Alternate cloud backups other then Crashplan?

Been using Crashplan for a few years now and for the first time needed to restore about 1TB worth of files. Has anyone ever tried to restore that much data with using Crashplan's servers? Don't even try it. You have to use the Crashplan application to select your files which alone took 60 minutes. Then after that when you start the restore the time it indicates to finish the restore is 9 days. Yea, ok.....over a week to restore files, but then Crashplan will constantly time out and have to start over hence never being able to restore anything. To me their cloud backup service is useless if you can't perform a restore. That's the whole point.

Does anyone recommend any other cloud backup services? I really don't want to keep throwing money at a service that doesn't really work and their support has been horrible. They took down their forums, which usually means they received too many complaints and wanted more control over that. Once a company starts to do that and changes their website all around they are trying to look like a new place and incur more customer's.

I saw this post and decide to run a quickie test. A laptop around here runs Crashplan and had luckily been off a couple days. This laptop is connected via wireless (2.4Ghz g), has 960GB SSD, ample RAM, but the process did use 100% CPU (dual core) for several periods.

The first interesting find was the sync required before doing any restore, painfully announced as taking 2hours took ~20 minutes. Then compacting... After about 90 minutes I was able to start a restore. The restore was video files, nothing less than 50MB, many GB sized. Restoring from a local unRAID SMB is in the ballpark of your estimates.

Crashplan has been very useful to handle the floating laptop, but I had not tried to restore huge amounts previously. Certainly looks like Crashplan is not ideal for large volume, even locally.

Something doesn't sound right.  I just restored about a 962MB file from the cloud to a local drive outside the array.  Only took about 5 min and no problems with the restore.

Something doesn't sound right.  I just restored about a 962MB file from the cloud to a local drive outside the array.  Only took about 5 min and no problems with the restore.

yes, I too expected to say, it goes faster for me. This was my experience previously. Someone would bring the laptop over stating YY is missing/corrupt/changed, Crashplan would restore the file (under 1GB) in minutes. But at scale, your example works out to 3.6 days per TB. The 90 minute delay to restore is a function of the laptop being off for several days, something I had not seen before. I wont be discontinuing Crashplan, but I wont expect TBs restored quickly either.

I have 1tb in the cloud, and am just in the process of setting up a local machine for 50tb Crashplan  repository. Maybe I shouldn't bother? 

Sent from my mobile

I have 1tb in the cloud, and am just in the process of setting up a local machine for 50tb Crashplan  repository. Maybe I shouldn't bother? 

 

Sent from my mobile

Maybe try a small test server before committing to the 50tb?

Maybe try a small test server before committing to the 50tb?

Won't even bother with that if it can't work.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

There is another downside to all of this. If you have a large restore to do, like I did, I'm talking over 250GB and once you get Crashplan to start the restore it takes so long that once it tries to start syncing again it will fail that restore and come back with an error saying "unable to restore until we have synchronized with the destination again".

Then when you try to contact crashplan about all this they try to sell you their RESTORE TO DOOR service which costs you $164. They will restore your files onto a hard drive and ship it to you. I told them I want support for a restore I'm trying to do and they consistently said I'll have to do the RESTORE TO DOOR service and pay up. I'm a little taken back at all this, since a lot of people use Crashplan but truly never have to do really large restores. Not until you have to do a large restore with many files do you really notice how bad their service really is. Yep, they'll backup everything in the world for you, terabytes even, but go ahead and try to perform a really large restore with many folders and files. I'm on a 50Mb connection and connect to the newsgroups and download 6MB/sec easily at a constant rate. I'll be lucky to get 300KB/sec download speeds out of Crashplan. I'm not saying don't use their service, but just let it be known about issues like this.

By the way, I'm trying to restore files from Crashplan itself, not other computers.

Here is the link to the service they are trying to sell me cause their servers can't perform a large restore.

https://www.code42.com/store/#/restore

Here are some screen shots of the errors.

I have 1tb in the cloud, and am just in the process of setting up a local machine for 50tb Crashplan  repository. Maybe I shouldn't bother? 

 

Sent from my mobile

 

Maybe try a small test server before committing to the 50tb?

I've tried a small test myself and it worked just fine. It was quick and snappy too. I'm trying to restore files that are a week old and that may have something to do with it. It could be possible Crashplan doesn't put a priority on older files or something or has a cap on the speed at which you can restore. If I backup files and try to restore that same day it is a lot faster for some reason. You also can't backup and restore at the same time. Even if the restore is a completely different folder. I've been a Crashplan user for 4 years now and I'm only finding out about these little problems only because I needed to do a restore. Their UNLIMITED backup plan reminds me of those UNLIMITED shared hosting plans. You really can't do anything with it, even if the word UNLIMITED is spread out all over the place.

I also want to make sure these are my own experiences. Yours may be different or just have better luck then me. But when a company tries to push a more expensive service at me rather then try to help or troubleshoot the initial issue that's a bit sad.

There is another downside to all of this. If you have a large restore to do, like I did, I'm talking over 250GB and once you get Crashplan to start the restore it takes so long that once it tries to start syncing again it will fail that restore and come back with an error saying "unable to restore until we have synchronized with the destination again".

I think you can tune the settings a bit to avoid the resync problem, but it is a shame that Code42 (Crashplan) wont help you do the tuning. Overall I think you are spot on. Crashplan works great for laptop and desktop protection, but it does not work so good for multi terabyte storage arrays. In my test, I selected 16 files to restore. In real life, I may have needed all 16, but I would know which one or two were needed first, etc. Thus restore can be broken into stages.

How is your CPU utilization during restore? I find Crashplan CPU intensive. I think they compress and encrypt everything, and that might be a factor.

There is another downside to all of this. If you have a large restore to do, like I did, I'm talking over 250GB and once you get Crashplan to start the restore it takes so long that once it tries to start syncing again it will fail that restore and come back with an error saying "unable to restore until we have synchronized with the destination again".

 

I think you can tune the settings a bit to avoid the resync problem, but it is a shame that Code42 (Crashplan) wont help you do the tuning. Overall I think you are spot on. Crashplan works great for laptop and desktop protection, but it does not work so good for multi terabyte storage arrays. In my test, I selected 16 files to restore. In real life, I may have needed all 16, but I would know which one or two were needed first, etc. Thus restore can be broken into stages.

 

How is your CPU utilization during restore? I find Crashplan CPU intensive. I think they compress and encrypt everything, and that might be a factor.

Computer power isn't a factor, as I'm using my custom built PC. To be quick, it has an Intel 3930K 6 core 64bit processor with 32GB of high speed RAM and SSD drives. My Asus Sabertooth X79 mainboard has been amazingly rock steady. I actually want to build an identical computer since this one is so nice and will last me a long time. I built it over a year ago and the processor  price has only dropped $20. I may build another off of a newer processor, maybe.

Getting back to Crashplan, well, my restoration of 200GB took 3.5 days and I'm not done yet. I have to select individual folders because if I select them all it is just too much for Crashplan to handle. I've went into the backup schedule and turned off all the days that I will be restoring so it doesn't start to backup and kill my restore again. I have to keep changing the days as the restore is going on. What a pain!

I'm just very disappointed in Code42 for trying to sell me something else, and I just renewed for another 4 years not too long ago. I may ask for a refund on that one.

So what is alternative to Crashplan?

So what is alternative to Crashplan?

This article lists 40 of them.

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/maintenance/tp/online_backup_services.htm