CrashPlan for Home Ends Today

I’m not saying you shouldn’t back up applications; I’m just saying that in my experience it’s not a big win in a tertiary backup for most people for the reasons I stated.

I don’t want someone who hasn’t thought their individual situation through carefully to get hung up on “Backblaze doesn’t back up applications” as a problem, because it’s not in nearly all cases. Configuration files, preferences, licenses, and so on are almost always stored in ~/Library so downloading new copies of apps doesn’t require any more setup than switching to a new drive would.

So yes, if you store data in /Applications (don’t do that), rely on programs that cannot be downloaded ever again because the company is defunct (store a DMG of the installer elsewhere), or the like, not backing up the Applications folder could be problematic in the event of a catastrophic disaster that destroys your primary and secondary backups as well.

In that case, you’d want an offsite backup service that lets you back up absolutely everything,

I agree that CrashPlan originally backed up everything, and I had it that way for the longest time. One day last year I found I was not getting backed up for 4 months. I was already at the maximum Java memory for the backup engine. Tech support eventually determined that I reached a CrashPlan file count limitation on a backup set that caused the scan for new files to never finish. Tech support also said they stopped supporting system file backups. Once I removed the applications and all of the system folders the total file count went down to where the backup could run again. For me, it was a matter of prioritizing my generated data over what is already provided by Apple.

I stopped backing up apps about 15 years ago because when I did have to restore everything the backed up apps never worked properly, if at all. I ended up having to reinstall anyway. In the case of Adobe apps, brushes, palettes, etc would get messed up in the process.

But then I don’t have that many apps, I do have a lot of stuff that runs inside other apps.

The whole point of backing up apps is to speed the restore — and if that’s the case you wouldn’t do that via an online backup anyway.

That’s why you clone your drive regularly. If the drive dies, you buy a new one and restore from the bootable clone and you’re back up and running in hours, not days. Since it’s a clone, there are no issues with apps not installing correctly or missing serial numbers.

The few data files missing from the clone you can restore from the cloud backup.

1 Like

A good suggestion…I’ll need to start cloning.

This is the real reason in my mind. I’ve got some apps that took forever to find in the first place that are quite specialized. I have no desire to have to try to hunt them down again. Also, some that I’m running old versions of. I have no idea what version. I just know I won’t be able to get it again.

I know I am late to this conversation but we had NO idea that CrashPlan for Home was being discontinued. Despite receiving weekly emails that the backup was going fine, we never received any notice from CrashPlan that the service was ending. Anyway, my computer died last week - I mean the hard drive completely failed and the computer would no longer boot up. After getting what we could from hooking up hard drive externally, we thought we still had backups from CrashPlan. All of the backups are on our own personal hard drive but encrypted by CrashPlan account, which we can no longer access. I have tried calling/emailing/texting CrashPlan to no avail. We have lots YEARS of family photos, financial data, tax documentation, documents, etc. This is HEARTBREAKING, and I can not believe that CrashPlan doesn’t have a way to allow us to just log in to get an encryption key. Is there perhaps anyone on this discussion that has some suggestions or knows where I can turn for help??? Thank you for much for any and all help.

I wonder if you could subscribe to CrashPlan for Small Business using your account and get access that way. Perhaps try contacting the CrashPlan for Small Business support, if they use different addresses?

I almost suggested the same thing, and it’s the only slight hope I can think of. However, I doubt it is possible, because IIRC Crashplan small business doesn’t offer local backups, but only remote ones.

1 Like

Thank you for the suggestion - yes, we have contacted CrashPlan and tried that route but they told us that will not work. They have permanently deleted all accounts and can’t get it back, and the fact that the data is on our remote drive makes no difference.

I switched to CrashPlan for Small business last year when they announced the discontinuation of the home plan. I backed up locally and to the cloud up until a month or so ago when I switched to ARQ. So unless they changed in the last month or two, CrashPlan for Small Business does indeed back up locally.

Sorry to hear it. Those of us in tech who heard about this plan knew that this was going to be the outcome for some people. It’s a real shame that Crashplan was so insistent on pursuing such an unethical and anti-customer course of action.

Very sorry you are facing this. I’m afraid your only option is to try one of the drive recovery companies at this point.

Well then, as far as I am concerned, that means you can’t trust CrashPlan for anything and you should’t use them for anything no matter what

1 Like

I assume you also tried to escalate your problem when talking to their front line support people, right?

It really shows a lack of competence and/or customer care if they did indeed attempt to contact you, got a bounced email back (I assume), and also saw that connection attempts were still coming from your account. Especially with your data still in their storage system.

Is there anyone on TidBITS Talk from Crashplan or with contacts at Crashplan who can confirm all past customer data is indeed now irrevocably gone?

Thank you for the comments. Yes, we have put in multiple requests via their website contacts, made telephone calls to corporate office, texted the IT support. All basically told us the same thing : Sorry we told you, you should have known this was coming, it’s all gone now. We still have our data locally (it is not on their storage system) and can’t understand why they can’t just recreate our account for a short window to let us get in and get the encryption key for our own drive! I haven’t given up hope and will continue to hound them, so it will at least make others aware of CrashPlan’s lack of support and caring.

I’m very depressed to hear about this too—I know all too well how unreliable email is as a notification method, so for something as serious as this, it would have been nice if they’d revved the software to put up alerts.

Here’s hoping you manage to escalate to someone who can do something!

I also used Retrospect years ago. My hope is that Retrospect, installed on a separate Mac computer doing nothing but backing up two Mac office computers, would be immune to ransomware attacks, since it has its own communication system which doesn’t require mounting servers visible to the office Macs. It seems like Arq has to be installed on the computer it is backing up.

There is an open source project, Plan C, that purports to implement the ability to restore CrashPlan backups on macOS. I am pursuing this option for a family that has also lost irreplaceable files.

1 Like

That’s great news! Please keep us posted on whether you get it working or not.