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Comment by ishbits | Hacker News Reader

This is unfortunate. I chose Crashplan initially due to great family pricing, but more importantly as it had a Linux client. Given I backup Linux home server, a Linux desktop and a Linux laptop this has been its killer feature for me.

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This is also what drew me to Crashplan, but I've been irritated with the service long enough that I think I'm glad they've forced my hand.

For one, their client is very bad at backing up without affecting other network services; when I'm on a video call I frequently have to pause Crashplan backups entirely or I'll have stream issues (or manually limit the upload speed to something really small that I'll inevitably forget to undo later). I've never had this issue with Dropbox for instance. The client is also written in Java so it's a resource hog; beyond annoying my desktop machine that also made it hard to install directly on a somewhat resource-limited Synology NAS device a few years ago (I eventually got the install to work but it sporadically won't start up on boot due to memory constraints).

Really, on my Linux desktop my most important files are my code, documents, pictures, and video, which are all already backed up to Dropbox. If my hard drive died it wouldn't be a big deal to do a fresh install as long as I can sync my code, documents, etc. with Dropbox. So I may just go without a full desktop backup solution.

I don't know how they're going to transition to enterprise given their trashy desktop client but good luck.

edit: in addition to Dropbox I'll probably add tarsnap to sync the important things to S3

In my experience, CrashPlan was easy throttle to prevent network issues. Backblaze I would basically turn off during the day and reenable at night because its throttling was useless.

> I don't know how they're going to transition to enterprise given their trashy desktop client but good luck.

I kinda feel that makes them perfectly suited for enterprise. I've never thought of enterprise software as having a particularly good user experience coffsharepointcoff

I'm also rather glad CrashPlan forced my hand. There were a lot of good ideas about it (the peer-to-peer features were interesting), but I really hated the Java client. And I always had to pause it's uploads if watching Netflix, because it would saturate the upload channel completely. (On a Mac here, for what it's worth.)

They've given plenty of notice though, so I'm thankful for that.

Their email to users offers a transition to the Small Business product... which appears to be the same product at $10/month/device. So this is really a pricing change, though you can enjoy a 75% discount for a year while you decide what's next.

Be careful if you rely on old versions and deleted files being backed up indefinitely. Their Home offering includes this, but it looks like Small Business does not.

edit: I got confused - Small Business likely still offers indefinite retention.

Where are you getting this from? Their feature comparison [0] lists both "keep deleted files" and "multiple file versions" as "forever"

[0] https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/business/compare/

Seemed like there is some conflicting information on the support page for restoring deleted files:

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Restoring/Retain_and_...

https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/6/Restoring/Retain_and_...

That red icon next to Small Business on the version 6 page scared me.

Hope you're right! Indefinite retention is a killer feature for me.

Same reason I was using Crashplan, now looking for suggestions for a good cross platform solution

Me too. They suggest Carbonite, but it doesn't have a Linux client.

Well, shit. I just switch da wife to Crashplan, touting its several advantages over Carbonite (which she was happy with). Now I'll have to eat crow and switch her back. :(

I used to have Carbonite for my wife's iMac. It was a little slow to backup but worked on till we actually needed to recover all data after a HD failure. Since then I couldn't dislike Carbonite more than I do. The first ten minutes of the recovery process the disclose was fast. Then it continuously slowed down. Of course customer support blamed it on our connection which was complete BS. I then started downloading the files were needed most through their web UI which was not bottlenecked on their end. However, there seemed to be done restriction on their end on how many files you can download at once. The limit seemed to be around 100 files. If you download too many you will see a spinner minutes and then download a empty tgz. It was incredibly painful and tedious. We have up on most files. The entire idea of unlimited space is obviously not viable and something gotta give. Apparently in Carbonite's case it's the download bandwidth. Should have seen this coming.

I can't dissuade against Carbonite strong enough.

We now have a NAS and back up truely important data to S3 and iCloud.

Check out spideroak.

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