Ok, not quite, but I thought a catchy title would be good

I hadn´t realised that CrashPlan had a policy of deleting backups from old inactive machines.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-cramp-read-your-terms-of- service-before-its-too-late/

To be honest I´m not convinced that was their stated policy before. The Wayback machine seems to think that their page about it is new:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://sup...ud_Destinations

I´ve just had an email warning that they will be deleting two old backups of mine in 5 days. One machine hasn´t backed up since 2013 and the other since 2014. So if they really do have this policy then they´ve not been enforcing it.

I´ve kept those backups around because I can´t be 100% sure there isn´t something in there that I failed to transfer.

I´m about to install a couple of VMs that I can associate to those backups in the hope that I can keep them alive until I´ve had chance to check.

Wow, good to know. I only use CrashPlan between machines that I own, so I'm not personally impacted by this, but... at least they did the courtesy of notifying you!

Five days before deleting the backups ! And I very nearly missed the email.

It is a shame they didn't make any effort to publicise the change of terms back in 2013.

If they had every got round to implementing account wide deduplication on the Home product, I'll bet most of the data in those inactive backup are also present in people's active backups.

This is relevant to me. I have one archived machine that hasn't backed up for 2.5 years and another one at 4.2 months. Last backup report still shows it though. Unfortunately I accidentally removed the whole machine for the former one from my local backup a while back. Fortunately the Crashplan Cloud backup was able to be restored by Crashplan (good support there once I got them to understand the problem). I couldn't restore my local archive though.

I also was not aware of this change. It does seem to me at least that this came in under the radar. Crashplan don't spam with weekly updates or similar so had I received an email covering this, I think I would have read it.

If I got 5 days notice, I'm not sure what I'd do. Speeds aren't fast enough so I don't think I could download the machine in 5 days. I still lose its history too. I guess I'd just create a fake machine in a VM or something to reactivate the machine.

I agree that the should have given more notice, and I agree that if this was a change of policy it should have been stated as such.

But let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Andy, I probably wouldn't call what you're doing a backup. Sure, they might be old backups, but at this point I'd call that storage. You're storing those files on Crashplan's service, and that's not the service they sold you. They aren't Dropbox or Onedrive, they're a backup system. It's intended for the active backup of in-use computers. I'd imagine they have quite a few computers in the same situation as yours, and they're paying quite a bit to Amazon (I'm pretty sure they use Amazon) to store those files.

I have a couple computers in this position, but fortunately they're not computers I care about, so I can't claim that I'm really in the same boat as you. But I still don't find too much wrong with what they're doing. I think they could have handled it better, though.

I do take your point, however when I signed up to CrashPlan back in 2011, it wasn't quite so clear cut. They were clearly trying to bridge backup and cloud storage with their blurb:

"CrashPlan Central is the cloud backup destination for CrashPlan+, providing online storage for your personal files in our secure data centers located around the world. It is instantly available as a backup destination after you install, and is available 24/7 for backing up and restoring files. Make cloud backup for your personal files an integral part of your multiple destination backup strategy with CrashPlan+."

http://web.archive.org/web/20110810143226/http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/crashplan-plus.html

"Unlike other backup products, CrashPlan keeps your deleted files forever (unless you tell us not to.) No matter how much time passes after you delete a file, you can get it back. (Files backed up to CrashPlan Central are retained as long as you have an active subscription or free trial)."

http://web.archive.org/web/20110809034750/http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/details.html

So when they changed their minds in 2013 and decided not to keep data from inactive machines they should have made it very clear to existing customers. I haven't come across any customer yet who was aware of this change.

I can't see how they can be using Amazon storage. I don't believe I am a heavy CrashPlan user with 1.2TB backed up (all most all from my active machines).

At Amazon's cheapest published rates it would cost $33 a month for standard storage and half that for infrequent access storage (I don't believe with the way CrashPlan operates that they could use Glacier). If I remember correctly I'm paying them around $10 a month.

They don't appear to be using Amazon from what I can see (based mainly on the fact that I can see Dropbox is definitely using Amazon's S3 so expect to be able see if Crashplan does too). They do talk about their own data centres.

Ah that's right. I feel like there was some other backup company using Amazon's storage... Oh well.

Andy, at best the blurbs you posted could be read either way, so they should have been clearer. But I don't think they expected anyone to do what you're doing. Those blurbs certainly don't explicitly say you can store inactive computers indefinitely.

I still think you're using it as storage and not really a backup. I consider a backup to be a second (or third or fourth) location for the copy of a file. You only have those files in one place, which is never good, for reasons just like this.

So I got my email today just now. 5 days warning. This is actually my only backup of this old machine. It's not super critical but I'd prefer to keep it as I lost the local backup I had on my NAS. Doubt I can download it in 5 days and even then I'll lose all of the file history it had.

I "like" the way they quote their EULA change now and include a link to cancel your subscription. i.e. "if you don't like it, leave".

Root of problem. Wow, didn't they even think of that?

Doesn't help that they apparently shape or limit speeds it seems. Not an unheard of issue although they usually blame it network issues at the users end. I'm only getting 2.4Mbps and it's basically flat lined there.

Locally my connection is capable of download at about 13Mbps (ADSL2) using Speedtest.net

Whilst I am in Australia my backup location is in the US. Looking at my firewall shows the restore is coming from an IP in Edinburg, Texas. Selecting a Speedtest.net server in Edinburg Texas gives me around 7-8Mbps. So 2.4Mbps when I probably should be capable of 3 or 4 times that is not very good either.

Last resort is I create a new PC and adopt the old one so the files just look as if they've disappeared.

Anything I can help with there? I have (much) faster speeds available to me, and a few hundred GB of storage.

Just saying..

Thanks. Surprisingly I'm running the restore over a VPN now and seeing much better speeds up around the 7-8Mbps mark. The VPN exit point is still in Australia but in Sydney instead of Brisbane. Should be able to get down in about 30-40 hours now at this rate. Strange.

So maybe it is my ISP or something at my end but I doubt it as everything else works fine. There'd be no reason particularly that they'd try and control Crashplan backups as I doubt it's common enough.

I do appreciate your offer though Mark. Thanks again.

To answer Matt's point regarding the storage of excessive extra data and Crashplan's point that the data is probably on another machine now, that may be so but that's also the point of the data deduplication. If it works (and it certainly seems to) then it's not even taking up excessive space.

Here, we often experience something similar on transfers to/from the EU. The route chosen by our ISP's routers is sometimes quite slow. Connecting first to a VPN, then to the same remote server, often results in a different, faster route.

This became much more noticeable as our local connection speeds improved over the years, to the current 100/10mb/sec cable connection (faster 250/20 is available, but not willing to pay the premium for it just yet).

Cheers

Sadly they only ever implemented data deduplication across a single machine's backups. They did promise the feature of account wide data deduplication, but as far as I'm aware they never delivered on it.

So our inactive old backups really are taking up extra space even if they largely duplicate other machines.

In my case it is actually CrashPlan's fault that one of my two inactive backups exists. Their mechanism for migrating a backup from one machine to another used to be well known to not work well. So when I replaced my home server hardware a couple of years ago I didn't use the backup adoption feature and just started a new backup.

I moved data across from the old server to the new one, reorganising/tidying it as I went. I kept the old backup around just in case I had missed anything in the process. As yet I haven't spotted anything I missed, but the whole point of that backup is, as a, backup...

That blog post I linked to suggest that if you contact CrashPlan support and explain that 5 days isn't enough warning that they'll probably give you more time.

In my case I just cheated by using a couple of VMs to refresh those "inactive" backups. I'll delete them at some point, but I'm certainly not going to rush around dealing them them now just because CrashPlan changed their terms, didn't tell* me about it, left it for 3 years and then gave me 5 days to sort out the issue !

* maybe they did somehow indicated they'd updated their terms to the detriment of the users, but I haven't found any user who knew about it yet

Rogers Cable Internet, I presume. I currently have the 250/20 service, speeds just above 300mb/sec are fairly common for me here. Gigabit service available in my area sometime 'soon'.

May I ask which VPN service are you using to work around the Rogers speed issue?

Yeah I created a VM to "refresh" my backup in the mean time.

I hadn't realised the data de-duplication wasn't working across devices. That's not great then.

I actually pointed my VM at my complete restore so it should have been a 100% identical copy of the current state (albeit in a slightly different location. The data deduplication seems quite slow in some places. It got to about half way and then slowed as if it was backing up the files again which the logs seem to reflect too.

Actually, Start.ca cable internet, over Rogers' lines.

The VPN service is US$40/yr PIA (PrivateInternetAccess), based near Washington DC. I figure it's probably owned/run by NSA/CIA, but seems to work well enough other than that. Lots of endpoints around the planet.

EDIT: Oddly, their website now shows a snailmail address for Los Angeles, CA.
-ml