CrashPlan for Small Business Review

CrashPlan decided a few years ago to focus entirely on its SMB customers with CrashPlan for Business. These customers will be served while by this provider, though they will be paying top dollar for the privilege. Read our full take on this backup service in this CrashPlan review.

By Aleksander HougenEditor
— Last Updated:
2020-09-28T07:35:29+00:00
(Editor)
$ 1000 per month for Unlimited GB

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CrashPlan abandoned its personal-user subscription plans back in 2017 to focus entirely on providing small business backup software. It offers unlimited storage with excellent security, privacy and customer support, as well as an intuitive and easy-to-use client with plenty of features.

CrashPlan Pro also offers great data transfer speeds, both when backing up and restoring files. Furthermore, the pricing structure is incredibly simple — though it is a bit expensive — and setting up your backup is as easy as it could possibly be.

The service also comes with a powerful web dashboard and a basic mobile app for remote access to all of the devices registered to your account. Keep reading our CrashPlan review to find out if it’s the right choice for your business.

However, if you’re not quite convinced by this CrashPlan review, you can check out our list of the best online backup for small business, as well as our best online backup overview article.

We’ve also done comparisons between CrashPlan Pro and other services that offer unlimited backup. To learn more about how it stacks up against the competition, you can check out our CrashPlan vs Backblaze and Carbonite vs CrashPlan comparisons.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths:

  • Unlimited backup
  • Unlimited computers
  • Backs up external drives
  • Customizable versioning
  • Retains deleted files indefinitely
  • Live chat & telephone support

Weaknesses:

  • Doesn’t backup by file type
  • No mobile app
  • No multi-threaded backups
  • No courier recovery
  • No live support on nights or weekends

Alternatives for CrashPlan for Small Business

  1. 1
    • Continuous Backup
    • Incremental Backup
    • External Drive Backup
    • NAS Backup
    • Server Backup
    Unlimited GB
    $ 1000
  2. 2
    • Continuous Backup
    • Incremental Backup
    • External Drive Backup
    • NAS Backup
    • Server Backup
    5 GB - 12.5 TB
    $ 579
  3. 3
    • Continuous Backup
    • Incremental Backup
    • External Drive Backup
    • NAS Backup
    • Server Backup
    Unlimited GB
    $ 458
    Save 24 %
  4. 4
    • Continuous Backup
    • Incremental Backup
    • External Drive Backup
    • NAS Backup
    • Server Backup
    Unlimited GB
    $ 692
    Save 16 %
  5. 5
    • Continuous Backup
    • Incremental Backup
    • External Drive Backup
    • NAS Backup
    • Server Backup
    5 TB - Unlimited GB
    $ 4999

Features

80 % – Good

Although CrashPlan is not as packed with features as some other online backup services, such as Acronis or IDrive, it still includes quite a lot of functionality. Offering unlimited storage, powerful versioning and in-depth throttling controls, CrashPlan Pro is likely to have everything your business needs from an online backup service.

The CrashPlan desktop software has support for Windows, MacOS and Linux, which means that it should work for pretty much anyone.

CrashPlan-App-Downloads

Is CrashPlan Really Unlimited?

Yes, CrashPlan offers truly unlimited storage. Whether you need to upload just a few gigabytes of data or hundreds of terabytes, CrashPlan won’t cap your storage in any way.

Although you do get unlimited storage, devices are not unlimited. Or at least, you have to pay for each device individually. These devices can be either desktop computers or servers, but nothing else. CrashPlan also supports hybrid backup, which saves you from putting all your eggs in one basket in the event of a system outage on CrashPlan’s end.

CrashPlan-Destinations

CrashPlan Pro can perform incremental, scheduled and continuous backup, which gives you plenty of choice on the timing of your data transfers. Unfortunately there’s no manual option available, but this isn’t the biggest problem because you can pause the scheduled backups indefinitely.

CrashPlan-Backup-Schedule

If you prefer to not use the desktop software, there is also a fully functioning web dashboard that lets you do everything the dedicated software does. This is also where you can manage your different users, and you can set up as many of them as you like.

CrashPlan-Users

If you need to add a lot of users at once — for example, one for everyone who works at your business — you can import a TXT file with all the information to quickly create the user profiles in bulk.

CrashPlan-Add-User

There’s unfortunately no courier service, which can come in handy for a business if it needs to restore large amounts of data or when performing its initial backup.

CrashPlan supports various forms of throttling and gives you detailed control over when the limits should kick in. This can be done on the basis of either CPU or bandwidth load, which prevents CrashPlan from taking up resources that you may need elsewhere.

CrashPlan-Throttling

When CrashPlan is uploading your files, it uses a block-level algorithm to avoid wasting resources and bandwidth reuploading parts of the file that remain unchanged. Instead, it analyzes your files and uploads only the parts that have changed from previous file versions.

Unfortunately, there are some features we would’ve liked to see that are missing. The first is image-based backups, which let you create a clone of your hard drive so that you can set up your system again exactly as it was. Furthermore, there is no way to backup NAS drives or mobile devices, though there is an iOS and Android app for mobile access to your files.

If these features are something that your small business needs, then we can recommend IDrive, which includes all of these and offers both personal and business subscriptions.

Multithreading

CrashPlan also doesn’t offer multithreading, which would probably improve data transfer speeds if it was implemented in the desktop software. However, as you’ll see in the speed section of this CrashPlan review, the software is still very fast.

There’s no way to share a file or sync data between devices, but most other online backup services can’t do this either. If these are the main features you’re looking for, we can recommend SpiderOak ONE. If you’re not sure what the distinction is, check out our cloud storage vs online backup rundown.

CrashPlan-Versioning

CrashPlan’s versioning is excellent, though, as it will retain deleted files for as long as you want, as well as an unlimited number of previous versions of changed files. You’re given a great degree of control over when to remove deleted and old versions of files, with several settings available for different lengths of time.

CrashPlan Features Overview

  • Backup

    • Backup Scheduler
    • Continuous Backup
    • Incremental Backup
    • Image-Based Backup
    • External Drive Backup
    • NAS Backup
    • Server Backup
    • Hybrid Backup
    • Mobile Device Backup
    • Unlimited Backup
    • Unlimited Devices
    • Speed Throttling
    • Block-Level File Copying
    • Multithreaded Backup
  • Restore

    • Courier Recovery Service
    • Browser Access
    • Mobile App Access
    • Versioning
    • Deleted File Retention
    • Bare-Metal Restore
  • User Management

    • Set User Roles
    • Set Business Backup Rules
    • Customizable Reporting
    • Access User Backup
    • Monitor Connected Devices
  • Security

    • Private Encryption
    • At-Rest Encryption
    • In-Transit Encryption
    • AES 256-bit Encryption Protocol
    • Two-Factor Authentication
    • Hardened Data Centers
    • Proxy Server Settings
    • HIPPA Compliant
  • Support

    • 24/7 Support
    • Live Chat Support
    • Telephone Support
    • Email Support
    • User Forum
    • Knowledgebase
  • Misc

    • File Sharing
    • Device Sync
    • 32 Free Trial

Pricing

75 % – Good

Figuring out the price of a backup service can often be quite a pain, as many providers offer several different plans and tiers, with different storage limits and features included in each one. The CrashPlan pricing structure, on the other hand, makes this very easy by offering only one type of subscription.

How Much Is CrashPlan for Small Business?

CrashPlan Pro (which is the same thing as CrashPlan for Small Business) costs $10 per device per month (unless you’re in Australia or New Zealand). This gives you unlimited storage and access to all of the features.

CrashPlan Pro
  • Price is per device Details
  • Unlimited GB Storage
1-year plan $ 10.00/ month
$120.00 billed every year

Users in Australia and New Zealand instead have to pay $16.49 Australian dollars per device per month, which — depending on the currency conversion at any given time — comes out to roughly the same price as the $10 that other international users pay.

Although this isn’t too unreasonable, it’s still quite a bit more expensive than other unlimited backup solutions, such as Backblaze or Carbonite, both of which cost only $6 per device per month. You can check out our Backblaze pricing guide if you’re interested in that service in particular.

If you want to test out the software before committing to a subscription, CrashPlan for Small Business offers a 30-day free trial for one device. There are no limitations placed on trial accounts, which means that you can get a real feel for the service before paying anything.

CrashPlan-Pricing

Although CrashPlan for Small Business certainly isn’t the cheapest unlimited backup provider out there, it does offer quite a bit more functionality than the cheaper alternatives. Its wonderfully simple pricing structure (compared to, for example, Carbonite) is also a huge bonus.

Ease of Use

95 % – Excellent

CrashPlan is incredibly easy to use, as it sports a clean and simple client and mobile app, as well as a web dashboard full of functionality that makes setting up and managing your backup to cloud storage a breeze.

In the main panel you have an overview of all your backup sets with details for each, such as the number of files included, their size, how long ago the set was uploaded and the time for the next scheduled backup.

At the top of this panel you have a dropdown menu where you can select what device you want to manage, but this is available only to the account administrator.

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Strangely, the size given for each backup set doesn’t seem to be quite accurate. For example, in the testing set we created — which has an actual size of 3.51GB — the client simultaneously states that it has a size of 3.8GB and 4GB, depending on where you look.

CrashPlan Settings

For each backup set there is a settings button and a button labelled “manage files.” By clicking on the latter, you can select or deselect the files you want included in the backup, and CrashPlan warns you that by deselecting a file, you will be deleting it from the cloud.

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In the settings for each backup set, you can decide how often the backup runs, which is either on a continuous basis or during certain days or times every week. Here you can also add file exclusions, decide how highly the set is to be prioritized and change the destination of your backup.

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Finally, this settings panel also lets you change the versioning preferences. These are extensive and allow you to decide how often you want to create a new version, which is anywhere from every 15 minutes to once per day.

Furthermore, you can decide how long you want old file versions to be retained: up to a week, after a week, after 90 days and after a year.

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This gives you a lot of control over your file versions, as well as how long you want CrashPlan Pro to wait to remove deleted files, which can be set to anything from just one day to never being deleted at all.

Aside from the options that are specific to each backup set, there is also a general settings menu located at the top-right of the main panel. Here, you can adjust various throttling settings that can be used to limit CrashPlan Pro based on either CPU or network usage.

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If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty, you can even set up different throttling rules based on whether or not you are currently using the device. This is a great option to have, as it lets you minimize usage while you’re actively using the device, preventing your backup from interfering with anything else.

You can also set up two rounds of notifications for when the device hasn’t been backed up in a certain amount of time. These notifications are then delivered to both the user and the account administrator.

CrashPlan-Notifications

Meanwhile, in the security settings, you can upgrade your encryption to private. Bear in mind that this means that you won’t be able to recover your data if you forget your password, so make sure to install one of the best password managers first, just to be safe.

The security settings is also where you can disable the password prompt when the CrashPlan application launches.

We found that if you leave the password prompt on, then the software is incredibly eager to ask for your CrashPlan login information again if you leave the application alone for more than a few minutes. Although this is great for security — especially in a small-business setting — it’s a bit of a pain to deal with.

CrashPlan-Login

By clicking on “tools” and then “history” in the toolbar, you are shown a detailed log of all the activity that has taken place on your account or device. This is especially important for small businesses because it gives the administrator the tools they need to make sure everything is being backed up properly across all of the company’s devices.

CrashPlan-History

CrashPlan Web and Mobile Apps

Besides the desktop software, CrashPlan’s web dashboard is also very well designed. This is where you can manage your devices and users, as well as all of their backup sets.

The main dashboard gives you some general usage statistics, including how much storage you’re using, graphs of your users’ restores during the past 30 days and the average storage space used per user.

CrashPlan-Web-Dashboard

On the left-hand side of the dashboard, you have the main menu that is split into two main categories: devices and users. In “users,” you can edit each user’s information, add new users, deactivate existing ones and manage your administrators. The section is split up into active and deactivated accounts, as well as invited users and administrators.

Under “devices,” you have a similar split between active and deactivated devices. When you click on a device in the list, you’re given in-depth data on the device’s backup, including usage stats, storage used, how many files are being backed up and more.

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From the device overview, you can also control its backup process. You can change all of the settings that you have in the regular desktop software, which means that you can remotely initiate a scheduled upload by switching the device to a continuous backup.

CrashPlan-Web-Device-Overview

To do this, you simply click on the settings icon in the top right of the device overview and select “edit.” This brings you to a settings menu that is essentially the same as the one in the desktop software. By entering the “backup sets” tab, you can change the frequency of the backup to “always,” which will force it to run as long as the device is connected to the internet.

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Finally, the CrashPlan mobile app is also incredibly easy to use, mostly because it’s very basic. The entire app consists of two screens. First is a list of your devices, which you can click on to see the backed up files. These can be downloaded onto your mobile device, at which point they will appear in the “downloads” screen.

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The settings menu is similarly sparse, with the only thing you can adjust being whether or not to use touch ID to sign in to your account.

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File Backup & Restoration

90 % – Excellent

Although many backup services are easy to use once you’ve got everything set up, many make it needlessly complicated or painful to set up your actual backup. This is not true for CrashPlan Pro, where the process is as streamlined as possible while still giving you plenty of control over what exactly you want to backup.

Once you’ve downloaded the client to the device that you want to backup, CrashPlan establishes a default backup set that, on Windows, includes your user folder. You can then easily create your own sets, selecting exactly what files you want uploaded, as well as whether they go to CrashPlan’s servers or a local destination.

CrashPlan-Default-Backup-Set

You can create as many backup sets as you want, which is excellent for file management because you can then set some files to backup continuously or on a daily basis, while less critical data can be uploaded less frequently or with other constraints, such as bandwidth throttling.

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For each backup set, you can decide how often you want the upload to run. Unfortunately, there is no completely manual option, but you can choose between continuous backup or setting specific days and times of the week when you want to allow backups to run. You can also specify exclusions based on file type and name, as well as what order you want the sets to be prioritized.

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While a backup is in progress, you’re given plenty of information about how it’s going. There’s a progress bar for each individual file, as well as an estimated time for completion, how many files have been uploaded and how many are in the queue.

Restoring files is just as easy. All you need to do is click the button labelled “restore files,” then select the folders you want to download and where you want them to end up. You’ll then be able to see the progress of your restore in a small dropdown located in the top right of the application.

Crashplan-Download

Unfortunately, you don’t get the same level of detail on the progress of your restore as you do with your backups. This isn’t the biggest deal, but we’d like to see a bit more detail here.

CrashPlan-Web-Restore

You can also restore a backup via the web dashboard. This is done by selecting the device you want to restore, clicking on the small button with a circular arrow on the right-hand side of the device overview and then selecting the files you want. Unfortunately, you can restore files and folders only up to 250MB using the web restore.

Speed

95 % – Excellent

Speed is a crucial factor when performing a backup to the cloud, especially if it’s your initial backup. Luckily, CrashPlan performs very well in this regard, despite the lack of multithreading support.

To test its speed, we used CrashPlan to backup and restore a 3.51GB folder filled with various kinds of files, including video, photo and data files. The tests were performed on an internet connection with a download speed of 25 Mbps and an upload speed of 30 Mbps from Oslo, Norway.

The data center we uploaded to was located in the U.S., which means that users located in North America can expect somewhat better results than what we managed to achieve.

In theory, our connection speed means that the upload should take about 15 minutes and the download about 20 minutes. More realistically, we’d like to see the upload completed in 30 to 45 minutes and the download in 40 minutes to an hour.

 First attempt:Second attempt:Average:
Upload0:37:190:39:490:38:34
Download0:19:000:21:000:20:00

As you can see, these results surpass our expectations, which is great. Considering that there’s no way to enable multithreading, we were actually quite surprised that it managed to achieve the results above, as it outperforms several other backup services that do use multiple threads, such as IDrive.

The restore, in particular, finished incredibly quickly, greatly exceeding our expectations and pushing up against the theoretical limit of our connection speed.

Security

100 % – Excellent

Security is an area where CrashPlan really knocks it out of the park. CrashPlan features strong encryption, solid data center security and two-factor authentication, which is pretty much everything you could ask for in terms of security for an online backup service.

Starting with the encryption side of things, CrashPlan uses AES 256-bit to protect your files while they’re on the company’s servers. This type of encryption is essentially unbreakable, as you can learn about from our description of encryption, unless you have several super computers and thousands of years to crack it.

CrashPlan-Security-Settings

When your files are in transit to the servers, they’re protected by the TLS protocol to ensure that you’re not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

As we mentioned earlier, CrashPlan also offers two-factor authentication. This adds an extra layer of security, which makes it incredibly hard for cybercriminals to gain access to your files and data because just cracking your password won’t be enough.

Crashplan-2FA

As for the actual servers where your files are stored, CrashPlan uses hardened data centers that are designed to stay online in the event of serious disruptions, such as power outages or natural disasters. They’re also equipped with 24/7 on-site security to protect from physical break-ins.

Is CrashPlan Safe?

Yes, CrashPlan is incredibly safe. Because it offers solid encryption, both at rest and in transit, as well as great data center security, your files are as safe as they can be on CrashPlan’s servers.

Privacy

90 % – Excellent

CrashPlan does pretty well with user privacy. Although it does collect quite a bit of metadata on its users, this is nothing out of the ordinary; basically all backup providers do the same to some extent.

The information that Code42 (the software company behind CrashPlan) collects includes the information you provide during signup, such as your name, email address and phone number.

It also retains information gathered through its website cookies, as well as usage data, such as your IP and MAC addresses, operating system, browser versions and hardware signatures.

Crashplan-Privacy-Policy

Despite reserving the right to retain this information for as long as it pleases, Code42 does make it clear that it never sells it to third parties. However, it will share that data with partners and affiliates, when necessary, as well as with official authorities if required to do so by law.

All Code42 software comply with the GDPR and HIPAA, though the latter requires private encryption to be enabled.

Besides data collection and handling, the most important privacy feature a backup service can include is private encryption. Essentially this means encrypting your data with a key that only you have access to.

CrashPlan-Web-Security-Settings

By handling encryption like this, it makes Code42 software “zero-knowledge,” meaning that the company has no way of accessing your actual files, even if it was forced to do so by law enforcement.

The biggest issue with CrashPlan’s privacy is where its data centers are located. With the exception of users in Australia and New Zealand, backups are stored on servers located in the U.S., which is infamous for its poor digital privacy laws. This has been shown time and again with laws like the Patriot Act, and intelligence programs and networks like PRISM and the Five Eyes.

That said, this isn’t as big of a deal as it could be, seeing as you can opt for managing your own encryption key, which protects your files regardless of where the data center is located geographically. If storing your data files in the U.S. is still a problem for you, there are a few backup services, such as Zoolz and Acronis, that offer alternate locations.

Support

90 % – Excellent

Because a backup service is entrusted with potentially critical data, it’s important that it provides quick and responsive customer service in case anything goes wrong.

This goes double for CrashPlan because it caters exclusively to small businesses, where data is likely to be far more critical than it is for personal users. Luckily, CrashPlan does very well here, though we would have liked to see 24/7 support.

You can contact CrashPlan’s customer service via email, chat or phone. The phone and chat options are unfortunately available only during opening hours, which are between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. CST.

We sent a couple of queries via email to test the responsiveness of CrashPlan’s customer service, and we always got a reply within two hours, which is excellent.

Crashplan-Chat

If you have only a minor technical problem, you can also consult the searchable knowledgebase, which should be enough to sort out anything simple. There’s no user forum to reach out to for support, but given the incredibly rapid email response, this doesn’t really matter all that much.

The Verdict

With that, our CrashPlan review comes to a close. All in all, it’s an excellent online backup system for small businesses, as it’s filled with relevant features and is incredibly easy to use. Pair this with top-notch security, privacy and customer support, and you’ve got something very close to the ideal choice for small businesses looking for a cloud backup solution.

There are a few things missing, though, such as hard drive cloning, mobile backups and multithreading. Although these absences might be a deal breaker for your business, if they’re not something you need, then there’s no reason to look any further than CrashPlan for your cloud backup.

However, if they are deal breakers or you’re looking for backup software for personal use, head over to our list of the best online backup services to find some alternatives to CrashPlan Pro.

What did you think of our CrashPlan review? Do you agree that it’s a well-designed service with plenty of features and great speed? Do you think that the missing features are a problem, or the price is a little too high when compared to other similar backup services? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you for reading.

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95 thoughts on “CrashPlan for Small Business”

  1. CrashPlan seems to do everything I need it to do. The ability to create multiple backup sets has been very useful to make sure my important files are backed up first. The filters for backup sets can be a bit confusing if you are trying to do something other than backing up all files with a specific extension, but there are examples on the forums to help with those instances.
    The interface quite easy to follow once you start using it. The only issue I have had with it is when I am trying to restore files backed up from another computer. When attempting to get a list of the other computer’s files it can take a really long time. The speed of the uploads seems slow to me but I have started backing up almost 50GB of pdfs on a rather slow connection. Luckily I also have my backup set to be stored on another local computer which went much faster (free version of the software allows this which is really nice).
    I am glad I went with the CrashPlan+ Family Unlimited backup because I have multiple computers that I need to backup. For a little more than twice the price of the single computer unlimited data plan, you can backup up to 10 computers!
    Overall the software is quite easy to use and for the price, definitely worth looking into.

    Reply
    1. I agree with what others have said – the service works well, software is fairly simple, and this is great… if you don’t have much to upload.

      That said, their upload speeds are atrocious. You’re lucky to get 10 megabits/second on a good day, even if you have gigabit upload speeds. Backing up a large set of files can literally take months with CrashPlan.

      Reply
      1. It speeds up a hell of a lot if you turn data-deduplication to a minimum on the advanced settings! My 7.5TB server was going to take months to do the initial backup, but that dropped to a week or so when I changed that setting! I don’t suppose Code42 would shout about that!

        Reply
        1. This was the best piece of information I have found from all the forums/help/etc!! THANKYOU!!!

          My upload speed of 10Mbps jumped to 94Mbps after minimizing data-deduplication.

          I couldn’t understand why my 100/100 fibre wasn’t delivering better speeds and assumed it was crashplan servers…

          with 3TB to upload this info just changed my life! 😉

          Reply
      2. I recently signed up for Crashplan for Small Business. It has been a terrible experience. The app was changed from Home to Small Business and was working fine. Overnight I had a different app interface and I had no idea why. I suspected it was a mistake. When I contacted customer service I was told no tech representatives were available. They assigned a ticket number and then sent a message saying I was assigned a medium priority and provided with links that didn’t answer my question. In addition, the non-tech person didn’t understand what I was asking and totally wrote up the ticket incorrectly. Then I received a message from the app saying I wasn’t backed up. Unfortunately that was after the other issues so I assumed I’d hear something back on the ticket. Over the weekend I got more and more frustrated since there isn’t any help available over the weekend. On Monday I called and again no tech people were available. My ticket was updated and then I received a rude email message telling me I just needed to read the articles they had sent the first time, that it wasn’t their job to teach me how to use the app (which isn’t what I needed to know-I can read and have 2 college degrees). I am giving up and finding an extra backup service until someone eventually has time for me (if ever).

        Reply
        1. Yup. When crashplan forced everyone to crashplan pro, they hiked the price and killed the support. I’m leaving them after (happily) giving them my money for 10 years. Not happy now!

          Reply
    2. As of 01/08/2016 my Mac has not been backed up for 60 days and tech support has been worthless. I have used CrashPlan for 3 years and have been happy until now. Despite active emails and multiple phone calls in the last 10 days, the tech support has been moronic and my request fr a refund totally ignored. When I called in today the woman said she could not hear what I was saying because the room she works in is so loud! Really? Never had that response on a tech call before. Needless to say I will not be renewing and no longer trust the company.

      Reply
    3. Crashplan has been one of the best finds for me in the last 12 months, except that since the latest update to 4.8.3 it now acts more like a virus.
      I now have 31 rules in my firewall just to get Crashplan to work, all sorts of odd ports and some of the many IP’s don’t even resolve.
      A second PC won’t backup at all even with all firewalls turned off!
      Such a huge disappointment as it had suited my needs very well until now.

      Reply
    1. Hi Ted,

      No, Crashplan does not support so called bare metal backups. So what you’d have to do first is create an image with some kind of software and then tell Crashplan to upload that. For the Mac you can use a program called SuperDuper.

      Reply
  2. I’ve been using Crashplan for a little over a month now and can’t believe how easy and reliable it is. I like that you can backup not only to external hard drives, but to Crashplan’s servers as well. They also have a very cool (and free) feature where you can keep an encrypted backup on a friend’s computer offsite if you prefer to avoid cloud services– and this method is smart enough to let you backup locally to an external drive first, then take that drive to the friend’s house and attach it to their free version of Crashplan (so you avoid having to use up bandwidth if that’s a concern).

    Their Support folks have been super helpful and friendly in answering my questions, and both the PC/Mac and mobile versions are elegantly designed and easy to comprehend. If you backup to Crashplan’s servers, you have access to those files from your mobile device, and multiple historical versions of those files as well.

    For $60/yr for unlimited storage per PC, you really can’t go wrong. Excellent software and company!

    Reply
  3. Can I access my files from another computer?

    I mean, if I travel, can I access my files from the hotel’s business center computer? Or must it be one of my computers?

    Reply
    1. Hello Jaime,
      You can most definitely access the files from any computer (as long as you remember your username, password and the encryption key, if you have one).

      If you have a smartphone, you can use the iOS or Android app to quickly download it. If you’re on one of the computers on which your CrashPlan is installed and activated – you can use the software itself to restore any file.

      Coming to your main question, you can access any file online through a browser by using the “Web Restore feature” on the CrashPlan My Account Page. On the page, you can select either individual files or whole folders (which can downloaded as a zip file) to be downloaded. The only limitation using this feature is that each individual restore cannot be more than 500MB in size. You have to select your required files/folders and click on restore; after a few moments, it will provide you with a download link that is accessible for 24 hours.

      I understand your purpose, you might want to quickly have access to your files where ever you go. The problem is – while its possible, it might not be as quick as other cloud storage services like SugarSync, DropBox or Bitcasa; or for that matter the CrashPlan mobile apps themselves!

      CrashPlan being a backup service, its main priorities are backing up and restoring files, where it definitely excels – so instant access online is not one of its strong suits. But then, its definitely possible 🙂

      Reply
      1. I’m confused about this 500MB.

        So, let’s say, you backup 1TB of stuff (if that’s even realistic with normal user upload speeds). Then your disk crashes. Do you have to restore it 500MB at a time?

        Reply
        1. No — this limit is only applied when restoring via the website. I regularly perform test restores to ensure my backups are working, and i’ve been able to restore 10’s of 100’s of GB at a time no problem.

          Reply
    2. I used crashplan pro for several years and had all my computers backed up, paid for their premium plan but 2 of my computers were put off line for technical reasons, I did not know at the time but a hard drive crashed completely. They were offline for over 6 months so crash plan deleted my information (275GB) and that’s it irrecoverable. My contract did not decrease in cost they just deleted everything. So unless you intend to use it everyday I would recommend going elsewhere. It is loke renting a storage box for 3 years coming back a year into the contract and finding that they had emptied the bow and rented it out to someone else but continued charging you because younever visited your box….

      Reply
  4. CashPlan has been struggling for a week with some of its servers at end of October 2013. The problem is still not resolved and backup are not possible.

    I am a paying user of CrashPlan with their “3 years unlimited plan”. Unfortunately (and regardless of their current technical issue) the bandwidth offered is extremely limited and while CrashPlan offers an “unlimited space” plan, it is very practically limited to small setup (looks like less than a Tb). There have been rumours of throttling but CrashPlan has always denied that fact. They might be simply using other techniques to limit the bandwidth thus they can deny the claim of throttling.

    In my personal setup, I have a backup set of currently (25 Oct 2013) 3.4Tb, which I started to backup on August 2nd at the time at 3.2Tb. CrashPlan is reporting weekly by email the progress of the backup and I have thus used it to calculate the average transfer speed each week since the backup started (in % completion, speed)

    week 1: (4%, 2 Mbps)
    week 2: (8%, 1.7Mbps)
    week 3: (11%, 1,.3Mbps)
    week 4: (15%, 1.6Mbps)
    week 5: (19%, 1.9Mbps)
    week 6: (23%, 1.8Mbps)
    week 7: (27%, 2.3Mbps)
    week 8: (31%, 1.8Mbps)
    week 9: (36%, 1.9Mbps)
    week 10: (39%, 1.4Mbps)
    week 11: (41%, 1.3Mbps)
    week 12: (44%, 0.9Mbps)

    As it can be seen, the backup started at a meagre 2Mbps (I am on optical fibre on my end so my internet connection is not the bottleneck) and it remained stable until reaching 30%, since then the throughput is consistently decreasing week after week. The last figure is of course much worse as CrashPlan was unable to backup for a number of days. Even ignoring this data point, the trend is very clear: CrashPlan might not be throttling users but they are surely using other means to reduce bandwidth, this echoes a number of other similar report.

    I’d be happy to provide the actual time series if any user or prospective user would like to have a better look. It factors for the size increase of the data set during the period.

    I have been in contact with their “Champion” in the past, providing extensive logs, but all they say is: it’s normal, everything is a-ok. So what I experience is what every CrashPlan user should expect: if your dataset is big your backup might come to a crawl…

    I have, maybe naively, put this comment on their Facebook page but it was removed. I guess they prefer to have only happy users telling about happy stories of their experience with CrashPlan. The fact is: 12 weeks ago CrashPlan was predicting my backup to end in about 4 months, 3 months later it tells me that I should expect another 6 months to complete. If other experience is right, this time is likely to continuously increase and I might never be able to complete my backup.

    Still I have paid and I will continue to monitor and to report back my experience. In the meantime I have completed a 2nd backup (my strategy being anyway in redundancy) with Amazon Glacier and the same amount of data was backed up in 3 months (it just finished).

    Bottom line: for prospective clients, be careful and think twice if you plan to backup large amount of data!

    Reply
    1. Very interesting review Christian. I am currently doing the research into an online backup solution for about 3TB of data too. I have recently installed crashplan to try out. Have you had any luck since this reveiw? Would you recommend crashplane or have you found any others that will do the job better?

      Reply
      1. I am also interested.
        What solution do you finally acquire Rowan?
        Christian, did it improve CrashPlan?

        Reply
    2. Hi Christian, thank you for your very detailed and thorough analysis. It reflects my own experience rather precisely. How do you get Crashplan to report weekly? It’s taken almost 4 months so far to (not) back up my 3TB; still has a week to go. I’m also on fibre with no throttling – I upgraded to a very expensive unlimited, unthrottled un-everything(!) package to get this data up there – but although it has the occasional little spurt (after a change a setting or location), it soon slows to a crawl. I agree with you, Crashplan may not be throttling, but they’re certainly managing to slow it down somehow. I’d like to know what it’s like for big businesses; I’m told Apple and Adobe use them, and I doubt very much they’re not putting up with these slow speeds. Very disappointing indeed.

      Reply
    1. Hi Vic,

      You can simply select your external hard drive in Crashplan’s backup client. Of course, it needs to be connected when you want to transfer files to the Crashplan cloud. Hope that helps.

      Reply
  5. I’m looking into getting a Synology DS1513 to backup 5 computers at work, setup data pool sharing for them, and something like a dropbox folder. My only fear is that if the Synology DS1513+ malfunctions, I’m going to be in trouble. Is there a way to use crash plan to do the following

    1. Back up the entire Synology DS1513+ so that I can restore it in case it gets stolen or it breaks and I have to get another one.

    2. Someone might delete a file from the synology shared folder, can crash plan be used to restore any given file without having to restore the entire synology?

    Thanks in advance for your comments 🙂

    Reply
    1. Hi Native,

      I use a Synology myself and until it hasn’t failed me. Yet sometimes it’s kinda slow. In theory you can do what you have described above. Crashplan allows backing up NAS devices as long as they are mounted. You can specify the file retention policy in the Crashplan client. So if a file gets deleted for how long Crashplan will retain it.

      Hope that helps.

      Reply
  6. Their upload and download speed are very bad. Maximum upload speed 2 mbps, download speed 4 mbps…

    Reply
  7. CrashPlan has failed me, big time! I have been paying for the unlimited service, and with a little help from the support staff, set up was relatively easy. However, even though I continued to get emails telling me I was 100% backed up, I was not. I found out the hard way.
    My hard drive crashed and when I went to recover my data, there were random folders and files missing. When I went to them, after 3 weeks of back and forth, they basically said “Oops, our system failed because you have so much data. You should have got warning emails (I didn’t) We’ll refund you for the last year.” that was it!

    *Still waiting for a refund, and they just charged me for this month!

    Reply
  8. Does Crashplan delete your backed up files from an external hard drive from the cloud if it is disconnected?

    Reply
    1. Hi,
      Crashplan never deletes your files. Just make sure to set it right in the preferences to “Never”, so it really won’t distinguish between deleted files or disconnected hard drives.

      Reply
      1. CrashPlan deleted all my files without even asking me, even though I had an active CrashPlan subscription (2 years) at the time they deleted all my files. They said they had emailed me several emails – well, yeah, all the time. But none of those emails said anything other than “0” (zero) activity had occurred. I am extremely disappointed with this service. They would not even try to work with me to deal with the change in Internet services in CA that I experienced after moving.

        Reply
  9. Had a subscription to CrashPlan and performed the initial back-up and scheduled subsequent back-ups at regular intervals. When I went to restore them after my hard drive failed last month, CrashPlan claimed I had never backed up my files. My guess is their system had a hiccup and lost my data but since I didn’t screen cap the process, and I move my emails to my hard drive after I open them, I have no proof. So my suggestion is go with someone else if its data you really can’t afford to lose.

    Reply
  10. In spite of the fact that I get e-mails at frequent intervals assuring me that Crash plan has backed up my files, I was very disappointed to find when I tried to access my data that nothing had been backed up. Further, nothing had been backed up for more than a year and what was backed up was all the nonessential files. None of my actual data had been backed up. Was this a glithch in a system that normally operates well? Or an example of a serious flaw. I was saved, however!! It turned out I had engaged the parental control function of my computer which created two accounts. The new account was empty, but I had not actually lost my data. It was easily accessed with my parental control password. I panicked for a good week before I figured this out. This possiblilty never occurred to Crash Plan tech support. They were very “Oh, well” about the fact that they had only backed up a small portion of my total files. And they had no explanation of why this occurred. I will give another try, but will constantly check out if my data is really available and not take it for granted.

    Reply
  11. Crashplan is fundamentally flawed as a cloud backup solution. In the advent of a computer crash, you are just as likely to lose all your data as be able to recover it with crash plan. It is sad really, because for the first 15 days of testing it looked so good. Then I read the amazon.com reviews and decided to see just how good it is…

    Here is a simple test you can perform.
    1. Backup lots of data. Say a couple of hundred gigs. Make sure it all shows up for the cloud restore.
    2. Now delete a 32 GB folder on your disk. Let crashplan run for a few days. You should see the folder you deleted on disk is still available for restore.
    3. Now uninstall crashplan. (You don’t have to purge the AppData for this test, but if crashplan fixes this bug, that would be my next test.)
    4. Reboot and then reinstall crashplan. At first you will probably see all your data available for restore. Soon though everything will disappear as crashplan syncs. Do not worry it will reappear. You may even have the opportunity to backup some more data.
    5. Now leave everything running and go to bed. When you get up in the morning, your restores will just be empty folder. Again don’t worry, your storage on the server has not changed.
    6. Run the backups. The backups will run very quickly, as they only need to relink to the data on the server, not re-upload everything…
    7. Walla, everything is available for restore, or is it? Look for the 32 GB folder you deleted a few days ago… It will be missing.

    So even on a simple reinstall, crashplan can only restore files you already have, unless you do the sequence of operations just right.

    There are many more failure modes. The basic problem is crashplan will automatically delete items that are not selected for backup from your restore. If you don’t have the files, in a recovery scenario they will be deleted. Your only hope to restore is start the restore before crashplan decides to delete the files, and hope they don’t get deleted before your restore is complete…

    Now, it turns out you won’t have this problem if you completely replace your PC, provided you don’t make the mistake of pressing the adopt button before the restore is complete. But that does mean if you have a large amount of data, you can’t begin backing up again until your restore is complete. For an 8TB drive, that might take over a year…

    Reply
    1. Way to fix this flaw is fairly obvious. They want the autodelete to limit excessive unneeded storage, so they clearly are not going to remove that feature…

      However, instead of instantly deleting a folder or file when it is detected as deselected add it to a pending to delete list. The user can then have a reasonable period, say 30 days, to remove the folder or file from the list before it is actually deleted. Then crashplan can still delete unneeded data from their server, but not cause users to lose all their data when attempting to restore.

      I see reports on this type issue as far back as 2010. Code42 knows this is a problem exists, but is either incapable, or unwilling to implement a solution.

      Reply
    2. I think that this happens if you adopt the old computer. If you actually need to restore old data in this way, do NOT adopt the computer. Let it think it is a new computer, and then restore.

      I had a computer that died. The drive was encrypted with Bitlocker, and for some reason other computers will not recognize the drive at all. So I would have lost a terabyte of data, but I recovered it all by restoring from CrashPlan. I did this without ever adopting the old computer. Once I was done, I adopted the old computer with a new laptop, and pretty much immediately the old stuff disappeared.

      It should definitely not work this way, and code42 should fix this as soon as possible, but as long as you avoid adopting you can recover your old files.

      Reply
    3. This is shockingly bad. If your data is stored off your computer (e.g. on extremal hard disks) and you change computers whether due to a computer fault or an upgrade, it’s a nightmare; if you ‘adopt’ the new computer IT DELETES ALL THE DATA YOU’VE BACKED UP PREVIOUSLY AND STARTS A WHOLE NEW BACKUP!!

      Reply
      1. Well its not true. Make sure that during adopt new computer, your previous file structure in intact in the new PC. I did this when I upgraded my old PC to newer one. The new PC contained the exact replica of old PC data and during adopt no folder/file was deleted.

        Please follow a proper backup policy. Crashplan should be your last resort to restore files. Try to keep at least one onsite backup file of your primary data and update it according to your needs (weekly/monthly).

        Reply
  12. I don’t really feel like this is 5 star, but after tech-supports excellent responses, I feel like my previous review was too harsh. So I am giving 5 stars in the categories I would like to raise in my previous review.

    Reply
    1. OK this should raise it back to the right average. Basically what I learned my uninstall/reinstall test showed me is crashplan’s installer is badly broken. It leads to corrupt cache files and such. In the end that is a horribly bad problem, in that users are of course going to trying and fix those things themselves. They are just as likely to accidentally erase all there data as restore it in their attempts. Hence the really bad reviews on amazon.com of people losing data.

      However, if one happens to contact technical support first, they can walk you through the steps to fix things and avoid this happening. So the software, I’m still rating as 3 stars. Not the best, not the worse. It can do the right thing, but it takes some manual intervention… In my scenario no data was lost, because I was wise enough not to mess around with settings I already knew caused data loss from my previous experiments. Other people who are more trusting and don’t carefully test their software, can and probably do lose data.

      I will probably to a full system replacement test next. I have an old laptop, and I can pretend like that is a new computer to replace a dead one. The think I keep in mind is I don’t expect 100% reliability from crashplan. It is part of a multi-backup strategy. I have my local backups which normally is all I need. If those have a 95% reliability, and crashplan has a 95% reliability, then I’ll have a 99.75% chance of recovering my data.

      What has me hesitant now about buying this product, is I know the current set of bugs I’ve uncovered and how to work around those. However, by the time I need to restore, it will probably be a new version of the software. If I hit similar, but different issues then, I might only have a 50% chance of data recovery.

      Reply
  13. I figured I’d just keep this factual. I paid the $60.00 for a single user license. I downloaded the software onto my computer. It wouldn’t even load. I have never had this problem before. I then called customer service and waited for 15 minutes before someone answered the phone. The technical customer service representative told me they would have to get a technician. No technicians were available and I was told to fill out a ticket. I had literally purchased the software not more than 30 minutes ago. After realizing that I was going to have to fill out a ticket for a piece of software that had been purchased not more than 30 minutes ago I asked the representative to cancel my subscription. He was very nice about it. We will see if I actually get my $60.00 back. I’ll update this review when I actually get my money refunded. In the meantime, be prepared to spend a significant of your time getting this to work. I would download the free trial. If it does not install easily then simply move on and look at something else such as Dropbox. I have never had any issues with Dropbox the entire time I have used it. Best of luck to the company, but my recommendation is to be wary of purchasing this product.

    Reply
  14. I’ve been using CrashPlan for about three years now. No real problem with it. I’ve never needed to restore more than one or two files at a time and that went smoothly.

    Reply
  15. I’ve been using Crashplan for a while now and it appeared to be working OK-ish. A little slow but I have 1.7Tb data to back up on my main Mac.

    However, about a week ago, my little menubar icon was grey, rather than the normal green (meaning its working). Grey isn’t good. I also started getting emails from Crashplan stating nothing had been backed up for 2 days, 3 days, 4 …

    Opened a support request with Code42/Crashplan. They got back with an email suggesting a fix AND CLOSED THE TICKET. Without any consultation with me. Subsequent updates from me, saying I’d tried their fix and it hadn’t worked, have gone completely unanswered. Nothing. Meanwhile its now day 8 without ANY backup from Crashplan. Although I do have a red icon now and a yellow one before that but no green = no backup.

    One further point that isn’t particularly clear, Crashplan will NOT EVER backup system files. In other words, no OS files are backed up. If you ever need to restore a whole machine you’ll have to get the OS installed first THEN restore the rest from Crashplan.

    Reply
    1. “You wil have to reinstall the os first” lol.. yeah how else is that gong to work? How will you run crashplan without an os? If you need an image of your harddisk, just make one and back it up with crashplan.

      Reply
  16. Very disappointed with telephone support. Telephone support is only available Monday – Friday 9 to 5 pm. Therefore, if you need telephone support you have to take time off from work.

    So you leave work early and try to call. You wait get put on an endless hold loop that every 20 seconds reminds you that you can get help by submitting your question through email. Problem with that is sometimes you really need to talk with someone versus get a canned email response to a typical problem there customers experience.

    The first time I left work waited 35 minutes for someone to answer the phone and I was told that no one was available from tech support and they would call me back the next day. I told them I would leave work early please call me after 4pm local time. I never received a call.

    Late the next day, I received an email telling me that they don’t schedule calls because they can’t guarantee someone will be able to call at a certain time.

    I called again a couple of days later, and was put on the endless hold loop again. It took 20 minutes before someone picked up and told me that they would connect me to tech support. Put on hold for tech support person, sat on hold loop for 15 minutes and then they hung up on me.

    If my hard drive hadn’t have crashed, and I didn’t need the information I have been paying them to hold on to, I would leave them in a second.

    Reply
  17. Pretty bad app all around. The interface is super non-intuitive, you have to manually mount NAS/SAN storage, doesn’t support multiple disks/locations… This is basically just a very cheap rsync UI wrapper that any newbie with some UI programming knowledge can write. All the “good” options to backup aren’t supported and they clearly tell you not to contact them about it.

    May be okay for computer neophytes, but anyone with an advanced understanding of backups will dislike this with a passion.

    Their support is non-existent. Wait 2 weeks to get a response to a simple question. This is horrible by any standards. Imagine if you have a problem…

    They also refuse to post any negative reviews on their own website, which means they willfully withhold information to make their product appear good to visitors. If it weren’t free, it’d be a scam.

    0/5. Use better alternatives.

    Reply
  18. Having spent some time reviewing personal/family backup products I have come to the conclusion that what we are seeing in the market is fairly standard for the way IT is commoditising itself. CrashPlan offer what appears to be the best mix of cost and functionality at the moment. However, they appear to be flying very close to the wire on the customer service front. Unfortunately, the race to the bottom on product cost is often reflected in a race to the bottom on customer service costs. As this market matures further I am hoping that, as the functionality offered by the other operators in the space improves, it will force Code42 to up their game on their pretty woeful customer service.

    Reply
  19. I have NEVER experienced such AWFUL “customer support” from any company, anywhere!

    I cannot condemn CRASHPLAN in strong enough terms!!! They are almost gleeful about their indifference to your needs as a user.

    When a user calls AND emails and makes it clear that they have A REAL CRISIS and that they are going to lose ALL THEIR DATA if they don’t have someone get back to them ASAP—and even after that you’re told “Sorry, no one comes in until 9 AM Central Time on Monday morning, but I promise you we’ll put you at the top of the line and call you The Very Minute the tech guys get in!” and THEN you never hear from them…it can make one livid with rage!

    THEN, to make matters worse, I finally called them back after being told they’d “definitely get to me” to find out that THEY GO HOME EVERY DAY—both the chat and phone people—AT 3:00 PM PACIFIC TIME!!!

    I am letting everyone KNOW not to use Crashplan; who even knows if they are REALLY backing up anyone’s data based on their horrible service and broken promises! BUT you’d REALLY be insane to sign up with them if you live on the West Coast, as I do!

    I cannot express how much disgust I am feeling for CrashPlan. I implore everyone to stay away from this incredibly BAD company!!!

    Reply
  20. CrashPlan is more a crash than a plan. The initial backup takes 1.5 Years for 5.3 TB. That’s much too long. My network is 3MB fiber to the internet, so no excuse there.
    I would not recommend this service.

    Reply
  21. I recently subscribed to backup package, I am happy but one thing that I don’t like is its App very much old fashioned with very less facilities. Its structure is just like backing up on a hard drive click on the ‘Restore’ just a tree list not giving any options to list files & folders in a nice & different formats. Its download facility either a single or multiple files is way out of fashion. It doesn’t matter which package you subscribe but app must be up to the standard for all users. Yes, just like others you can add couple of £s extra to let someone down load a better app which can facilitate a user in a better way do I not know once app designed it stays there for ever but can be improved as time passes. There should be a download tab and once clicked, let you choose you the place where to save that download on your computer. Just like others, there is no sync folder where someone can temporarily add files to down load from any other computer through login. Well, it is not the money that counts but app layout and highlights, good but not that good enough to enjoy that is my findings.

    Reply
  22. June 11, 2016: Thanks for the review. Despite some problems reported by commentators, I’m going to try Crashplan (terrible name! – where were the marketing people?) My heavy-duty archives (pix, movies, music) are already clear-copied to disks and stored offsite. All I need is continuous backup of current work in case my house is robbed or my computer blows up. That’s less than 100 gigs in fewer than 50k files. I don’t expect useful tech support from any software company anymore, so that’s not an issue. The price is good, and if it works at least as well as Carbonite (which I am not renewing), I’ll be happy. I will do test backups and restores on the trial version before I sign up and pay.

    Reply
  23. Hi there,

    I have multiple external hard drives (more than a dozen) which i would like to backup in a cloud system. Do i have to have them ALL plugged in at all times in order to have a back up or can i simply upload one HD after another and only plug them into my system if i’ve modified that HD?

    The external hard drives are only backups of older projects and i don’t really need to access them on a regular basis. Its more in case a customer requires them in the future. In this case i couldn’t just plug in the HD, upload it’s content, and move on to another HD?

    Reply
  24. A very interesting feature I’ve not seen with other similar apps is to backup from different machines and this includes a virtual machine!
    CrashPlan runs also on Linux, so you can install CrashPlan inside a VM (eg. VmWare), add the paths you need to backup (eg. system settings, PHP settings, server settings etc) and select as a target the host computers name which is displayed as a target computer).
    Now you can backup the files from your Linux running inside the VM to the host.
    This saves a lot space because it doesn’t need to backup the complete virtual disks and the same time the files are also available on the host which can be sometimes very useful. Great!

    The idea of this feature is to backup different computers in the same network to a dedicated backup computer/server without the needs to work with network path mappings or virtual networks drives etc. The data is directly transported between the different CrashPlan installations.
    This works also with NAS in both directions because most/all NAS servers running Linux and so CrashPlan is supported.

    There is a lot good stuff with CrashPlan but also some cons:
    – a file from the archive cannot be directly opened/viewed it must at first restored

    – CrashPlan is working with a unique id which will be used as the folder name where the backup is stored. After a re-installation of CrashPlan this id was changed, so CrashPlan creates a new folder with a different id.. to tell CrashPlan that this are the same archives this old folder must be opened and CrashPlan is chaining this both folders… you get the picture. This ID thing is IMO a bad idea and makes things more complicated

    Performance is ok, also the upload to the cloud. Because of the used compression the values are often not the real values and higher but the lowest upload speed was near my real available upload speed.
    The backup speed can be very different because if the app is running in the background it’s only using some percent of the CPU.. this settings can be changed.. if not, the default CPU usage is set very low so the backup needs a lot longer than expected.

    Reply
  25. I’ve had a terrible experience with CrashPlan. In May 2016, all of a sudden and for no apparent reason the app could not connect with the server. Support (by email) instructed me to uninstall and reinstall. Could not uninstall following any of CrashPlan’s uninstall methods because Mac permissions would not allow it (“permission denied” error message). Support told me they could not help, that I had to contact Apple. Apple could not figure out how to uninstall it, either. Months went by with no backup, then in October I get a message from CrashPlan saying I had to backup soon or else my data would be deleted from the server, as they require a backup at least once every six months. Well, the nerve! Here I’ve been paying for a service that does not work for 5 months and I receive a message like this. Finally, back to the challenge of how to remove CrashPlan from my computer once and for all. After hours and even days of trying, was only able to do it via Terminal, following advice from Larry Aasen on http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/121623/how-do-i-remove-crashplan-from-my-mac. DO NOT RECOMMEND

    Reply
  26. I am a long-time Acronis TrueImage, EASEUS To-Do, Mozy, and Windows OS backup user. I back up my home PCs on a local drive. While CrashPlan works Ok, I find the interface confusing. I learned by trial and error that the scheduled backup times should be taken literally. It will start backing up at the start time and stop at the finish time – whether it has finished backing up all the files are not. Initially, I thought that it would start a backup sometime during the start and stop window and keep going until it finished – even past the stop time. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but they need to make this more obvious.

    Also, I use local computers for backup. Preventing CrashPlan from uploading to the cloud is VERY frustrating. But, lo and behold, buried under the “enable backup sets” button is the place where online backups can be disabled. I’m sure the marketing department determined the location of this feature, because it took some digging to find.

    CrashPlan will not back up an image of a client, so complete system recovery is not available. It’s not the end of the world, but saving backup images saves a lot of time when restoring a failed computer, not just a few files.

    Finally, there is no backup search feature. If you are looking for that one folder that you accidentally deleted last week, you must manually dig for it – a royal pain when you have terabytes of backed up photos, documents, etc.

    All in all, if I just installed Crashplan and let it go, it would work fine for most purposes. However, CrashPlan their cloud storage, which, admittedly, is very reasonably priced. (I thank Crashplan for letting people like me back up to local systems for free.) I would rank it number one among the backup software that I have used recently, if CrashPlan had an option to save drive images, add search, and clean up the user interface.

    Reply
  27. I had a serious problem with CrashPlan recently when an external drive suddenly failed. Restoration from CrashPlan Central (their cloud) was easy, but the last two months of data wasn’t there. I had not allocated enough memory, and all backups for the last two months had failed with no warning—all their email notices said 90% to 100% complete. I increased the memory allocation, but the lost data could not be recovered (though I was able to rebuild most of it). I would give CrashPlan 4 stars for performance, 2 for the user interface, average 3.

    Reply
  28. Hello Mauricio/everybody, thanks for sharing this information online. Indeed; very useful.

    I contacted Crashplan with some question about the “Individual” unlimited” plan, for one computer (US$59,99), but had no answers yet.
    Maybe you can help me:

    1. Can I subscribe being in Portugal (Europe)? Even expecting slow speeds?
    (maybe this sound strange but some unlimited services work only in the US)

    2. I´ve “Work done” kind of files (Will not edit those anymore) stored in external hard drives that I just want to backup online. If I delete those files from my hard drive (internal or external to the Mac); my uploaded stored files remain in the cloud to download one day? Or its a “mirror” process that always need the original files and my hard drives connected to my Mac from time to time?

    3. I´ve other “Work-in-progress” kind of files from projects I´m working on. The sync and versioning features are available in Crashplan? Or I have to close the projects first and backup to the cloud?

    4. Is there any limit of file sizes for upload or download?
    I had read something like this: “File Type Restrictions? No, but restoration over 250 MB via desktop only”; that I didn´t understand. Is this outdated information or there´s some limitations downloading our files?

    5. I´m using a Mac OS system with the usual Desktop Publishing, Photography, Video, Vectorial, programs and file formats. Any known file format retrictions using CrashPlan?

    6. To download a file or folder is easy and direct as to upload without the need for a unzip app or other time consuming processes?

    Sorry for so many questions.
    Thanks in Advance for all your help and opinions.
    Best regards.

    Reply
    1. 1. Yes, European countries can subscribe too. Speed isn’t necessarily slower, but it’s not fast to begin with. Don’t expect more than 300 KByte/s (2400 KBit/s).

      2. No longer existing files will be kept until the next pruning occurs (~30 days). It’s not supposed to archive all your files, but back them up them from the source. So basically: if you don’t restore lost files, they will be lost permanently sooner or later.

      3. Yes, all CrashPlan plans offer file versioning. And no, files will be uploaded in the background automatically. No need to take care of that on your own.

      4. I didn’t encounter any yet (my biggest was about 8 GB). It’s not possible to backup system files (C:/Windows/) and programs (C:/Program Files/). You can restore any file size, but the web(!) version (if you download a backup file using your browser) restricts the maximum file size. You need to use the desktop client (the native Java client) to restore bigger files or chunks of data.

      5. I’m not a Mac user, but other than system files and programs, there’s probably no limit.

      6. Yes. You can either restore to the original location or in a separate directory of your choice. You can also chose which version to restore, if there are more than one.

      Reply
  29. Check out Cloudberry.
    i’m not connected with them, other than being a customer for 3 years. Main con is that you have to learn a few things about S3 or Azure etc because Cloudberry uses the cloud of your choice for storage. Cloudberry is reasonable one time fee. S3 costs me a bout 25$/month for about 1tb of storage. Not ‘free” but much cheaper than the easy to use Barracuda. I also started using CB’s Office 365 cloud backup. Much cheaper than competion and fine for my needs except it doesnt back up “exchange public folders” in office 365.

    Reply
  30. Have tested Crashplan for almost a month now. I get an upload speed around 20-25MBit/s (My maximum upload speed is in theory 40MBit/s but “Speedtest” usually states around 30MBit/s). Hence, a really good upload speed which is nice given that I have 1.8TByte of data to backup, all of it being on an external USB hard drive. It has worked fine so far. I had a few questions regarding disconnecting and reconnecting my USB hard drive and e-mailed support. Got a response the next day with very helpful answers. So far a winner for me.

    Reply
    1. I’m curious about your questions and their responses regarding disconnecting an external hard drive. Will they retain data if the drive remains disconnected for an extended period?

      Reply
  31. The one thing that I am most interested in, I am not seeing listed anywhere on this page (but I read it somewhere else)

    If I delete a file from my HDD that I have backed up with crashplan, will that file be deleted from crashplan in 30 days, or will it remain indefinitely? 99.99999% of cloud backups will “mirror” your hard drive every 30 days and will delete files that you delete from your computer. Im looking for true cloud “storage” where I can free up some space on my local storage.

    Reply
  32. Does your review reflect that CrashPlan discontinued it Restore to Door service?

    Which cloud backup service is best in case of a hard drive catastrophic failure and need to restore +600GB of files+?

    Which cloud backup service has the biggest file size limit?

    Reply
  33. I think CrashPlan rather awful & a waste of money. CrashPlan cheerfully charged me an annual subscription of 60 dollars for two years but when I needed it, nothing was there. My computer’s hard drive folded and I looked quickly to what CrashPlan had. Having first turned the computer off for 24 hours CrashPlan had only 544 retrievable of 223 GB and those files were silly pieces of old dll’s. Gosh, that was such great news! I have a cloud drive myself & 2nd computer basically running in parallel so managed but what a complete waste of money and “imaginary back up” on my part. Carbonite had been even better than this though not a great solution. I find CrashPlan mostly a scam but am glad it works for some. I was appalled by the joke of support which simply sent back surveys “How Did We Do?” without ever answering the original query for help. Chat would fold, calls told me: “Maybe that’s in The Pro FAQ?” and then vansih. Also, to answer an earlier query: if you take out a file from your HDD, in addition to all woes, yes CrashPlan removes it from the nest. For me, it simply tossed the whole nest I suppose when it couldn’t read it. Sort of like paying for fire hazard insurance and then having it come and carefully burn all the house twice. NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART

    Reply
  34. CrashPlan is basically worthless. The support is nearly non-existent. I just had a crash and the files recovered were mostly years old. It does NOT recover Adobe files such as InDesign. Every jpg my business has just vanished. They have basically devastated us. I would NEVER suggest anyone use this service. Dropbox is probably the best answer.

    The reply I got from support after telling him our business was trashed was….. “Good luck”

    Stay away from these guys!

    Reply
  35. Over the years I’ve tried to use CrashPlan. Each time I sign up for their free 30-day trial and start a backup. NEVER does it finish within the 30 days. The up-load speed is so S-L-O-W that I’d never have a full backup, not even after uploading 24×7 for a full month.

    I have a fiber optic 100Mb/100Mb connection and I could not even use 1% of the bandwidth I have

    Reply
  36. I have been a happy CP Home user for a long time, and at $5/month for unlimited backup, who wouldn’t be? So… today I got this email from them announcing that they are closing down CP ‘Home’, claiming that their focus is now going to be on business accounts only – which is such obvious corporate double-speak for “we are raising our prices” that it beggars belief they would consider their customers to be so stupid we couldn’t see right through it.

    The upshot of it is:
    Current CP ‘Home’ customers will be migrated to a CP ‘Business’ account which, instead of costing $5/month, with now cost $10/month!

    You will be limited to 5TB per device – no exceptions – so if you currently have more than 5TB backed up – it will be deleted!

    They are at least so very wonderfully kindly offering a ‘special price’ for the first 12 months, how generous! In other words, the price won’t go up for 12 months, but you will still be limited to 5TB.

    There is absolutely no business case for this “focussing on our business customers” b/s, because you don’t even need to be a business to go on the new plan! It’s just thinly veiled corporate weasel words for “let’s make them pay double!”

    Oh and by the way – I only just found out today that their pro-rata refund offer has gone by the board – that used to be one of their great selling points – pay for a year up front, but if you cancel, they offered a pro-rata refund. Quite generous, yes – but right when I might have wanted to avail myself of it, apparently it no longer exists. Gee, thanks guys!

    Reply
    1. This is incorrect.

      I was transitioned from Home to Small Business a couple of days ago. I have 14TB with CrashPlan.

      It was not deleted and I have communication from their support that I am grandfathered in. Perhaps this is the case for new users but not current ones.

      Reply
  37. Jeff’s right. I just got mail from crashplan that my personal plan cannot be extended. They advise users of personal plans ti switch to Carbonite.

    I am using Crashplan for about three months now. The contents of my internal HD (ca. 200 GB) have been backuped in about 4 weeks. To backup the files from my NAS seems to be working in theory only. Calculated time to complete is always around 3.5 month. I think the backup of larges files is not done cleverly- seems to restart everytime it wasn’t completed.

    Reply
  38. I would highly recommend NOT using Crashplan. What they don’t tell you about is “archive maintenance”. This is carried out to correct any errors in their copy against the sources and prune old versions that are no longer needed. First up there shouldn’t be any errors in their copy and if my PC goes down and there are errors in their copy that is no useless. Second once your archive enters the queue you cannot backup or restore. This took 3 days for my test backup of less than 1MB before I gave up and stopped the test. Support said they could not take it out of the queue and it was held up by others going through maintenance. Mine was next in line and wouldn’t take long. 48 hours later still not available. If you want the illusion of backup then this product is good, but if you actually want to backup your files regularly and be able to restore them when your PC goes down then do NOT use Crashplan.

    Reply
  39. These jokers are a lawsuit waiting to happen. They have lost countless amounts of user data. Have bizarre retention policies…and are essentially going out of business the slow way. First by alienating their home consumers by closing Crashplan for Home, then next…bad business practices for their other “products”.

    Reply
  40. Software sucks and can stop backing up at any time. Lost all my data on two computers due to their “back up” policy. Stopped using their services and am going somewhere that actually works.

    Reply
  41. Used Crashplan for Home for about a year before switching to Small Business when the Home version was discontinued.

    Crashplan USED to be reliable. Then, as someone else said, they kept changing the interface, and suddenly it just stopped working. Currently, I am in the middle of a 3 day (so far) struggle just to log into my account. I can no longer log into my account, I can’t change my password, I can’t back up my data or retrieve it if I wanted to (over a week now) and they can’t tell me why. They keep sending me password reset forms that don’t work, and then when I said I simply wanted to cancel the service, first they told me to send an email stating I wanted to cancel and what to do with my backups, but then later when I did so, stated that I must log into my account and cancel it myself– which I can’t do, of course.

    So here we are on day three of this nonsense, and I still can’t back up, still can’t restore if I needed to, still can’t log in, still can’t change my password (who knows why or how it got changed to begin with!), still getting emails telling me my system isn’t being backed up, and still getting no real answers from their incompetent tech support team.

    My advice? Look elsewhere for a backup solution. Crashplan used to be good, but not any more.

    Reply
  42. I am beginning to agree with everybody else here. I used it for a few years and had over 9TB backed up. Then, they changed over their plans and I had to now get CP for Small Business. Because I had over 5TB, I had to begin my backup again, from scratch. 5 months later and I was at 6TB backed up as of yesterday. Then, I restarted my machine and this completely new version – something I was given NO warning or notice about – started to run. Not only did I spend hours trying to customize it and read the documentation, but it would not let me do much, even AFTER I had signed in on their web-based console. On top of that, after running all night, it now says that I only have a few hundred GBs backed up. I am waiting to hear from their tech support, and I’m willing to give them a chance to remedy this, but I’m also going to be looking for another solution going forward.

    Reply
  43. Do not go near this platform, it is a con. I was paying Crashplan for several years to back up my data, but then received an email telling me they will delete all of my data unless I upgrade to a more expensive plan. This is due to discontinuing the plan I was on apparently.
    Forced to upgrade I did so, only to find the new plan and application, do not work on OS X.
    After taking more money from me, Crashplan deleted all of my backups and

    Reply
  44. Keep away from this rip off. The system does not work and once you are signed up to them, they threaten to delete your backups, unless you to upgrade for more money.
    Even when you pay them more money they still delete everything and provide you with a back up system that does not work.
    Criminal.

    Reply
  45. CrashPlan for Small Business isn’t a stable reliable software. The problem is that it auto updates itself without asking. So when a new version has problems, you cannot do anything. Because even if you find an old version to roll back, it will auto update as soon as you run, and go to a broken version 6 again. I’ve had this problem since Dec, with support spending a month getting me to reinstall again and again until they gave up. Support manually put a flag so I could stay with the working v4. Then I was fine for a little until the flag wore off and now I have no backups again. Now I have to jump through the same hoops again because they need to follow their phone/email script. They don’t even understand the app, as they refer to settings/buttons that don’t exist. So it’s definitely not ready for business use, not even home use I’d say given the instability and the lack of IT support a home user would have.

    Reply
  46. Warning!

    CrashPlan once provided a good and reliable service. Their recent redesign made a mess of it. The backup service regularly fails to start automatically and can’t be started manually. They eliminated individual folder management controls or the ability to view backup progress. And they are slow to respond to trouble tickets and essentially useless when they do. That they are so incapable of basic design and user interface skills raises doubts concerning their technical ability to actually backup, secure, or restore one’s files. This company could be studied as a paradigmatic example of fiddling too much with a good thing that wasn’t broke and wrecking it.

    Reply
    1. Completely agree with everything you said. I used to love it, and now I’m constantly telling support that I checked services and I’ve switched it, again, to “automatic (delayed start).” I should not have to do this almost daily on all of my machines.

      Reply
  47. The user interface (the app, not the web site) has changed since this review was first created. It used to be a real nice interface.

    Here it is a Sunday, I recovered from a system image I last created on 3/29/2018, and I’m looking to restore the files between then and yesterday’s drive crash, 5/5/2018.

    Restore in the app keeps doing a sync, I’m thinking so that it only restores the files which are different. Good idea but not working well, if at all.
    Multiple times I’m getting an error about not being able to access the destination in the process. A few times it didn’t get as far as producing the file list. A few MORE times it got as far as producing the file list and then immediately went into that same error. Each sync takes about 20-25 minutes. Not reliable.

    Another way to get ALL the files, by doing a restore from the web, and it is apparently take a REAL long time zipping the files. I didn’t really want to go this way as I don’t want this to turn into a data exercise of comparing file dates/differences. But Monday is approaching and I need to get my files back.

    That’s the reason I’m using this service in the first place.

    Looking at backblaze as a backup service to my backup service.

    Reply
  48. Restores from mobile DON’T work anymore!

    They’ve eliminated their mobile app, and if you’re using a separate backup password (separate from your Crashplan login password), you will NOT be able to enter that password from your mobile. They responded to my ticket saying “Yes, we know about it, and no, we’re not going to fix it.”

    They used to be good, but seem to be going backwards. What kind of company thinks that mobile access to your data isn’t important these days !?!?!

    Reply
    1. Could not agree more. In addition to mobile not being supported anymore, I am constantly having connectivity issues, which they admit are on their end and “will notify their engineers and appreciate my patience.”

      Constant messages that my computers haven’t been backed up in X days because of THEIR problem is so frustrating.

      Reply
  49. I was a CrashPlan Home customer (paid up until 2020) and was switched to Small Business a couple of days ago by CrashPlan. Interestingly this happened while I am actively restoring 14TB (yes terabytes) from CrashPlan.

    I’m on a 150/20Mbps internet connection and backing up has generally run about 80-90% of my upload speed.

    For restore I preferred the prior CrashPlan Home client to the new Pro client (6.1.7). The restore was more informative in the earlier version. The new Pro looks prettier but is harder to work with and gives less information on the restore process (there is no file monitor or data rate as there was before). I also noticed that the restore using the Pro Client is running about half the speed of the Home client. I previously worked out it would take be around 28 days (1/2TB per day) to restore everything. Now I’ve no idea and it may take several months….

    Looking at the traffic analysis on my hub it shows me pulling around 620 GB per day prior to the switch. Now with CrashPlan Pro I’m getting around 300 GB. How I did notice that type of file makes a difference but this will be another discussion with CrashPlan support that I have. BTW, support has been very responsive to my questions through all this.

    One thing you can’t complain about is price. I paid around $300 for five years of support. Now in 2020 for me it will convert to $10 per month for unlimited (if they don’t change it before then), That’s a bargain compared the competition and their versioning and file retention is great – and works. I’ve been using them for around 6 years now.

    Reply
  50. I was a Home user and switched to Small Business. I have 7TB of data on my home NAS. I have been running the Code42 client since August and it’s still only 24% completed! I have another 1.5 years before the initial backup is completed! I have a fibre connection and SpeedTest tells me I am getting more than 400Mbps up speeds. The data deduplication setting seems to have disappeared from the client. In fact, there’s no Advanced options in the client anymore. I don’t have any idea on how to speed it up.

    Currently my NAS is not backed up. I am thinking I will have ditch Crashplan and go for something that’s not throttling the transfers and will backup and restore in a more reasonable timeframe.

    Reply
    1. John – Nearly the exact same thing happened to me. I have 7TB which had been successfully backed up to Crashplan for months. About a week ago, I noticed it said it was 21% complete with 1.2 years remaining. I’m also on fiber and I’m monitoring less than 1Mbps of outbound traffic from Crashplan. Currently working with tech support to understand where my 5TB of data went, then hopefully figuring out how to increase upload speed. The API does have commands for deduplication still, but I don’t know if it will work for non-enterprise. Anyone else out there suffering or have a solution??

      Reply
  51. Don’t waste your time on Crashplan for Small Business unless you only have a few files that need to be backed up. It used to be a good service that’s turned into a steaming pile of sh*t. Their new desktop app stripped out most of the useful features of the old one; their bandwidth up and down is heavily capped, so if you have a lot of data to back up or restore, it will take days or weeks or months; their restore function is a joke unless you only want to restore entire folders. I needed to restore 1700+ files of a specific file type, from several different directories – despite being able to filter by file extension, there’s NO way to “select all”, NO way to bulk select a group of files, you can’t restore many gigabytes of files all at once if you need to (maybe 5 GB total, if you’re lucky), and trying to select even individual files to restore in the desktop app requires selecting them one.at.a.time…and each checkmark takes 15 seconds to register. This is a joke. There’s a reason it’s so cheap. This is not a serious backup service for anyone except the average home user who needs a few Word documents backed up. Don’t be fooled by their “Small Business” BS. You’re just wasting your money.

    Reply
  52. I have used Crashplan for Small Business for many years. They have recently implemented a change, as of May 1,2019, which had devastating effects for my businesses. They have chosen to remove from the backup all files in the /user/xxx/library/containers/ directory as well as all root directory application and system folders. My company’s financial data was stored by our 3rd party Unix app in that directory and they excluded it from backup and deleted ALL PREVIOUS BACKUPS without permission. Apparently they sent this information out in a “newsletter” to the business users in Mid April, and implemented the change on May 1. We had a file corruption of our database on May 18, and we were unable to recover from our online backup with Crashplan. The company provided no backout and did not have a recovery path for the data they had deleted without our knowledge or permission. We lost 10 years of data. Absolutely devastating. The customer trust has been breached, but their attorneys claim that we didn’t have a “contract”. This is unbelievable on so many levels.

    Reply
    1. Must absolutly agree.

      Their behaviour and information policy is getting worse’n’worse. Didn’t receive a notification on the policy change in May and just accidently stumbled about it because my VMs were marked “Excluded for all backups” and I searched for info regarding this.

      Worst thing IMO is deleting backupped data without user confirmation, which is absolutely no go in a business environment.

      Have been long time customer on Home then Pro than SMB, but will look for another solution now. Unreliable nowadays and cannot be trusted anymore. Stay Away!

      Reply
  53. Long time crashplan home user, converted to pro then small business. I converted mainly because I have not found an equivalent alternative yet, and it took me best part of a year to do the initial backup and didn’t want to start over (roll on fibre)
    I suffered a hard disk issue in Feb – corrupted dynamic disk database – end result, multiple drives had to be converted back to basic…which means formatting. Thank goodness for Crashplan, right?
    Well…yes….but. Gawd the restore is slow. I restored 70GB or so of essential data prior to travelling around, and recently came back to do more. But the client was having issues – support got me to change the settings to use 5GB RAM – so the restores would work. It has been 6 days now, and my 209GB restore is 203GB done with an estimated 6 hrs remaining. It runs at 1-3Mbps. That’s it.
    I’m not a small business so in some regards getting the data back is not time critical – but whilst I’m restoring, the backup is stopped. So all my *current* files are at risk. And I probably want to restore around 2TB all together.
    The irony of being forced into finding an alternative backup whilst a restore is in progress so data isn’t left at risk.
    I feel this is a cheap consumer product, being marketed incorrectly as small business. If I was reliant on this data for a business, I’d be in real trouble. (I got trouble enough with my better half for ‘losing’ [temporarily] 20 years of photos!)

    Reply
    1. Simple Dave, Don’t rely on CP as your only backup. Get a great little prog called Bvckup (yes Bvckup) and set it up with a portable HDD to your PC. The software is incredibly well written and faultless AND quick. Best I’ve seen in 30 years. i have no lkink to the company I am only a happy user. best advice i can give mate! Good luck. Oh, consider Backblaze too if you dice CP. I’m looking to do that now.

      Reply
  54. After almost 5 years of backup (and the money that goes with it, of course), they’ve deleted 10Tb of data, because of a service that is really not intuitive. They must think that everybody read every little line on their website during their weekends…
    There is an option on their app that says « Remove deleted data files : Never », well that do not really work. They should update the text with an « unless this and unless that… and still we might invent new rules that will get your data deleted because we don’t really care ».
    They don’t care a bit, you’ve just lost a huge amount of work and their only answer is “sorry next time you should read this and that on our website…
    Not to speak of the restoration that is incredibly slow and a software that bugs all the time. Mediocre service!

    Reply
  55. I’ve been using Crashplan Pro for a while now – I converted over from the personal plans. I like Crashplan PRO – how it works and the features it has. BUT on my laptop it is a CPU HOG. Using the % CPU settings doesn’t REALLY equate to % CPU. Consulting with the company on-line, the reply I have received so far to my complain that my laptop blows hot air all the time is an explanation of why the %CPU isn’t really %CPU. The FAILED to listen to my complaint and question: So – what CAN I do to keep this service from using so much CPU? If I can find a service which has a REAL setting to control %CPU AND which provides 1) version backups and 2) recover files from a specific date, then I’ll consider switching. I also use Acronis for image backups, with settings to make image backups every weekend.

    Reply
  56. CrashPlan is garbage. No one should use this service. It used to be great; it was $60 a YEAR back when I started using it in 2014. Then they increased their rates to $20 a month for my 2 devices. Fine, I’ll pay 4X as much even if it’s a good service, but the service actually got far worse and it recently stopped working completely. I could not fix it, after reinstalling and everything else I tried it just would never launch so I went 11 days without backups. I can’t even log into my account to change my subscription, their website is a login loop saying I need to “Login to Complete my Purchase.”

    Reply
  57. I was a longtime Crashplan customer and I’m shocked now that anyone would give their service more than one star. I could live with the Byzantine structure of the app and impossibly slow upload/download speeds, but as storage got cheaper, they actually had the gall to start charging more while eliminating which files would be backed up. That drastic a change should have only come after an extensive amount of email AND snail-mail to ensure their clients would be aware of the change. Now I trash their service to anyone who will listen so that I won’t look like a complete and total moron given all the times I had recommended them in the past. It’s laughable that they changed their focus to “small business” as about they only thing in my opinion that they’re good for now is for people who want a ridiculously expensive and hard to use way to back up their Word docs and maybe a low-res family photo album with no video. For that, I think most of us will stick with Google, Amazon, MS, Mega.nz, DropBox, etc. Also, hope you don’t like two-factor authentication if don’t want to pony-up even more cash every month for their “Enterprise” level. I hope the “Enterprise” level clients are getting the service level we small biz & consumers used to get, as otherwise, I can’t imagine how they’re still in business.

    Reply
  58. We have been loyal customers of Crashplan for 10 years and they have made hundreds and hundreds of dollars out of us.

    Now, when we try to contact them for the first time ever because there is a problem caused by THEIR lousy system, they are absolutely impossible to get hold of.

    They encourage you to use their chat support. What is this? Simply and purely a ‘bot’ that doesn’t answer the simplest of questions. No human being whatsoever!

    They have a phone number. No matter which options you select, you are sent to an automated message. It sends you to their help section. No human being once again!

    I could go on and on.

    I’ve wasted HOURS trying to get hold of Crashplan, all to no avail.

    We are in a dire situation now with our backed up files and when are trying to reach out to Crashplan they are making it IMPOSSIBLE for us.

    Therefore I’d recommend you stay clear. When you are in a situation like ours you will realise that they are simply not available for you!! Therefore there is absolutely no point paying Crashplan hefty amounts of money if you can’t access your files when you actually need them.

    Everybody else all over the internet is saying the same thing.

    Avoid, avoid, avoid!

    Reply
  59. I’ve been with CP for about 4 years. Generally reliable and support here is SLOW 2 days return email to start the ticket. UPloads of 350GB takes up to 7 days and CP is good at making excuses for this. I have 95Mbps download and 37Mbps UPload. My large backup files of this size should take 2 days at that speed – max. I’m in the middle of such a backup right now and I’m on the 4th day and only a fraction is done. I don’t know where the coke is but CP tells me, incredibly, I am backing up to their Aussie outpost server in North Sydney only 10-15kms away. Nothing makes sense with these people and I’m at the point where i am now looking closely at Backblaze. Their support people just never seem to empathise – if they did I’d feel like they actually understand me,. my frustration and what I’m trying to explain to them. A definite love/hate relationship but not a lot of love coming from their side. If they’d only be more communicative. They ask for me to complete “service” surveys all the time – God knows why, nothing ever improves over the years. A real shame with a product/service with so much potential.

    Reply
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