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Thanks for posting your experience… for a company who normally seems to be quite up-front about their shortcomings, the fact that they haven't publicized this is really surprising. It would seem to be in their best interest to do so. Much better that they tell everyone now vs. only telling people when they're in the nightmare scenario of wanting to restore their backup and finding out only then that it is corrupt.

It seems to me that CrashPlan knows this is an issue, they know that it only affects files stored on a certain location/server in their environment, and as a result, they must know which customers have backed up data to that location during the time that the bug was present. Why not just send a notification, with an apology, and instructions for correcting the issue?

Saying that it only affects .004% of the files backed up isn't adequate… what if that .004% was a priceless home video or unrecoverable family photos? I think we all realize that mistakes will happen and that's why we back up to more than one location, but dealing with unanticipated mistakes vs. those you know about and choose not to disclose are two very different things.

Sitting on the grenade and hoping it doesn't blow up just doesn't seem like an intelligent strategy here. If Nik's blog really captures all of the details as they occurred and there isn't any other part to the story, from all of my own experiences with CP (which have been truly great), I'm very surprised that this is how they've handled it.

I'm hoping that CP chooses to respond publicly as I still remain optimistic that this version of the story isn't entirely true and not as bad as it sounds. I'm willing to give them that much credit after my own great experiences with them, but from Nik's telling of the story, it's pretty bad.

Now, what I heard from the CrashPlan team is that new and existing CrashPlan customers do not have anything to worry about as this issue was fixed a while ago and that there is a continuous backup verification process going on so if some how you do have a messed up file in your backup, it will, or rather should have already fixed itself.

Just to be sure however I decided to restore all the files from a CrashPlan backup archive I had laying around that had been created a year ago from a computer I parted with in May and didn't have any file corruption issues. I'm going to try restoring some of my other backups and if I see any problems I'll let everyone know. If anyone else has seen this issue, please post your comments here to let us know.

Your note however made me think of a great blog post I had read recently from Joel Spolsky entitled "Let's stop talking about Backups" (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/14.ht... Joel makes a great point that if your data is important to you, you shouldn't be thinking about just backing up, but you need to be thinking (and testing!) your ability to restore. I know we all pay money to backup services like CrashPlan so that we don't have to think about that, but it's a good point. Until you have done at least one restore how do you know it really works? All to often we wait to test out backups on the day our hard drive dies and that's probably not the day to do our first test of our backup system if our data is really that important!

More details at http://try-dot-ch.blogspot.com/2010/03/crashplan….

All in all I'm still quite happy with CrashPlan, but I can identify with the experience above re: troubleshooting complicated issues.

Then, just before signing up to the full deal, I realized my backup is stuck, and the numbers are not consistent on my mapped drive (I know not officially supported).

What broke the deal was their support. I started interacting with their support to figure out what's happening. I had to REMIND their support I have an open ticket. At some point – I uploaded log file, and again reminded them to get an answer; the answer was "the developer is looking at it". Enough is enough.

Not professional. Nobody should nag support 4+ times. (BTW – I read your Carbonite support ordeal … hard to believe it can be worse … so pathetic …)

I am off to iDrive; superb performance and support from my limited test; let's see how it goes.
Less features, more expensive for all of my data – but I need a backup+support I can trust.

Does Crashplan save previous versions of files & if so, for how long. I am concerned about having a corrupted file & then not being able to access a earlier version that is not corrupted.
Thanks.

For anyone considering Carbonite, please please please choose someone else and save yourself the frustration. Also, for those wanting to confirm just how bad Carbonite's speeds are, they've gone so far as to now publish their capped speeds (sometime at the end of December they buried this on their site).

http://cp-carbonite.kb.net/display/4n/kb/article….

Here is a quote of the relevant information. I can tell you from experience they don't even achieve these rates. I ultimately gave up when my total backup was around 180 GB and my upload speeds were capped at 100 kbps.

Hopefully this helps someone avoid the same mistake I made.

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Our bandwidth policy is allocated into three tiers as shown below. This allows us to ensure that all users are able to backup their most important data as quickly as possible. Actual speeds may vary depending on your internet connection, your computer's configuration, other Internet-enabled software you may be running, and how often you use your computer. The current maximum upload speeds are as follows:

* The first 35GB of data can achieve upload speeds of up to 2 mbps (megabits per second).
* Between 35GB – 200GB of data can have the upload speeds reach up to 512 kbps (kilobits per second).
* 200GB or more of data can be uploaded at up to 100 kbps (kilobits per second).
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