Cloud backup service, Crashplan, lost all of his data. Cloud dystopia? | Hacker News Reader

Cloud backup service, Crashplan, lost all of his data. Cloud dystopia?

jeffreydonenfeld.com

19 pointszx2c49 comments

CrashPlan is a real nightmare -- horrible almost-worse-than-nothing backup. I have two personal experiences with them.

I bought a year of CrashPlan Family service for my dad and sister. The backup service went down a couple times for DAYS and WEEKS at a time. Sounds extremely similar to this poster's experience. What the hell use is that? Eventually in their case it did start working again, but obviously going many days without backup is not really backup.

For instance: https://crashplan.zendesk.com/entries/457404

The other one I had was once when I was trying out CrashPlan for the first time. I had rsync-based backups too, and was just testing out crash plan. A hard drive failed and I tried to restore my 60-GB home directory. It took something like ELEVEN DAYS. And, it fucked up all the mod-times of all my folders. They may have fixed the mod time issue since then, though, I think.

I would never rely on CrashPlan for anything.

When I want easy-peasy backups that work perfectly, I use Arq (Mac-only). Unlike CrashPlan, it is both fast and extremely reliable.

But, that isn't an apples-to-apples comparison; since Arq (securely) backs up to Amazon S3, it costs something like a hundred times more than CrashPlan, which has flat-rate 'unlimited' storage (which is of course extremely limited by their bandwidth throttling).

I wish CrashPlan was good, but it is not. That doesn't mean cloud backup is inherently flawed, though. You would have to do a great deal of work yourself to implement backups as reliably as Arq.

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

(Not a stakeholder; just a fan.)

FYI, they don't throttle bandwidth (anymore?). I know this because I started to go with Carbonite, but they throttle bandwidth to 256k. What's worse is that it gets even slower if your backup exceeds 200GB. I have a 5 Mbps upload speed and 500 GB of data to transfer, so being capped at 256k or slower wasn't going to work for me.

Definite nightmare. And apparently I'm NOT the only one having this issue - there have been at least two other users affected, based on a posting on Crashplan's FB wall.. here's my screenshot of it.. http://jeffreydonenfeld.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/...

I was just thinking - Wouldn't it be great if there were some sort of site that allowed people to trade disk space to use the backup to a friend feature? The only problem I see with that is being a little uneasy about putting data in a stranger's hands (even with encryption). This might already exist, but if not then maybe I'll get bored and build it.

You should checkout Wuala. I've been using them for a while and they let you trade or buy space.

You used to be able to use your own drive as space for others, in exchange for more space for you "elsewhere". Do they still do that? I thought they'd killed that idea.

It'd need to be mirrored and striped over a lot of strangers, as otherwise a restore would be painful, as you'd be bottlenecked by the minimal uplink speed of the average residential Internet connection.

That plus encryption probably solves a lot of the privacy concerns, too. Seems like it should be doable.

Between people being offline, random drive failures, people leaving your service, etc., I wonder what kind of redundancy would be required. 5x? 10x? No idea.

I wonder how people would respond to the offer, "get 10GB backed up, but you have to store 50GB of other people's backups". I'm guessing that sounds pretty unfair to the average Joe (but its of course what the math requires should you want 5x redundancy).

Those are all good points. It would be something that you'd really have to stay on top of in order to ensure that your backups are happening. Bandwidth for restores would definitely be a big issue since the typical home only probably has around a 1 Mbps upload speed.

Regardless of n(eggs), n(baskets) strictly > 1.

Take the seed drive.

Find a backup backup provider.

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