CrashPlan Reviews 90

So the adage of you get what you pay for and no such thing as a free lunch applies here.

First the Bad:
They operate out of serveral datacentres world wide with one apparently in ireland but my (UK) connection seems to go to the mdiwest US, this makes uploads a little on the slow side but then it's a trickle backup not skydrive / dropbox (Although people seem to treat it like that)
Also their support can be somewhat..... lackluster.

Now the good:
They are T.N.O. Backup (trust no one), you can set a local encryption key for your archive and ONLY YOU can ever pull the backups, they can't snoop your data and should they ever be breached the hackers would just get your gibberish blob so would be useless to the,

The backup versatility:
They do versioning so if you accidental screw up a doc and save it or you need to go back to see what an older assignment looked like before you did a bunch of edits you can do (and you have controls over version numbers / times / etc)

When they say unlimited they mean unlimited - My 10+ years of DSLR photography is backed up there to a 3.5TB backup set!

Their prices are great: I have the family plan that allows for 10 computers, which covers My main computer, my Photo archive NAS, my laptop, my technophobe brother (who lives 100 miles away) and my neices laptop to cover her while she goes to Uni so I don't have to worry about the dreded call of "laptops been smashed with all my degree work on it" call.

There's a whole bunch of other controls about how much CPU or bandwidth the system can use while you are working at your PC or idle (which is where a lot of people come unstuck with the "slow" uploads, coz they have set a upload throttle to prevent ISP saturation while they work but never leave their PC's long enough for it to flip into away mode. (guilty as charged when I was trying to figure out why my NAS was so slow once!) but again this thing is designed to trickle upload changed files in an invisible and unobtrusive fashion, it's not dropbox, box, sharefile, google drive or skydrive etc (or pick your cloud file sharing service of choice)
Oh and did I also metion the software is free, you just pay for the cloud backup sub? This means you can create backup sets for free on your own gear / external disks etc? Great if you have a NAS as I keep a 2nd backup set for my main computer and laptop on there or if you regular VPN into a bigger network...

I have been using crashplan sins 2011, and I am satisfied!

The PC/MAC app interface could use some love, and might confuse new users a bit. But once you get to know it, you only have to use it once or twice a year.

Regarding speed. My experience is about 20Mbit/sec on average - Now that do not sound like much, but is it more the enough for my daily backup. And keep in mind the data is encrypted before its send.

The couple of times I actually needed to restore files it just worked perfectly.

Their offering started out quite well after capturing a number of users from Mozy. Price plan was attractive, upload speeds had been pretty good, and was generally a good service.

Now - it couldn't be more different. Things seem to start to go wrong with them offering reduced cost/near free offerings toward the end of last year. Obviously they just don't have the capacity to support the users that are buying the service.

To put it in perspective, on an uncontended 24Mbps ADSL line, with speedtest.net showing 18Mbps down, and 1.6Mbps up, I've managed to upload approximately 385Mb in 16 hours. That's a whopping 24Mb per hour.
It would take you 42 *hours* to upload 1 Gb at that rate.

Having raised numerous tickets with them to get them to investigate, their responses are nothing more than 'um, ah, yeah....oh'.

Avoid avoid avoid. Try Backblaze, or hell, even Mozy - at least you'll actually get the service you're paying for.

I was using their free offering to backup PCs in my house to a server. Worked great. I then decided that for security and to support the product, I should sign up for some online storage with them.

BIG MISTAKE

Total waste of money. Their service is dire (so slow, it doesn't work) and their customer support is even worse - takes ages to get any kind of action when a problem occurs, and in my last case - slow synchronisation - it will have finished by itself (after 4 weeks) before customer support actually get off their arses and try and fix it.