CrashPlan for Mac

User Reviews

• slow, no tech support, misrepresents capacity

  mgNYC6/3/2014

  Pros

  none - doesn't actually work and tech support is as slow and unresponsive as the program is

  Cons

  took more than 2 days to back up 30 mb online. have multiple computer plan and after 1 week still has not backed up anything from the second computer (new macbook air - only applications, no files yet). Tech support takes more than 20 min to answer and say first backup can take a long time (not my first backup). they say online backups can take as long a 4 days so 2 days is not an "issue". they claim they can backup also from an external drive when connected to the computer and give you options to set that up, but nothing gets backed up. I wonder if the people who say they like this have checked to see if they have acutal files? Or have tried restoring a file? I tried with a small excel file and the file was corrupted. Does not bode well for larger files

  Summary

  don't waste the money or time

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• Best consumer backup software...

  anacreo8/13/2013

  Pros

  Bar none, if you just download the free "trial" and install the software you can get the best home backup system available. Install it on your PC, your Mac, your Linux box add a 3TB drive to one of those boxes, configure the software to backup all 3 machines to the one with the big HD, and voila you're done, at no cost. It has very advanced features including dedupe, compression, and encryption on the target disk. It is very similar to high end software such as Avamar, in that it puts a lot of workload on the front-end (your PC) for the initial backup, which can take hours or days even locally. However what it will give you is a very small backups, continuous protection, using backup sets you can have many many revisions saved as you save them, or say for video work adjust it to every few hours, or some combo of these. After the long initial backup is complete you'll have very versatile and efficient continuous protection, for free.

  Cons

  Honestly you have to be an engineer (and maybe even a backup engineer) to understand all the advanced features this software provides, it is impressive. The GUI does a good job of presenting this in a simple enough manner however it could have a button to solve each of the complaints I see. A button that says backup as quick as possible, to disable compression, encryption, and make it use 100% CPU, may give people the "quick and dirty" feel that consumers seem to want to have, but not the efficiencies the software delivers. On the recovery side I find the interface a little oversimplified, an option to show file details would be nice, and a content search of the files (no matter how slow) would be very helpful for those of us supporting our users.

  Summary

  If you're a tech and have mom, dad, brother, friends, school teachers, non-tech co-workers bugging you for the answer to backups CrashPlan is literally the answer for every situation. CrashPlan central will let your friends with light workload pay to have their data backed up at a vault, while your heavy Mac Videographer friend will get all their various network and local drives backed up to any arrangement of disks, local PC's, or what not, with advanced backup sets used to make advanced retention and storage decisions. It's a win. I have not come across a more full featured backup software outside of enterprise programs (certainly not one that is openly free for my usage), and I'd offer that outside of EMC Avamar, CrashPlan doesn't have a rival for disk2disk features.

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• Just cancelled my subscription after one year of use.

  gorlizki_dotmac6/7/2012

  Pros

  Worked OK for a single computer. Tech support was prompt and courteous.

  Cons

  Unable to handle my family plan upgrade to backup two computers. Tech support were not able to resolve problems with their software.

  Summary

  Crashplan worked fine while I was using it to backup a single computer, though I never had to test it out to restore data. When I upgraded to the family plan and started backing up my new iMAC, the server somehow couldn't recognize the two separate computers. I left the iMAC copying continuously for around 180 hours (which backed up about 250GB of data) and when I reconnected my MacBook Pro, Crashplan wiped out the new set! 7days and nights wasted... Tech support were polite and responded quickly to my emails but ultimately weren't helpful. They suggested I'd elected to 'adopt' or merge the two sets of data (which I definitely didn't) and said I'd either have to start copying from scratch or pay another $125 for a seed backup. Having that degree of instability and wasting so much time on the backup and trying to resolve the issue -without success- made me doubt the stability of the software so I cancelled my subscription.

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• Customer support - beyond horrid

  vxs1233/16/2012

  Pros

  Gives the impression of working well - so long as you aren't paying attention.

  Cons

  1. Atrocious, unresponsive and arrogant customer support. 2. Automatic updates of client software with defective non-functioning versions with no option of declining updates and with no option of rolling back to working versions. 3. Did I mention arrogant and socially offensive customer support?

  Summary

  I am a paying subscriber and I rely on backups working for my business continuity. First the backup software suddenly stopped backing up in real time. A problem submission ticket got ignored for a week before I contacted them upon the situation deteriorating to the point of having a non-working software update automatically pushed to the desktop, which caused backups to completely stop working. I finally reached someone at tech support. Not only did they offer no apology for not responding, or attempt to offer basic workarounds (such as the obvious one of rolling back the software to a working version), they simply said they were so popular and such great guys that they couldn't / wouldn't respond to all tech support requests. Upon attempting to escalate the issue with their manager, Brad, things got only worse - he curtly informed me that if I didn't like it I could leave and they'd refund the money but they weren't going to fix the issue because it only affected a "very small number of users on Mac OS X 10.5.8" (which btw. is officially supported according to their web site). Trust their backup service at your own peril. The reviewers who LOVED their service (I could very well have been in that camp just a few weeks ago) haven't yet been in a situation where they depended on the backup service and it failed them. No doubt crude arrogance and insolence and incompetence has something to do with their geographic location, politicial affiliation, and culture as exemplified by their illustrious senator.

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• Works great, great service. I LOVE it!

  1sdman3/4/2012

  Pros

  FAST NO THROTTLING like some other programs, Backup speed settings are per your settings Can backup your system to a drive or another computer. Resident program is imperceptible Service is relatively inexpensive No hiccups, no crashes since install, 3 months now. Tech Support has been very responsive, even for simple questions.

  Cons

  none! seriously, and it has more features than I expected. no complaints

  Summary

  Can backup online (main purpose) with NO THROTTLING like some other programs (shame on you Carbonite), all backup speed settings are per your settings (pre-set and easy to change). I had Carbonite before, and since they throttle, after a year I was still not fully backed up when my PC was stolen, so I lost files. I got a refund and got CrashPlan instead, and so HAPPY since then! I really appreciate CrashPlan, works very well. I can also backup to a drive or another computer with CrashPlan if desired. So you could set up a drive at another location and backup to it as well as the CrsahPlan home site. This is nice if you have some sensitive info (or extremely high volumes) but want to ensure it's backed up offsite. It has some other features as well, but most will use the online backup. Their resident program is imperceptible and backing up all the time, it kicks into high speed when you are idle on the pc/mac for 5 minutes. I got the single license to start, but just upgraded to 2-10 pc licensing. We will have 2 Macs and 5 pc's being backed up using the Unlimited Family Plan. The Family plan is the cost of a 2-pc license, but can be used on up to 10 pc's with unlimited data. All our pc's/macs have close to 1TB each so this is a great price, definitely cheaper than buying 2 hard drives for off-site rotation for each computer! In short, a near perfect online, off-site, simple to use, reasonably priced system. GET IT! I love it!

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• Worth the effort to set it up correctly....

  DigitalMT1/29/2012

  Pros

  - Backing up to the companies servers provide great offsite protection and the ability to retrieve data from mobile clients. - Offsite backups encrypted prior to transmission. - Local backup option to get the initial backup performed. - Great solution for family members who would not backup at all....set this up and it just happens for them! - File versioning and more!

  Cons

  - Without using this tool to perform a local backup, this might seem slow...but the whole point to backup your system without seeing a degradation in performance and NOT to blast your connection with a fast backup.

  Summary

  Please don't think of this as equal to backing up locally...it is MUCH more than that. It brings the home user in the enterprise backup world with the ability to keep important data offsite. Think about it....wouldn't you rather know that your data is safely offsite if something bad happened to your computer...or God forbid...you house! This solution is definitely going on my 'recommend to family' list....much easier than trying to provide 'tech support' and teach them how to properly back up their systems. AND..with the ability to use a client on IOS devices, I can access a current file from my backup from ANYWHERE, like Dropbox without the storage limitations!

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• Product does not work, customer service is poor.

  laneyhess8/22/2011

  Pros

  Great--if only it worked as it claims to.

  Cons

  S u p e r s l o w . . . 38 GB in 11 days!

  Summary

  I started my free trial 11 days ago with 150 GB to upload. I have set all settings according to the company's recommendations & left my computer running 24/7. Yet in these 11 days it has only uploaded 38 GB & tells me it has 21.4 days to go. This is the reply I got from tech support: Unfortunately there is no way for us to be able to predict what your speeds to our servers will be. There are too many variables for us to be able to give any sort of "normal" amount of time to back up data. But from looking at your account it does appear that you have modified the settings to optimize the upload speed and you have been constantly uploading at this time. Since you have modified those settings, there is nothing else that we can do from our end to increase your speeds. Have a great day, ~Michael He then marked my request as "solved". I have a strong feeling that only the people that work there are writing the highly rated reviews seen here and putting "thumbs down" on the low rated ones. After all, how would it not be helpful to hear about other people's issues when you are considering a purchase?

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• Reliable, fast, secure.

  nothere--20083/26/2011

  Pros

  - Simply works (For about 2 yrs, with >400 GB data) - Stays completely out of your way once configured - Very efficent incremental backup method - Support from CrashPlan is very good (for my experience) - All deleted files are being saved

  Cons

  - The configuration tool is usable, but not very Mac-like - User interface is a bit quirky (also not very Mac-like :)

  Summary

  Most importantly: CrashPlan is an online backup service - and like all these services it costs money. There is a free version, which is okay for backing up to an external harddisk. But for online storage, you should choose CrashPlan+ Unlimited (unless your data is < 10GB). The last time I compared (1 yr ago), the prices were better than the competition. About the software: The software itself is a Java-based tool, which works, but that the user interface has some quirks: Some options are difficult to find, others not very comprehensible. Here's room for improvement. But since you usually configure your backup plan only once, that's no major drawback. Really great is CrashPlan when it comes to performance and security: - All your data is encrypted locally (with your own key if desired) before being transmitted to the online storage. The encryption methods are more than sufficient. - The incremental backup mechanism is very intelligent. If files are modified, only the modified parts of the file are being transmitted. So if you create a copy of a big video file, the data is only being uploaded once (not like Time machine which in this cases makes two copies). Especially for an online service this is a great benefit, but also for backups to an external HD, CrashPlan often is much faster than Time Machine. (But for local backups I'd prefer time machine, which allows you to access the files directly, instead of having an archive file, like CrashPlan does) - Deleted files (deleted after backing them up of course) can be kept an unlimited amount of time, which is also a good feature. (Only useful if you purchase Crashplan+) Data security: - Since I can't restore and compare some hundred GB, I check the data consistency from time to time with some files, which are easy to recover and compare. Until now I had no problems. (But of course you somehow have to trust the vendor in this case). Support: At two occasions I contacted support and recieved a fast and competent answer. Summary: I gave 5 points, because the only drawback is the quirky UI. And since the tool works cross-platform, that's understandable here. Otherwise a very much recommended service, with frequent updates, good support and a good pricing scheme.

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• Dumps your backup without warning

  mortenz063/24/2011

  Pros

  Good for backing up very small files

  Cons

  Slow upload speed, dumps you backup,

  Summary

  It is way cheaper, faster, more secure buying an external hard disk and storing it at a friends house.

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• Set it and forget it for Mac Backup

  staney1/5/2011

  Pros

  Easy to set up & it works

  Cons

  None. Works without issue

  Summary

  Beats mozy on a Mac!

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