After almost an entire week of not being able to backup to Crashplan because of “archive maintenance” on their part, I was informed today that instead of merely maintaining my backup archive, Crashplan LOST THE ENTIRE THING. That’s right, Crashplan lost all of my data, unrecoverably. It’s gone – my entire online backup archive of all of my data – my life’s work – 2.4 tb of everything – completely gone. And Crashplan doesn’t seem to have any remorse.
I’ve been using online backup for a number of years. Before I switched to Crashplan, I was using Backblaze for online backup. Backblaze was great – a lightweight, easy to use front end, fast backup speed, low system resources, good support response times, and most importantly, a reliable service. However, the one thing Backblaze didn’t do at the time was offer unlimited, or very long retention. Backblaze would delete data from my archive if it didn’t see that data connected to my computer for a month – so if I went on vacation for 2 months and stored away my external hard drives, my data would be automatically expunged at the end of the first month. Because of this little quirk of their service, I decided to switch backup providers to Crashplan. Note that nowadays, I believe that Backblaze retains data for 3-6 months, which is much much better. (more…)