CrashPlan crashed (no joke) and will burn (joke)

After seven years I’m dropping CrashPlan. I had changed my backup strategy so that Small Business CrashPlan wouldn’t break the bank after they dropped the Home plan. However:

Last week my server mysteriously stopped backing up, giving a Java security exception. This system runs Sierra, and has not been upgraded because it uses the Server software that has been quickly neutered since Sierra.

I contacted Code42, and they replied quickly. They no longer support Sierra and had just pushed an update to everyone (without announcing it) which doesn’t work on Sierra! I had to uninstall, download an old version, and install that. And they warned me that I would get no further support!

I’m going to try BackBlaze this weekend.

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I like and use Backblaze.

That said, Sierra came out in 2016 and I thought Crashplan’s Business plan dropped its Java applet years ago (while retaining it for the consumer plan). Can’t shed a tear when people are using deprecated OSes, sorry.

You’ll probably like Backblaze, though if you want extended versioning the price will be close to CrashPlan’s prices anyway, and there’s no Family plan.

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That doesn’t make sense. If you’d been running the latest version you shouldn’t have been updated to the non-Sierra version.

And when updates come out users ordinarily get an email noting and detailing the update.

I use Backblaze and am happy with it. They also support B2, which is their “big bucket in the sky” service. Your setup sounds ideal for their regular backup service though. You have a server, and can have all your people back up to it, which will get backed up to your single Backblaze account. Backblaze doesn’t back up TimeMachine drives, disk images, virtual machines (as I recall), and a few others, so you might need to use Carbon Copy Cloner, ChronoSync, etc. to backup clients to the server.
I also like that they’ve added extended version history. Sometimes I might not realize I need to restore a file until after 30 days.

Yep. Doesn’t make sense, yet it happened anyway.

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“Can’t shed a tear when people are using deprecated OSes, sorry.”

WOW! Shin kicking is for the elementary playground.

This is where I step out of the room. I have issues with trying to learn from those that chose to inflict pain.

David and crew have a good thing going here. Hopefully it doesn’t get sunk by rude comments. There sure has been a lot of those on here lately.

:frowning::v:t2::point_right:t2::wave:t2:

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I have to agree. There are lots of valid reasons for running deprecated software, including just choosing too. It’s not our place to judge, but to contribute if we have something to contribute.

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That’s not what it was at all. When you have a deprecated OS dealing with apps that don’t support your system is part of the choice one makes. Maybe the hardware is too old for Mojave, maybe the OP doesn’t want to install a newer OS as well as an older one on a separate drive - but these are typical consequences to not upgrading software (or hardware).

:wave:

So, with CrashPlan, I back up my TimeMachine external drive, all the .dmg s or .pkg s of applications, my virtualised Windows partitions, and may delete items from my Mac and recover them from the back-up if needed. I have never wanted to make just a clone of my current state but rather have something that also allows me to offload certain items when I no longer need them in my day to day but be able to get them back easily if I want/need to use them again (e.g. video footage, design assets, audio recordings …).

Sounds like Backblaze isn’t for me. I can’t think of any other back-up service that is either.

Their B2 services would probably do what you want. Of course there are others, Amazon for instance. When I was checking prices, Backblaze was the best for me.

That’s my intent, and what I do. I have yet to see if it actually backs up all I want. You can enable extensions so you can back up disk images, etc. However I generally don’t do this because a small change (for instance just the act of booting a virtual machine) will end up causing the entire machine to be backed up again. You can also exclude volumes and folders. However you can’t include individual files (or folders) that would otherwise be excluded and you can’t include folders with certain names. So CrashPlan is more flexible.

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“Can’t shed a tear when people are using deprecated OSes, sorry.”

I intentionally hadn’t commented about this before because I have respected your comments in the past. But I did feel this a low blow. I have good reasons to run Sierra on my server as successive versions have taken away capabilities I rely on. I really blame Apple for having a too frequent release interval and too soon dropping support.

Just two years and two months ago Sierra was the current operating system.

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