no configuration of my own apart from selecting files and schedules.

I just haven't found anything with the level of polish that CrashPlan has in terms of UI and usability. To avoid having all eggs in one basket I try to keep at least a mirror of everything too, e.g. on a NAS.

I have been a DataHoarder kind of guy in the past (dabbled with my own backup scripts, etc.) but found that the chance of user error on my part is probably an order of magnitude greater than the risk of losing data any other way - and with user error there is always the risk that you also bork your backups. So I don't want any system that has any kind of complex configuration on my part.

Further, I don't want to separate the storage from the backup, simply because buying unlimited cloud storage is to expensive. I don't need fast random access storage, I need something cheap like glacier, but that quickly becomes comples. So I'm very happy to hide that complexity behind a cloud backup provider that gives unlimited retention and storage.

I just restored ~3TB from it a couple months ago. Worked very smoothly and faster than the upload process. Each TB took about a day to download vs 1.5-2 weeks to upload

I also use Crashplan. For the price it can't be beat. Plus the upload speeds are very fast when compared to someone like iDrive.

However be warned, their client is a Java application and the more files and terabytes you want to backup, the more ram it takes.

For example, I backup about 3 terabytes on a server and it takes 3+ GB of constant ram usage to do this.

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Troubleshooting/Adjus...

Yes, i wish they made a leaner client. I have a budget NAS with 128mb ram which I have to backup from a client because 128mb isn't enough.

I thought they had fixed this by now.

Please double check if CP really does backup all your files - it doesn't for me (Ubuntu 14.04, haven't checked after upgrading to 16.04 since I've cancelled my account anyway).

I suspect it's related to the huge amount of files in average js projects, eventhough i'm now excluding node_modules/ from backing up. I've also spent quite some time with CP support to debug the issue but without any result.

Nonetheless, I don't trust CP anymore to backup all my files. I've actually needed access to files in the past and wasn't able to find them.

I must admit I have only done partial restores, but it looks right size wise. I also use Windows CP exclusively so many-small-files and deep hierarchy are basically frowned upon...

If I had that problem I'd include a huge tar of everything in the file set. Or go to backblaze.

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