Cloud Backup

Handruin

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I just got an email from code42 (Crashplan) that they are discontinuing the Crashplan home service and transitioning to the small business market. From what I understand so far, this means I can no longer backup locally like I've been doing using their utility even if I continue to pay for their service under their small business plan. I need to read up a bit more to confirm this but that's how I understand it so far. I have until April 2018 to figure out a solution and transition to another backup process. They're recommending that Crashplan home users migrate to Carbonite and are offering a discount.
 

LunarMist

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I think the cloudy storage plans will always be changing. Have you considered placing a storage server in another location and backing up to that?
 

Handruin

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Thanks Chewy I'll give it a read. I've also seen similar discussions on the reddit homelab and DataHoarder subreddits while people like myself are exploring new options.

Lunar, I've considered it but I don't have a location that I can do that. I could colocate a server but that would be rather expensive.
 

timwhit

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I think I deleted the email about this without reading it. I only use crashplan as the target. Will this affect me?
 

Handruin

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timwhit, if I'm understanding your question, then the answer is yes. Last I read and understood from their message is that you won't be able to use it as a local (free) target after they switch over.

Those who currently use the cloud service and plan to continue to use it will only have a maximum of 5TB of data migrated to the new service.

Clocker, I would consider Backblaze but they don't offer a Linux client. Backblaze has their B2 service which technically would work but it might be rather pricey for me.
 

Clocker

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My parents have about 60GB of data. Any suggestions on how I could securely automate their computer backing up their pictures to mine via the internet? I don't need versioning or anything, just a sync. Both machines run Windows 10.
 

timwhit

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I looked into what Crashplan will cost me and it's looking like $100/month. This isn't really very cost effective for me. I'm probably including some computers that don't need to be backed up, but even $50/month is way too much in my opinion.
 

Clocker

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At under $4 per month prepaid, I'm going to just move my parents over to Backblaze . I have my data consolidated to one machine and only about 1TB of data on Crashplan so I'll transition over to their small business platform and then revist my options when the 75% discount expires.
 

LunarMist

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It seems that many people all over the web are going bonkers about this change. Backblaze will be gaining customers.
I don't understand how the online storage works, but I wish you all good luck.
 

sechs

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Code42 has now reneged on their offer to refund me. They're apparently now blanket denying all refunds, even to people who signed up right before the announcement. It's pretty ass of them.

They now have an "F" rating at the BBB. I believe that it was a "B" just a few months ago.

They've really gotten themselves into a mess, here. I expect that folks will start filing complaints with attorneys general and elsewhere. Just responding will suck away a lot of time and energy.
 

sechs

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Carbonite is pretty garbagey unless your are just backing up your documents.

I switched over from ACD to Google Drive, and haven't gotten any guff yet from them about how much space I'm using. Amazon was, however, nice enough to give me a full refund on my ACD subscription.

On the other hand, I've been trying to pull a snapshot of the files that I have on CrashPlan, and it's slow and crashy. I guess it's in the name....
 

Will Rickards

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My issue with crashplan is that I was on the family plan and had 6 computers or so backing up for $150 per year.
No way I can touch that with backblaze or carbonite.
Just covering my three computers will be $150 / month via backblaze.

If these are the real prices for this service, I'm not sure it make economic sense.
 

sechs

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There's also apparently going to be no way to use the peer-to-peer backup after shutdown because they use their servers to authenticate the machines.

Users won't even be able to restore files from legacy back-ups.
 

LunarMist

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Why would there be any need to restore data from the defunct service once the pay period expires? Presumably users would have a new backup set on the new storage cloud business by then.
 

Handruin

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The peer-to-peer is one of the major selling points of their utility for me. When I dump a large data set onto a drive, the cloud sync can take a week. However, if I have the peer (local) configuration setup I can get that backup done in an hour or two. If this was still an option I may consider continuing my subscription but it's not from what I understand.
 

sechs

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Why would there be any need to restore data from the defunct service once the pay period expires? Presumably users would have a new backup set on the new storage cloud business by then.
One could use the software (for free) to back-up to another machine running the software. You didn't have to pay to send to their cloud servers.

I know of folks who swapped space for backups across the Internet. All of those back-ups will be useless.
 

Striker

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My father and I used Crashplan for offsite backup to eachother. I'm trying to figure out what to do now.
 

Clocker

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I use Goodsynch for my local backups to my file server and it is great. If I had a second copy of the software I might try this: https://www.goodsync.com/goodsync-connect


But, I'm lazy and just put my Dad on Backblaze instead.

For me, I think I will just leave Crashplan and load Backblaze on my Windows 10 Pro all purpose file server box so everything can be backed up as it is backed up on the Server.
 

sechs

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If you're trying to grab your back-ups from CrashPlan, like me, you'll find that their servers and website have been down for over eight hours now....
 

Handruin

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Are you doing an actual restore from CP? Good to know they're down. That's what my local copy is for.
 

sechs

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Since I haven't been actively backing up there for months, I'm trying to grab old versions and deleted files to stash onto Google Drive.

Because Crashplan is so buggy and slow, it's a painful process. I frankly can't imagine what it'd be like if I'd had a catastrophic loss of data from my NAS and needed to restore. This is a mess.
 

sechs

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If anyone is filing complaints against Code42, make sure to file with the Minnesota AG (which is a pain, because they only take paper). I got a letter back, and they've gotten enough complaints to open a file and assign someone to deal with the situation. My state AG referred me to the Federal Trade Commission.

On the other hand, I am currently corresponding directly with a developer of Arq on an issue that I'm experiencing. Couldn't even get CrashPlan support to respond in a timely fashion.
 

Lena

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Haha and it gets funnier...I tried to read a comparison. I tried. But i mean if so many sources like this one can confirm that these backups come with high levels of 3rd party storage uncertainty then meeh!. No thank you. Forget all of this, let me stick to my good old flash-disk lifestyle :bglaugh::bglaugh:
 

Clocker

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I must say I have been very happy with the performance of Backblaze. On my Xfinity connection (~12mbps peak upload)I was able to upload about 3.4TB of data to them in the month of October. Much better than Crashplan!
 

timwhit

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I must say I have been very happy with the performance of Backblaze. On my Xfinity connection (~12mbps peak upload)I was able to upload about 3.4TB of data to them in the month of October. Much better than Crashplan!

Are you getting charged data overages? Comcast/Xfinity limits to 1TB per month.
 

Clocker

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You can exceed the limit 2x per year without any overage charges. I took advantage of this month. :)
 

Handruin

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As the clock ticks down to the end of my Crashplan service I'm going to switch over to using Backblaze for my desktop for offsite backups. For onsite, I'm starting to build a PoC using Arq + minio. My plan is to run a Linux VM that hosts Minio as an object store which is Amazon S3 compatible. This way I can find and use any object store client on any machine to backup to this VM and I can independently add more NAS servers and/or Minio servers over time as-needed to grow.

I don't know how it will perform but if this overly-complicated setup sounds interesting I can share more results once I get this working.
 

timwhit

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I ended up switching over to Crashplan Small Business. One of my computers had 8TB in the archive, even though I unselected some things to get it under 5TB, when I converted the entire backup was lost. It's going to take like 2-3 months to get it backed up again. I am already 250GB over on my Comcast 1TB allotment. They give you two courtesy months to go over a year, so this shouldn't cost me anything.
 

Handruin

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That really stinks the backup was lost. I would have similar issues if I tried to convert mine over to the small business account. Crashplan thinks I have 16TB to move but I've reshuffled a lot of stuff and I'm down to 2.5TB. I've tried doing the compact but it didn't make a difference. Backblaze on the other hand seems to think it will take 209 days for me to backup 2.5TB to their service. I've configured their app to do the fastest backups it allows using 6 threads but the most it pushes is about 30Mb/sec.
 

sechs

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I think that it's clear that Crashplan is garbage all around. Even after dumping so many customers, they're too big for their britches.

I'm waiting for the class action suit.
 

sechs

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As the clock ticks down to the end of my Crashplan service I'm going to switch over to using Backblaze for my desktop for offsite backups. For onsite, I'm starting to build a PoC using Arq + minio. My plan is to run a Linux VM that hosts Minio as an object store which is Amazon S3 compatible. This way I can find and use any object store client on any machine to backup to this VM and I can independently add more NAS servers and/or Minio servers over time as-needed to grow.

I don't know how it will perform but if this overly-complicated setup sounds interesting I can share more results once I get this working.
Why go this route rather than just SFTP or even a network share?

What advantage does running a Minio VM bring over just using a straight-up file server?
 

Handruin

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I tried the network share option but could not get Arq to connect to my NAS via UNC paths which are CIFS shares provided by samba. I have several of these mapped as network drives to my various windows workstations but Arq can't seem to connect to them. I wasn't aware of the SFTP option so I'll take a look at that.

As things stand today I have two file servers. I can dump files to them however and whenever I want. The problem is how to manage backup sets for having proper ways to recover data over time if I just use them as a sync? I could simply just use rsync or some equivalent utility. The industry caters to Amazon and their S3 cloud storage in a lot of ways. With all that said, the ability to find a backup utility that works with an Amazon S3 interface may have a longer life span and variety over a propriety way of building a client/server relation.

I admit fully that I'm taking on extra complexity by doing this and this might not be the most practical approach. I'm not trying to convince anyone here that this is the best way to manage backups. I want to experiment and learn more about how this works. This could give me the ability to add any type of storage behind minio and the variations in backend storage will be invisible to whatever is using it on the front end of things. I can also host multiple share-nothing VMs to improve performance and availability.
 

sechs

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I've yet to have any problems backing up to my NAS. Were you using the mapped drives or the UNCs in Arq?

I guess my theory is that backup should be simple and safe. Experimenting is fine, but not with data that one might need.

As local storage, I don't see what Minio brings to the table that one cannot get some other way. You can run a simple file server in a VM and abstract the physical storage and, with the right hypervisor, get failover.
 

Handruin

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I was not able to see any mapped drives through Arq and every different way I tried to map the share location using their UNC dialog, I got nothing but errors returned that Arq could not find the path. I know they work because I'm using them.

When you say a simple file server what components do you define as part of that? Is that a basic samba setup?
 
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