I've been a happy CrashPlan user for some years. I never did a big restore, but periodically have done small restores and all worked well. I like their setup and the ability to prioritize some directories, connectivity seems fine, and in general the service has worked well. I have 6TB backed up there...certainly more than needed in one sense, but they say unlimited, so I back everything up.
But recently I learned something rather shocking.
I was traveling and wanted to grab a file from home. They tout the "access your stuff using our app or on the web" feature, so I went to do a web restore and got various errors about timeouts.
A lot of back-and-forth in tickets later, I learned the following:
- there is a "deep maintenance" that runs every 28 days
- during this maintenance, you can't do restores
- for a 6TB archive (like mine), the deep maintenance can run up to 4 days
In other words, there's a 4-day window every month where I can't do restores. If I had some sort of catastrophic data loss at the beginning of that window, this would really suck - particularly as the restore itself is likely to proceed over many days (redownloading everything), so I could be without my data for quite a while.
Kind of a bummer...so I'm thinking about other backup services. Unfortunately they all seem to offer per-GB/per-TB pricing that adds up to a ton more than I pay with CrashPlan, or they only support Windows/Mac (everything I backup lives on a central Linux file server). I could roll my own on VPSes (which would still be more significantly more than I pay with CP), though this seems like a self-maintenance headache.
(BTW, yes, I could reduce by 6TB certainly - probably only 500GB is core personal data (pictures, home video, documents, etc.) but ideally I'd back it all up...the rest are movies, music, etc. that would be tedious to replace.)
But recently I learned something rather shocking.
I was traveling and wanted to grab a file from home. They tout the "access your stuff using our app or on the web" feature, so I went to do a web restore and got various errors about timeouts.
A lot of back-and-forth in tickets later, I learned the following:
- there is a "deep maintenance" that runs every 28 days
- during this maintenance, you can't do restores
- for a 6TB archive (like mine), the deep maintenance can run up to 4 days
In other words, there's a 4-day window every month where I can't do restores. If I had some sort of catastrophic data loss at the beginning of that window, this would really suck - particularly as the restore itself is likely to proceed over many days (redownloading everything), so I could be without my data for quite a while.
Kind of a bummer...so I'm thinking about other backup services. Unfortunately they all seem to offer per-GB/per-TB pricing that adds up to a ton more than I pay with CrashPlan, or they only support Windows/Mac (everything I backup lives on a central Linux file server). I could roll my own on VPSes (which would still be more significantly more than I pay with CP), though this seems like a self-maintenance headache.
(BTW, yes, I could reduce by 6TB certainly - probably only 500GB is core personal data (pictures, home video, documents, etc.) but ideally I'd back it all up...the rest are movies, music, etc. that would be tedious to replace.)
