Code42 CrashPlan Letting Go Of Consumer Business

[Julio Urquidi]

Due to an increase in demand in CrashPlan’s enterprise and small business offerings (partly thanks to attacks like WannaCry and GoldenEye), Code42 is transitioning away from the consumer backup space.

From Code42’s announcement, it also sounds like the company wants to focus on business computing because home computing customers’ needs prove to be very different from what SMB and enterprise IT users experience. By dropping its home product, Code42 can now focus on the non-consumer market.

With a target date of October 22, 2018 for winding down its support, Code42 is offering its home backup customers several options to help the transition away from CrashPlan for Home. First, existing CrashPlan for Home subscribers will get 60-day extensions added on to their ending subscriptions. Second, through a partnership with Carbonite, customers get exclusive offers and help to move their backups over to the partner’s data protection services. Lastly, qualifying home customers will get the opportunity to move to CrashPlan for Small Business to continue working with Code42.

For more information about the changes in Code42’s CrashPlan for Home support, check out the company’s Consumer Information page.

 

[MichaelCG]

Carbonite is great for those who can handle their dirt slow upload and download speeds.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Jeremy Leik]

I'm seriously looking at a few options right now, because my one requirement is that my new solution be usable from Windows, Mac AND Linux (or at least Synology/QNAP). With this in mind I'm considering the following: BackBlaze B2, Amazon Glacier/S3 or going to Rsync.net which I know supports about any platform you can throw at it, and they have real engineers answering the phone.

I'd be curious to hear what others are considering.

 

[RMerlin]

Been using Carbonite for years here, as well as for some of my customers. Really happy with it.

 

[MichaelCG]

To build on my comment about speed....

I have been a Carbonite customer for 5+ years now. The ease of use is great overall. Having access to my data via the web portal is an added bonus when I am looking for something from my phone or from a remote PC somewhere. These parts I greatly enjoy from there service.

Now for what I don't like....their upload and download speeds.

This past summer I had my first drive failure where I had to resort to Carbonite to restore data from. I lost a 2TB Seagate drive that holds misc data on my home file server. No big deal right? Had the wife stop by Best Buy on the way home to pick up a new drive, swapped it out in the PC, and open up Carbonite to start a restore. Carbonite had "frozen" my backups since it detected a drive missing which is handy dandy.
Two hours in and I see very little data has restored so I call it a night and head for bed. The next morning I check on it again...still not nearly as much data restored as I had hoped for. I check my traffic history and my restore is coming in at 7Mbps on my Google Fiber 1000Mbps connection. Not cool.

After 3 days, I gave up and cancelled the restore. To note, while you are restoring your backup remains paused/frozen. So my restore was going to take over a week easily and during that time, nothing new was going to be backed up. Then by the end of the week or two, that means I will have a gig or two of new data that hasn't been backed up which will then probably take another couple of days to fully backup.
Lucky for me, I managed to get the old Seagate drive functional on an external drive sled and managed to pull all of my data off of it. And then was able to unfreeze my Carbonite and let it play catch up over the next several days.

PROS
- Stupidly simple to use on Windows (don't know about other platforms)
- Runs in the background and just works
- Price is pretty good for "unlimited" storage

CONS
- Upload/Download speeds will be under 10Mbps
- No proxy support (for the home product)
- Not all file types are automatically backed up and require manual selection
- Backups are frozen/paused during a restore
- Speed issues are a major challenge if you have several hundred gigs of data
- Data is not encrypted at rest with a key the user manages (it is encrypted in transit via TLS)

Overall, I "hope" to get enough free time over the next 9 months before my subscription runs out to identify an alternate solution. However I have a feeling that many of the issues I have will be exist in many of the consumer based solutions. I am way too lazy to build/support my own setup...so good chance I will end up staying on Carbonite.

 

[XIII]

Considering BackBlaze B2 via arq.

Anyone using this? What's your experience?

 

[RMerlin]

Carbonite's speed is indeed an issue. My backup runs at my full upstream's 10 Mbps, however restores seem to also run at around that speed as well despite having a 30 Mbps downstream connection.

One of the things I like about Carbonite (Backblaze also offers it) is the ability to provide your own encryption key. That means that their employees will never be able to access your data, even if the local government issues a legal request for it.

A few years ago I tested a couple of services, I dismissed most of the others because their clients were seriously lacking compared to Carbonite. Might be time for me to re-try Backblaze.

I wish these providers offered backing up NAS shares. None of them allow it on a Personal plan, so I have to do daily syncs between my important NAS share and a local folders on my desktop's HDD, and backup that folder.

 

[RMerlin]

Data is not encrypted at rest with a key the user manages (it is encrypted in transit via TLS)

They do allow users to provide their own encryption key (it's what I do myself).

 

[XIII]

One of the things I like about Carbonite (Backblaze also offers it) is the ability to provide your own encryption key. That means that their employees will never be able to access your data, even if the local government issues a legal request for it.

But if you use the regular BackBlaze (instead of B2) when restoring you have to enter that key on their website and files will be unencrypted server side...

 

[MichaelCG]

They do allow users to provide their own encryption key (it's what I do myself).

I need to look at this again...when I signed up it wasn't an option...also curious if you are using Personal or Pro? I know there are feature differences.

 

[RMerlin]

But if you use the regular BackBlaze (instead of B2) when restoring you have to enter that key on their website and files will be unencrypted server side...

Can't you setup the client on the computer and then run the restore from your computer, using a local key instead of going through the web interface?

I need to look at this again...when I signed up it wasn't an option...also curious if you are using Personal or Pro? I know there are feature differences.

Personal, the one at 50$/year (it's for my personal computer at home).

 

[XIII]

Can't you setup the client on the computer and then run the restore from your computer, using a local key instead of going through the web interface?

If one of their customers knows I'd love to read that here.

Their description of cloud restore stopped me from further investigating this as an alternative:

https://www.backblaze.com/backup-encryption.html

In a discussion on their page for CrashPlan customers one of their employees mentioned that you should handle your backups yourself with B2 if you don't like this cloud restore...

 

[RMerlin]

That ZIP-based restore sound pretty ackward to me. That would imply that following a disaster you might have to download a multi-gigabytes zip file. This is pretty bad on many levels:

1) You cannot resume work until you downloaded the WHOLE zip, and unzipped it. So if it's a 100 GB zip, you will be downloading forever before you can finally get access to some files

2) If that huge zip download is interrupted, I assume you have to start all over again

3) The bit about having to provide the passphrase for remote decryption kinda defeats the purpose indeed

4) You will need a lot of disk space to store the zip AND the unzipped data. If your disk was 80% filled by data, you won't be able to download that zip and unzip it on the same disk.


Hopefully they also provide a way to do a disaster recovery by just installing the client, and running a restore process on the client itself. Otherwise this is a fairly serious limitation in their service compared to Carbonite.


EDIT: they seem to provide a download manager, so that will at least help with issue 2.