
CrashPlan has my data, won't give it back - jik
https://blog.kamens.us/2017/08/25/crashplan-jumps-the-shark/
======
proactivesvcs
Unfortunately it's easy to forget that what you have is not a backup until you
have tested it.

I remember setting up a pair of NASes for a customer, units I hadn't used
before. I found that the configuration restore did not work at all and the two
built-in backup tools a) would only allow a full restore of any backed-up
folder and b) were unconscionably fragile, respectively.

Luckily this was blatant in testing and as the rest of the units' functions
worked nicely, I decided not to send them back, and rolled my own backup.
Which is tested, and has much better alerting/monitoring.

------
magicalhippo
I decided having terabytes of data backed up in the cloud is just not
feasible. So I picked about 300 GB which I _really_ care about and back up
that to the cloud.

For the rest I got my NAS, and I live with the fact that if the house burns
down well then that data goes out the window.

Just because you can back up everything in the cloud doesn't mean you should.

~~~
jik
The thing is, the majority of the stuff in my backup is my family videos and
photos, and frankly I don't have the time to curate it well enough to select
out which of the videos and photos are "important" enough to back up and which
are not. Perhaps when I am retired. ;-) In the meantime, my time is far more
valuable than the money I will spend backing up everything into the cloud. And
I'll now be switching from CrashPlan to a backup solution I built myself using
Rclone and Backblaze B2, so I will be able to ensure end-to-end that it works
the way I need it to.

~~~
pavel_lishin
At a certain point, isn't it easier and cheaper to just buy a second hard
drive, copy everything over, and ship it to an uncle, or a cousin, or your
grandparents?

~~~
jik
No. My Rclone / Backblaze B2 backups happen automatically every night. They're
plug-and-play. The backup scripts I wrote verify random files automatically in
the backup every night, to confirm that I'm actually successfully backing
files up and can successfully retrieve them. If there comes a time when I need
to restore huge amounts of data from Backblaze and I don't want to wait for it
to download, I can take a snapshot and ask them to write it to a hard drive to
ship it to me. Until that happens, I don't have to worry about it, and given
that they charge $.005 per GB per month, the storage costs are infinitesimal.

~~~
james-skemp
Do you have a link to more info on your solution?

~~~
jik
Thanks for asking. It's one posting back on my blog from the link at the top
of this HN thread. ;-)

[https://blog.kamens.us/2017/08/24/backing-up-from-unix-to-
ba...](https://blog.kamens.us/2017/08/24/backing-up-from-unix-to-
backblaze-b2-using-rclone/)

