Crashplan is untrustworthy - do not trust them with your back or data

I started using Crashplan for my backup needs back when Mozy switched away from doing an unlimited backup.  Initially I was very happy with their service.

However, since at least June of 2012 when I first noticed it, Crashplan has had horribly slow upload speeds. Many people are getting much less then 1mb uploads even though their internet connection supports speeds many times faster then that.

For anyone who frequently adds files to their backup set, this would make crashplan almost useless since you would never have a complete backup. You would always have files pending to be uploaded.

I myself could probably live with these speeds since I don't often add files to my backup. What I can not live with though is a company that lies. And crashplan lies. Their support has NOT ONCE responded to the thread I started here: https://crashplan.zendesk.com/entries/21660011 (they require you to register to view threads, probably to hide complaints from showing up in search engines - i'll post a complete copy at the end of this post).

That thread is almost 6 months old and has NEVER received a response from someone in support. It did however receive a response within a day when I finally got fed up and accused them of being incompetent or liars. Then a Mike Evangelist (listed as Chief Marketing officer according to his linkedin profile) suddenly stepped in and deleted my post accusing me of 'name calling'. I'm not sure what other conclusion you can come to when you have a problem that's ongoing for months and the only response you get from CP support, if they respond at all, is to tell you the internet is shared resource. Basically their excuse is that the internet is slow, not them. Apparently the internet has been slow, ONLY for crashplan customers, night or day, for months.

His idea of customer support was to offer me a refund. That's a pretty shoddy business model - no actual response to the problem itself, just someone who gets upset when you use harsh words about the lack of support and communication and then tells you to leave.

The only conclusion I can draw is that crashplan is either incompetent and doesn't know how to fix the problem or is otherwise incapable of doing so, or they are lying to me. I think it's both. I suspect they signed up too many users too fast and don't have the resources to support them all and are just hoping people wont notice.

As I said earlier, I could probably live with the slower upload speeds. But I will not do business with a company that treats their customers like this. They lie to their customers pretending there is no problem or pretending the problem is with you and not with them. They don't respond to complaints in their forum for MONTHS and then the only official response they finally give is to delete a post that calls them out for what they are - liars.

I don't know about you, but I would not do business with a company that is dishonest with you and treats their customers like idiots. Would you trust all your personal data with them? What's going to happen if their servers ever get hacked, do you think they'll actually let you know? Can you be sure you're data is really encrypted and safe on their server? And what happens if some day you need to download your data, how can you be sure you'll be able to get it? Or that it wont take months or years to download because of their poor service?

I apologize if this sounds like a rant, but I am angry. I think anyone would be angry if they are lied to for months on end. Because of this I've canceled my subscription to crashplan. Oh, and they are actually planning on raising their rates at the start of 2013. I'm going to use amazon glacier with cloudberry. Shockingly, the shared resource that is the internet seems to have no problem maxing out my upload speed when uploading to amazon. And it'll cost me less then what crashplan charges.

Edit: I've been using cloudberry in conjunction with amazon glacier for several weeks now without a single slow down. And it's only costing me $2/mo. To be fair, it looks as though the issue with crashplan has been resolved, at least the technical issue has. The customer service/honesty issue though has not. Crashplan only once admitted to there being any problem and it was a rather vague message along the lines of 'some' customers report problems and 'they are looking into it'. No explanation as to what the problem was. No explanation as to what they did to fix it. No sort of apology. I still don't trust them.

Edit 2: It loosk like CP might still be lying to their customers. Someone who just signed up with CP starts off getting 6mbps uploads but then quickly drops down to 250-300kbps. When they contacted CP support, this is what they were told:
I looked over your backup logs from the past few days and it looks like everything is going exceptionally well. 200-300 KBps sustained transfer rates are normal for most people and are common when the CrashPlan Client is backing up media files or other large chunks of data (applications come to mind). Those types of data don't compress well and therefore have to be sent in their entirety versus smaller chunks that have already been efficiently indexed by the CrashPlan Client.
That's the first time I've heard that not being able to compress file means it'll download MUCH slower then your maximum internet connection. The support rep went on to say turning off data de-duplication might speed up the upload. Which I assume is also either a lie or an indication their system is poorly made if data de-duplication means a 20x reduction in upload speeds.

Edit 3: For anyone still using crashplan and having problems, you might want to take a look at this blog post. He greatly sped up his upload speeds by disabling the deduplication function in crashplan's client.

Some general comments on backups

Given my last post about mozy doing away with their unlimited plan, and seeing all the reactions from people, some of which seemed to be in a panic at the thought of possibly not having a full complete backup for a few weeks, I thought it would be good to make a few suggestions about backing up data.

The first thing to realize is your backup is exactly what it says - a backup. It should be a secondary copy of your data, not your primary storage. Forgive my nerd analogy (you did read the title of this blog didn't you?) but it's like being on the USS Enterprise while fighting the Romulans. Captain Kirk doesn't use the backup systems first, he uses the primary systems. He only asks Scotty to engage the backup's when the primaries are in trouble.

That's what your online backup should be like. They should mainly just be used for when your primary data storage - your hard drive - is in trouble. So if your online backup goes away, it shouldn't be cause for panic. Because your primary system should still be in relatively good shape and the chances of the primary going down while the backup is down should be pretty small.

The thing to keep in mind here is making sure your primary is always in relatively good shape. There's a few simple things you can do to ensure that.

1. Run a disk monitoring program in the background to keep tabs on your hard drive. A very basic, and free program, is HDD Health from panterasoft. It'll monitor your drives and let you know if they report any problems.
2. If you want to be even more proactive, you can schedule windows to run a chkdsk every week or month. You can either schedule this as a task in windows, or you can run it yourself. You have a few choices as to how you want to run the command, as it can drastically effect how long it takes to run the check, and also whether or not you can use your PC while the check is running. You can run it as chkdsk c: /F /R /X. replace c: with whatever drive you want to check. This command will take the longest and possibly require you to reboot the pc and wait for it to finish before you can use your PC again. Having to reboot is almost a certainty if you are going to check drive C.  If you want to speed things up a bit, leave off /R, which does a more intensive scan of the disk looking for bad sectors on the disk. If chkdsk starts reporting bad sectors, it's time to replace the hard disk. You can look up the warranty on the hard drive to see if it's still covered.
3. The other suggestion I have is to replace your hard drive once it's 2 years old. Hard drives are pretty reliable - i can't remember the last time I had one fail. But if you replace them every 2 years or so, you are even less likely to see a failure. Given how cheap HD's are (and they keep getting cheaper), you'll more then likely be able to be a hard drive twice as big as the one you are replacing, for less then it originally cost you. So not only will you be ensuring the reliability of your data storage, but you'll also get more space out of it. 
4. If you replace your hard drives like I suggest, you can then use those hard drives as backups, in addition to any online backups. You can buy an external enclosure for the drive on newegg or amazon for $20 or so. 

One thing to remember if you replace your drives and you are not going to keep them or re-use them - make sure you wipe all the data on them, especially if you plan on selling them or giving them away to anyone else. You can use Eraser to securely delete the data from your drives. It's also free.

And for some more free and useful sofware, check out my post about gparted, which you can use to partition those new hard drives and copy data from one drive to another.

One last suggestion when it comes to replacing hard drives - keep your original drive on hand for at least a week or two before you erase it or do anything else to it. The most likely time for a new hard drive to fail is right when you first start using it, if there's was any sort of defect to it. Otherwise, any decent hard drive will most likely last you several years.